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The element table

repo: land-of-lor · updated 2026-08-12

What this is

The work of actually authoring the game’s 64 elements: giving each one its in-game name and its property bundle. This is a content-authoring epic — its deliverable is a table, not code or UI. The governing principle is settled (Kris, 2026-08-06): the hexagram is the machinery, the name is the flavour — an element’s identity is its six lines, but players meet it through a fun, memorable name (“Eye of Fire Newt” is Wind over Fire; Rah named Wind over Mountain “leather”). Naming the 64 and setting their properties is, in Kris’s words, “a clear design decision now” — decided work to do, not an idea to weigh.

Why it exists

Four epics lean on this table and each explicitly declines to own it:

• object-system-experiments names “the periodic-table/ingredient-authoring work” and says outright it does not resolve it and deliberately proposes no ingredient list.
• spell-crafting-interface builds the UI over the table (keyed slots, ghostly hexagrams).
• barter-marketplace trades what the table defines — per-element rarity is its whole economy.
• battle-arena-poc spends ingredients as its arena resource, and produced the sharpest constraint on the table (“64 is a fine number for a system, and an unworkable number for drops on a floor”).

Four epics pointing inward at the same missing thing is the signature of a missing epic. This is it — and it’s the keystone: the table unblocks all four.

What’s already decided (from thought-specs/sixty-four-hexagrams-as-base-items-and-spell-slots.md and base-elements-marketplace-and-vip-chat-with-Rah.md, filed 2026-08-06)

• Hexagram = element = base item = ingredient. One thing, not three. 64 of them, full stop.
• Each element carries a bundle of properties (a handful to a dozen); the slot it’s dropped into decides which property fires — the same rare element is a terrain-shaper in one slot and a colour in another.
• Every element has a numeric value (feeds duration and any number-shaped slot) and a colour — so there are exactly 64 colours in the game.
• The first ingredient decides the spell’s kind (life, terrain, destruction, spawn point, tower, clothing…) — 64 spell types, one per possible opener.
• Rarity is a per-element property and the primary balancing lever — which also turns object-system-experiments’ gatherability-tiering candidate from a mechanism to invent into a column in this table.
• Naming convention in evidence: trigram-over-trigram structure gets a flavour name, and human-memorable beats AI-systematic (Rah’s “leather” beat “Weatherstone”).

The fold-back: the world as a conversion graph (design conversation, 2026-08-06)

Nutted out with Kris by voice the same day the epic was created; these are agreed direction, not yet formal decisions:

• Every complex item is a converter. The item list already says Factory is the general converter and Spawn Point a special case — extend that view to everything: a tree is a factory (fertile ground + water field in, apples out), a newt is a factory (eats bugs, drops eye of newt on death), a volcano is a natural factory nobody built. The world is a directed graph of conversions flowing over the 64 elements, and “folding the periodic table back on itself” is that graph closing into cycles (tree → apple → seed → tree).
• The table gets an origin column (confirmed by Kris “100%”): how each element enters the world — mined from terrain, poured out of a generator, dropped only by complex items (eye of newt exists nowhere but inside newts), or crafted-only. A first-class per-element property, not a special case.
• Tool-mediated extraction: some origins require a complex item acting on another complex item — wood (likely Wood over Wood) comes only from trees, and only if you have an axe. The axe is itself a complex item.
• Natural and player-made run on one mechanism. Some converters grow wild in the land, some are built by players — same machinery everywhere. Kris flags this as significant beyond a detail.
• Rarity becomes partly emergent — an element is rare because its production chain is deep (need the creature → need the recipe → need the tree). Tune rarity by shaping the graph, not just stamping numbers. This also re-answers the arena-gatherability constraint: an arena’s floor economy is defined by which converters are placed in it.
• Cycles + conservation of matter must not become perpetual motion. Fields (sun, water, fertility) are the energy input converters consume; generators are the sources. Whether decay exists as the sink (things rotting back into ground) is an open question Kris hasn’t answered yet.
• Custom player-built arenas (noted here, touches battle-arena-poc): players shape their own arena with the same terraforming magic — an arena is defined by which converters are placed in it.

Kris notes he’s “not 100% aligned” on every detail but wants to move forward and build anyway — next step is a visual POC of the conversion-graph idea (proposed: a single-file interactive HTML sim in land-of-lor/pocs/, in the style of docs/historic/lor-kernel-sim-v0.html, showing a tiny world + the live conversion graph + a conservation ledger).

Scope

• Name all 64 (flavour names, per the machinery/flavour principle).
• Define the shared property schema: which properties every element has (value, colour, kind-as-opener, rarity tier, …) and how slot-keyed activation reads them.
• Assign each element’s values across that schema.
• Reconcile 64 against the arena-gatherable floor — decide which subset plausibly drops on the ground mid-fight (the constraint recorded in object-system-experiments’ “Core constraint” section).

Non-goals

• Not the crafting UI (spell-crafting-interface), not 3D composition (object-system-experiments), not the recipe-matching engine (server-architecture), not the trade mechanics (barter-marketplace) — this epic feeds all of them and builds none of them.
• Not renaming the trigrams or the underlying I Ching structure — machinery is fixed; only flavour is being authored.

Open design questions (prose for now — formalise as Question objects only if they start blocking tasks)

• Naming the spell-opener categories themselves (Kris stalled live on “the element that modifies the Earth”).
• Whether wrong combinations explode, or explosion is just an element that behaves that way.
• Slot counts and slot order per recipe kind (colour-then-morphology was an oversimplified example, not a spec).
• Whether one trigram → size and the other → shape is the real morphology rule (“something like that, perhaps?”).
• Transmutation’s mechanism — rare, yes; how it works, undecided (connects to the changing-lines mutation element in conduit-and-changing-landscape.md).
• VIP — Rah wants it, Kris doesn’t get it; redirected to private areas but not closed. The one place they didn’t converge.
• Whether silver/gold are ingredients rather than currency (Kris’s “no money in the game” vs. armour “would require some silver” — reads as a reframe, not stated cleanly).
• Squeezability as an element property (from the 8-way movement work, 2026-08-12, Kris + agent voice discussion): the movement core distinguishes solid blockers (a stone wall seals its diagonal — no corner-cutting past it) from soft blockers you can squeeze between (two trees). The mechanism ships in land-of-lor/game/world/grid.gd (CELL_SOFT_BLOCK / permits_squeeze()), but nothing authors it yet — the intent is that whether a placed thing seals its corners becomes a property of the element or material it’s made of, authored in this table alongside rarity/origin/value.

Relevant docs

• land-of-lor/docs/thought-specs/sixty-four-hexagrams-as-base-items-and-spell-slots.md — the founding voice note for this epic.
• land-of-lor/docs/thought-specs/base-elements-marketplace-and-vip-chat-with-Rah.md — the economy/ownership decisions and the “leather” naming moment.
• land-of-lor/docs/thought-specs/little-witches.md — the “too esoteric” objection the flavour-naming principle answers.
• land-of-lor/docs/slots-and-items.md — the earlier keyed-item + menu vocabulary this table must stay compatible with.
• object-system-experiments/overview.md — the gatherability constraint (its “Core constraint” section).

Status

2 backlog1 done

Next: Kris authors element definitions in the card editor (003 — his own task, not an agent's); table authoring (001) still waits on the property schema.

Tasks (3)

backlog (2)

• element-table/001 — Author the element table — names and properties for all 64 (priority 1, estimate L )
• element-table/003 — Author the element definitions in the card editor (priority 1, estimate M )

done (1)

• element-table/002 — Conversion-flow POC — the fold-back made visible (priority 2, estimate M )

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