World traversal and ground

design parked

repo: land-of-lor · updated 2026-08-18

What this is

The most basic-sounding and, per Kris directly, the most poorly defined piece of the whole design: what it actually feels like and works like to walk around Lor: The Ten Thousand Things’ world, what ground types exist, what properties they carry, and how a player affects them. This is explicitly a spec’ing task, not an implementation or POC task — the job here is to think it through and write it down, not to build anything yet.

Why it exists, and why it’s flagged this way

Every other epic in this project board assumes there’s a ground to stand on, but the design docs’ treatment of ground is the least concrete part of an otherwise unusually well-developed design:

docs/README.md §3 establishes the headline idea — “ground is matter without a boundary; an item is matter with one” — same substance as everything else, no separate material system, and each cell has a floor slot (bulk element matter, i.e. terrain), an occupant slot, and field values.
But that same doc immediately flags the framing underneath it as explicitly unsettled: the “two topologies” boundary framing (ground = no boundary, item = boundary) is called out in §13 as “Gen-1 physics-first thinking that may not survive,” and the workspace’s own CLAUDE.md repeats this as one of the few not settled design pillars.
Concretely unresolved, per the docs themselves: what makes ground “fertile” for planting (RECIPES.md asks this outright and doesn’t answer it — “a lookup table (or specified by a trigram)”); how terraforming via changing-lines actually plays moment-to-moment (§7 describes the physics — scorched soil aging toward glass — but not the player experience of causing or seeing it); and what “walking around and doing things” means as a verb set beyond the crafting/combat/building actions everything else in this board already covers.

Scope

This epic is scope-limited to specification. The output is a design document (or documents), not code or a running prototype. It should resolve, or at least sharpen, questions like:

What ground types exist at launch and what are their gameplay-relevant properties (walkable/blocked, fertile/infertile, field-conducting/sealing)?
How does a player directly affect ground, distinct from the ambient changing-line physics (§7)? Is there a “terraform” action, or is it purely emergent from field pressure?
What does traversal actually feel like moment-to-moment — movement rules, whether ground type affects movement speed/cost, interaction prompts?
How does the settled “ground = default infrastructure” idea (§3: terrain conducts/blocks fields exactly like everything else) surface to a player who isn’t thinking about field physics at all?

Non-goals

Not implementation. Not a POC. Not the field-simulation engineering (chunking/scaling) — that’s server-architecture’s concern once this epic gives it something concrete to simulate.
Not resolving the “two topologies” question in the abstract for its own sake — resolve only as much of it as is needed to answer the concrete traversal/ground questions above.

Key open questions

All of them, honestly — that’s the point of this epic. The sharpest ones from the source docs:

Fertile-ground rule: lookup list vs. “any ground whose lower trigram is Earth/Wind” (slots-and-items.md open question #2).
Whether the boundary-topology framing survives at all, or ground needs its own (still one-substance) treatment.
What a player does to ground on purpose, versus what merely happens to it as a side effect of field emitters and time.

Relevant docs

land-of-lor/docs/README.md §3 (one substance, two topologies), §7 (changing lines / terraforming), §13 (open questions — boundary framing flagged unsettled).
land-of-lor/docs/RECIPES.md — the unanswered “fertile ground” question for the Seed recipe.
land-of-lor/docs/slots-and-items.md — open question #2, same issue from a different angle.
land-of-lor/CLAUDE.md — lists the two-topologies framing under “Openly speculative / to be resolved.”

Status

1 done

Next: Parked. 001 signed off 2026-08-18 — GROUND_TYPES.md and the ground-types epic answered the ground half; the traversal half (fertile ground, deliberate ground change, movement feel) waits for a design conversation with Kris, as overview prose, not tasks.

Tasks (1)

done (1)

world-traversal-and-ground/001 — Write the ground & traversal design spec (priority 1, estimate M )

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