# Ideas — the miscellaneous shelf

## overview.md
```yaml
id: ideas
title: Ideas — the miscellaneous shelf
area: design
summary: A running list of ideas and notes that belong to no epic yet, kept so a session with nothing obvious to work on has somewhere to look.
repo: land-of-lor (workshop/epics/ideas)
depends_on: []
parked: false
standing: Opened 2026-10-05 as the place loose ideas go; the list below is the whole epic.
```

## Where this stands (2026-10-05)

Opened 2026-10-05 (Kris, by voice): a shelf for ideas that have no epic yet, so a session
that arrives with nothing obvious to work on is sent here. Nothing on the list is promised or
scheduled; an idea that grows up moves out into its own epic or a GitHub issue.
Decided (2026-10-05): this epic never gets issues of its own — an idea becomes an issue only
when Kris picks it, under the epic it then belongs to.
No open issues.

## What this is

Kris's words (2026-10-05): *"an epic that is like miscellaneous ideas … capture ideas that
I've had and some notes somewhere, if I ever come into a session like this and go, 'Hmm, I'm
not sure what to work on,' that we get directed to there and go, 'Okay, here's some things.'"*

The list is the content. Add to it freely, in a line or two per idea, with the date and
where it came from when that's known. Keep it plain bullets, newest at the bottom.

## How to use this shelf

- **A session with nothing named:** read the list, pick the smallest thing that can be
  tried end to end, say which one you picked, do it, report. `PICKUP.md`'s "do what you were
  asked" rule still holds — picking from here is what you were asked.
- **An idea that gets done** moves to the "Done or moved out" section with a date and where
  it went (a commit, a deliverable, another epic). It does not get deleted.
- **An idea that turns out to belong to an existing epic** moves there, with a line here
  saying so.

## The list

- **Racing, like Mario Kart** (Willow, 2026-10-05). Kris: *"Racing cars will wait for now
  because it's different to how the rest of the game works."* Willow's reply, which is the
  idea worth keeping: vehicles could still come in through the game's own mechanics — a spell
  to tame an animal; leather and rope to make a bag or sack; the sack put on the animal; the
  sack holds ingredients for spells; a tamed animal follows you around. (The pet-follow half
  already exists for created creatures — `docs/handoff/mud-and-life.md`; taming a wild one
  and a carried bag do not.) She'd also love to help make some of the base items.
- **Snails** (Willow, 2026-10-05). Snails in the world. In tag you collect them and throw them
  at others to slow them down; you're slowed when you go near one; a snail-immunity spell
  lets you pick them up to throw.
- **An invisibility spell** (Willow, 2026-10-05).
- **A ruin somewhere** that looks like the photo below (Willow, 2026-10-05): a roofless
  Gothic folly — pointed-arch windows and a doorway, a broken tower, trees growing through
  it, long dry grass in front.
  ![The reference: a roofless Gothic ruin among trees](/images/ideas/2026-10-05-ruins-reference.jpg)

- **Characters downloaded in chunks as players go** (Kris, 2026-10-22): *"I wonder if we want
  to implement something whereby chunks of characters are downloaded as players go along —
  say we have 20× the number of models, once we add a number of NPCs and also other kinds of
  enemy and beast type creatures to the world — is it still sensible enough to bundle all
  that?"* Context: the characters pack is one 14 MB download today (twelve bodies, ~1.2 MB
  each); the native builds carry the bodies inside, the web fetches the pack in the
  background. The pack machinery already exists (`characters.json` + a `.pck` by hash), so
  "chunks" is several packs keyed by what an Area needs, fetched on arrival.

Kris's note on the four (2026-10-05): all of these are good for tag, but it would be better
to set up other mini-games or game mechanics so they are part of the core game even without
tag.
- **Mist** (Kris, 2026-10-23): *"Add mist as a thing in the game, an atmospheric thing, but
  also it blocks your view — and then there are special goggles that you will be able to make
  as part of a spell that will let you see there."*
- **Signet and the cast — fake players on errands** (Kris, 2026-10-23), **parked**: *"an NPC
  that walks around the Village of Lor, The Badlands and The Mountain Pass — just so it feels
  like there is someone else in there… like the 'door probe' I saw running around — deliberate,
  on a mission going somewhere… fake players, you can't interact with them… never start up an
  area."* Worked out that evening into a roaming cast on their own clocks, doors used for real,
  never reacting to players — and then parked: *"I'm not certain I want to do this… possibly it
  will come in later when we have multiple servers and someone gets relegated to a new one with
  no one else in."* All the notes, the facts found in the code and the design are on
  [issue #36](https://github.com/krisrandall/land-of-lor/issues/36) — an idea, not work.

