The world is separated into Planes, which are combinations of Glyphs. The actual Glyphs are based on astrological symbols ie Shatterloop but for the purposes of easy documentation here I'll use letters.
There are 12 glyphs total (based on the zodiac) and any combination of them constitutes a plane, so there's a grand total of 4095 planes (mersenne-12).
Each plane is a 2D grid of flat terrain, obstacle terrain of various types and POIs.
POIs are 3D mazes grown organically from a seed cube with connections being made through growth and some additional ones added.
Planes alter the spread of terrain, distribution of POIs, POI size, palletized Terrors, loot and machine distribution, etc.
This game is unusual in that the scanning/analysis abilities are all unlocked at the outset via a fixture called the All-Seeing Eye. You can look up a plane you haven't the remotest ability to travel to, look into one of its POIs, and see Engrams you can make from the materials within, etc.
A lot of the game is highly strategic so this kind of thing is pretty essential -- it's good to know your plan in great detail before you actually carry it out.
Instead of having clearly delineated magic/armor/weapons, you instead have a bunch of items called Engrams that serve those various roles.
Engrams have a fixed number of uses, at which point you have to recharge them with the Soul they require at a specialized fixture (this also costs whatever passes for fuel in this game). They also tend to require that you have a certain combination of Imprints -- I'll get to that in a bit. There are ways around all of these limitations if you explore the systems enough.
