# World traversal and ground

## overview.md
```yaml
id: world-traversal-and-ground
title: World traversal and ground
area: design
summary: Walking around the world and doing things — the mechanism of ground types, their properties, and the player's ability to affect them.
repo: land-of-lor
depends_on: []
```

## 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.md
```yaml
updated: 2026-08-18
parked: true
tasks: {"backlog":0,"needs-input":0,"ready":0,"doing":0,"review":0,"done":1}
open_questions: []
tag: parked
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.
```

## Task summary

1 done · 0 ready (parked, so nothing is marked ready regardless of what's underneath). Kris wrote the ground-types spec himself on 2026-08-17 (`land-of-lor/docs/specs/GROUND_TYPES.md`) and the `ground-types` epic built it the same day; 001 was signed off against it 2026-08-18. Deliberately parked, not decomposed further — this is, by Kris's own framing, the most poorly defined piece of the whole design, and generating formal tracked questions about it ahead of an actual design session was exactly the kind of premature work this project's 2026-08-05 course correction removed.

## Open questions

None tracked. The real open questions (the fertile-ground rule, whether the boundary-topology framing survives, what a player does to ground on purpose) are recorded as plain prose in `overview.md` — for a real design session, not for an agent to resolve alone.

## Next

Nothing from an agent. 001: Signed off by Kris 2026-08-18 (blanket approval of everything then in review). The traversal half still needs a dedicated design conversation with Kris; it lives in overview.md prose until then.

## tasks/ (1)

### world-traversal-and-ground/001 — Write the ground & traversal design spec
```yaml
id: world-traversal-and-ground/001
title: Write the ground & traversal design spec
epic: world-traversal-and-ground
state: done
priority: 1
blocked_by: []
estimate: M
created: 2026-08-05
updated: 2026-08-18
claimed_by: null
claimed_at: null
delivers: []
review_artifact: land-of-lor/docs/specs/GROUND_TYPES.md
```

## What to do

Write the actual design spec this epic exists to produce: ground types and their gameplay-relevant properties, the fertile-ground rule, whether/how the boundary-topology framing applies, movement rules, and what a player does to ground on purpose vs. what merely happens to it. This is a spec, not implementation or a POC — see `overview.md`'s scope. This is the piece Kris flagged as the most poorly defined in the whole design — whoever picks this up should expect to need a real conversation with him, not just a solo research pass.

## Definition of done

A design document answering the four bullet questions in `overview.md`'s Scope section.

## Where the work lands

`land-of-lor` repo, likely as a new `docs/WORLD_TRAVERSAL.md` alongside the existing `WORLD_ZONES.md`.

## Docs to read first

`overview.md` in full, especially the "Why it exists, and why it's flagged this way" section; `docs/README.md` §3 and §7 for the underlying physics this spec has to be consistent with.

## 2026-08-17 — answered by Kris's own spec

`land-of-lor/docs/specs/GROUND_TYPES.md` (Kris, 2026-08-17) is the ground-types half of what
this task asked for: the 64 ground types, their properties (passable / sunken / mountain),
their look, and how they are stored, drawn and painted — and it has been built
(`epics/ground-types/`). Moved to `review` so Kris can decide whether that closes this task
or whether the traversal half (the fertile-ground rule, what a player does to ground on
purpose, movement feel) stays open here. The epic stays parked either way.

## questions/ (0)

## deliverables (0)