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Spell-crafting interface

repo: land-of-lor

Where this stands (2026-10-24)

Parked since 2026-08-05. On 2026-10-24 Kris set down where spells are going: every thing in the game gets a spell, the spells form one table with a logic the cauldron will look up, and there are eight kinds of spell so far, four for soon and four for after the MVP (the section below). The first real spell card with ingredient slots shipped inside mini-games (2026-09-09), which answers part of what was asked here; ground-as-casting-table versus a cauldron is still formally the open front (docs/), though Kris now talks about the cauldron as the thing that is coming. First step when picked up: low-fidelity mockups of the two crafting metaphors, then the keyed-versus-open slot treatment (were tasks 001 and 002). No open issues. Past task files (to 2026-09-13): workshop/historic-docs/epics/spell-crafting-interface/tasks/.

What this is

The player-facing UI/UX for creating things: laying out a recipe’s spatial pattern (items/elements into slots), seeing which slots are open (any element) vs. keyed (one specific element, shown as a “ghostly hexagram” per docs/README.md §8), and — for Complex Items — the ongoing legibility of their formula (port levels, what’s required, what happens at zero).

Why it exists

This is the single most-touched surface in the game, ties directly to the recipes/formulas system (land-of-lor/docs/README.md §8, RECIPES.md, slots-and-items.md), and is explicitly meant to hide most of the underlying complexity. The design docs are unusually clear about the feel this needs, even though the visual/interaction design itself hasn’t started:

“Little Alchemy 2 onboarding feel. No tutorial; immediate play; smoosh things together and it makes sense.” — docs/README.md §12

“Most players won’t want to memorise 64 Hexagrams… I think the Elements are, by and large, hidden — and Slots are filled by Items, not by raw Elements.” — RECIPES.md

There’s also a live, unresolved tension in the source material worth carrying into design: the ground-as-casting-table idea (“I like the casting table on the ground idea — that is the template,” RECIPES.md) versus the cauldron/sequential-ingredient-drop idea from the Little Witches voice note (thought-specs/little-witches.md) — two different interaction models for the same underlying recipe-matching mechanic.

Scope

• Rendering a recipe’s slot layout (blueprint overlay) on the ground or casting bench, per docs/README.md §8 and RECIPES.md.
• The open-slot vs. keyed-slot distinction, and the “5 keyed items + 3 trigram-typed menus” minimal vocabulary worked out in docs/slots-and-items.md (Life Crystal, Will-stone, Heart of Heaven, Foundation Stone, Quickseed; SHAPE/COLOUR/KIND menus).
• Input-bar UI for Complex Item ports/stocks at tick-time (level, requirement, zero-state) — flagged in §8 as “a core legibility surface.”
• Blueprint/schematic-as-inventory-item: how a player projects a known recipe’s layout onto the ground.

The first spell shipped without this (2026-09-08)

The first mini-game (mini-games/) put the first spell in the game — the Lightning Tower, an ordered recipe authored as data in game/shell/spells.js, found as a scroll on the ground, cast with one tap once every ingredient is held (the “readiness indicator and a trigger” the battle-arena-poc overview describes). That is deliberately not this epic’s crafting interface: no cauldron, no slots, no experimentation. Everything above stays open.

The spell table and the eight kinds of spell (Kris, 2026-10-24)

Kris, by voice; his words are in docs/thought-specs/2026-10-24-spell-categories-and-the-spell-table.md. He said this is “not new as such, but it’s a little more refined”. It refines docs/thought-specs/sixty-four-hexagrams-as-base-items-and-spell-slots.md, where the first element in a spell says what is being made and the slots after it set its properties. The eight kinds and the side-effect kind are new. None of it contradicts a settled pillar.