*From a conversation with Rah, 2026-10-24, all of it in one recording* — Kris: *"all of this
does actually need to go on to the ideas board right now, because it's just not fleshed out…
capture all the notes."* The whole transcript is
`docs/thought-specs/2026-10-24-night-market-chat-with-Rah.md`. Kris's reason for liking it:
*"part of what I'm dealing with at the moment is the world is quite empty."*

- **The Night Market** (Rah, 2026-10-24). A market somewhere else that only opens at night, so
  it needs day and night. The portal to it has a lock on it — maybe not animated, just the ring
  with a lock in the middle — and only at night can you see it open and go in. Inside, a lot of
  stalls, mostly food (Kris: *"night markets usually are food"*). At the very far back, one big
  main stall with a name, its stock not decided yet. A blacksmith could be in the day Bazaar.
  Kris: *"I actually love the idea of the night market … maybe we can do it later."*
- **A stall where you sell your pets** for elements or something good (Rah, 2026-10-24).
- **The carpenter sells the house things** (Rah and Kris, 2026-10-24): the man you get the
  chest from is where you buy all the building and house stuff — Rah: *"it just makes it easy
  for people … I want to buy a table, or I want to buy a chair."* (He is Hob Hartwood, in the
  Bazaar, on staging with the chest quest, issue #40; the spell table already places tables,
  chairs and chests as builder spells after the MVP — `spell-crafting-interface`.)
- **The Bazaar changes hands at dusk and dawn** (Kris, 2026-10-24), the other way to have a
  night market: keep the one Bazaar. At night the carpenter gets up, walks out to the home-Area
  portal and goes through it, *"just as if that's his home, like any other player"*, and a food
  seller comes the other way and stands at a table of their own; the carpenter's table stands
  empty at night, the seller's by day. The technical half, his words: *"there'll be an exact
  set time that they walk to and from and switch positions, but we don't need to animate that …
  we just need to know when that area fires up if they happen to be partly through their
  walking thing."* Nothing runs while the Village is asleep; the clock says where they are when
  it wakes. (Facts: there is no day/night cycle or server clock today — the night sky is a
  backdrop only, `docs/handoff/sky-and-map.md`. The parked roaming cast on issue #36 already
  worked out NPCs on their own clocks who use the doors for real.)
- **Food: apples and carrots** (Rah and Kris, 2026-10-24). The food seller sells apples and
  carrots; Rah also named dragon fruit (and one word the recording lost), Kris: *"I think
  that's plenty."* An apple increases your health; a carrot improves your vision — *"see
  through the Mist and through darkness"* — and can heal you too. What they cost isn't decided.
  Kris: apples and carrots should be **elements**, each one of the 64 hexagrams, picked to fit
  the I Ching meaning — but special, because you can eat them. Open: *"I guess you can eat
  mushrooms then too?"* (the Mushroom is already element 2, The Receptive) — *"or do we treat
  food as different?"*
- **The goggles quest: eat your carrots** (Rah, 2026-10-24), building on the Mist entry above.
  You ask a character for the goggles that see through the Mist; they ask *"is your vision
  good?"*; you say no; *"well then, eat some carrots — eat three carrots, and then come back"*;
  you come back and say yes; *"well then, here you go."* The point is that you eat the carrots
  yourself, not hand them over. Kris: a different character from the food seller, who makes
  the goggles. Note the two ways to get the goggles now on this shelf: Kris's 2026-10-23 entry
  makes them with a spell, Rah's gets them from this character. Not decided.
- **Frogs and slime mould in Far Hop** (Kris, 2026-10-24, renaming Far Away to Far Hop for
  Esmeralda's "where do I find…" answers): *"I will make it also be the place where there is a
  spawn point for frogs, and also 'slime mould' as a new element (which will be the ingredent
  to swap into the familar spell for making a frog (a new spell with that difference) in place
  of the mud .. or in place of some of the mud)"*. So: a frog spawn point in Far Hop; slime
  mould as a new element; a frog-making spell that is Make Life with slime mould for (some of)
  the Mud. (Esmeralda already answers "A frog" when asked what you'd rather make — `@what_then`
  in her dialogue — and says her creator hasn't told her the ingredients yet.)
- **A Shrink spell** (Kris, 2026-10-26): *"a SHRINK spell, that shrinks you down to the size of a
  familiar — that's how everyone else sees you, and you move at 1/10th the speed — and for you,
  you stay the same, but all the ground and rest of the world scales up 10x — so you see yourself
  walking as if per normal, but the ground is pixelated because now a single cell takes 10 times
  as many steps for you to cross it."* Kris: *"we will leave it at that for now."*

## Done or moved out

(nothing yet)

## deliverables (0)