Spell-crafting interface

client parked

repo: land-of-lor · updated 2026-08-05

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.

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 (which stays “Lor: The Ten Thousand Things” regardless of 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.

Status

2 backlog

Next: Parked — not being worked right now.

Deliverables (1)

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

Tasks (2)

backlog (2)

spell-crafting-interface/001 — Low-fidelity mockups of the two crafting-interaction metaphors (priority 1, estimate S )
spell-crafting-interface/002 — Prototype visual treatment for keyed vs. open slots (priority 2, estimate S )

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