• Every thing has a spell. Every type of object in the game (trees, wells, rocks and the rest) will have a spell that makes it, so everything can be made and discovered. One day there will be “a giant table of the spells, and there’s going to be a real logic to that”.
• The opening of a spell says what kind of thing it makes, and the ingredients after it say which one. “A tower spell always starts with perhaps ice crystal, stone, stone, and then what goes in next determines the type of tower.” Make Life works the same way: the last ingredient, or the last two, decide the type of life. Both spells in game/shell/spells.js already have this shape: the Lightning Tower opens with ice crystal and stone, and Make Life has “the two that decide what wakes up”.
• The cauldron is where the logic pays off. “When the cauldron is there players will be able to put any combination of ingredients — they won’t need the spell, they’re just going to experiment without having the recipe.” Whatever goes in is looked up in the table.
• Opposites. More kinds of tower are coming. Later on, each element will have a polar opposite (water against fire), and that opposite is what it has the most effect on, or the least.

The kinds, in Kris’s order

Side-effect spells come from the Asterix story where the druid who brews the magic potion is hit on the head and can’t remember the recipe (Asterix and the Big Fight). He keeps trying random things: most of the time it explodes, but sometimes it turns whoever drinks it a different colour, or spotty, or stripy. Kris: “I want to implement that.” The name isn’t settled (“maybe we call them side effects spells or something like that”).

Effect and weather started as two kinds and were merged into one. Two of their examples are already on the ideas shelf (workshop/epics/ideas/overview.md): Mist and its goggles (Kris, 2026-10-23) and an invisibility spell (Willow, 2026-10-05).

A passing thought, set aside. Kris wondered whether the eight kinds might line up with the eight trigrams, then let it go: “Nothing needs to happen with that now, and I don’t think that we probably will make that limit.” The list is not capped at eight.

Non-goals

• Not the recipe-matching engine itself (pattern recognition, ground/field condition checks) — that’s server-side, see server-architecture.
• Not deciding the cauldron-vs-ground-casting question outright — that interaction-metaphor question is independent of the (now-decided) title and needs its own design decision from Kris before UI work commits to one metaphor.

Key open questions

• Ground-casting-table UI vs. cauldron/sequential-drop UI — genuinely open, not just a skin choice, since sequential-drop implies an ordered recipe rather than a spatial pattern. Update (2026-08-06): the earlier note here about the title decision weakly favouring ground-casting no longer holds — Kris’s own current-thinking documents (docs/thought-specs/little-witches.md, now ranked as current per the repo’s reorganisation) explicitly lean toward the cauldron/sequence model and away from the ground, independent of the title (Spellgrove since 2026-09-11; the name never depended on which interaction metaphor wins). See /codex’s “open front” section on the site for the current framing.
• How blueprint-overlay “ghostliness” is actually rendered for keyed vs. open slots.
• Whether the 8×8 grid (RECIPES.md) is the crafting surface for all recipes or just some.

Relevant docs

• land-of-lor/docs/README.md §8 (recipes & formulas), §12 (design principles — Little Alchemy feel).
• land-of-lor/docs/RECIPES.md — the original recipe/slot thinking, including the 8×8 grid idea and the turret image reference.
• land-of-lor/docs/slots-and-items.md — the refined, small keyed-item + menu vocabulary.
• land-of-lor/docs/thought-specs/little-witches.md — the cauldron/sequential alternative.
• land-of-lor/docs/thought-specs/inventory-interface.md — Ingredients/Blueprints inventory tabs this UI plugs into.
• land-of-lor/docs/thought-specs/sixty-four-hexagrams-as-base-items-and-spell-slots.md — the 64 hexagrams as the base ingredients, and a spell’s first element choosing what it makes.
• land-of-lor/docs/thought-specs/2026-10-24-spell-categories-and-the-spell-table.md — the spell table and the eight kinds (the section above).

Deliverables (1)

• #1 — The base elements of the game (2026-07-29)

Work on this epic

The granular work is GitHub Issues, one label per epic: epic:spell-crafting-interface (private repository — sign-in required). The dated Where this stands section above names the open ones. The task files that carried this epic until 2026-09-13 are kept in the repo: task files to 2026-09-13 .

Also available as raw markdown.