Shatterloop

Prism Fixture

I'm not sure how you unlock this or where it is in the labs.

The Prism fixture lets you turn various elemental items into other elemental items via Recipes.

The basic way it works is that you have to give it some medium-sized amount of a type of elemental item -- this will then become something you can craft. Alternately you can create the unlock via the procgen recipes system or a blueprint thereof -- this should open up additional options like getting fusions really early on potentially (depending on the dimension/seed).

Elemental items should all be aggregated into an "Elemental Materials" or "Prismatic Materials" category. Maybe "Elements" or "Elementals"?

You can also Prismize various elemental items -- this will add their element to the prism (or more specifically the base)'s element count. The amounts here are static and are based on rarity / game balance (scraps/cores/keys are definitely going to have 1:3:9 ratios for example).

You can also Prismize Quartz, Starshards, Aether, Money, base fuel and other basic things like that -- these are necessary base qualities of recipes.

Recipes are random but can be reseeded with starshards. They take some amount of the element and some amount of base qualities.

Any element-based item can go into a prism, including split-elemental things like tetradshards, myr triads or fusions.

If you "Use" your elemental superpowers on elemental fixtures that it attacks like doors, shrines, strange loops, etc, you get some kind of base element item that can be put in the prism for an equivalent amount of that element quality.

QOL Upgrades and Lore

Everyone in Shatterloop is some kind of transhuman -- have mentioned this before.

The process that started right before the game started has a tendency to fuck with biological systems. These issues can be resolved by sourcing the correct kind of materials for hand-wavy lore reasons (which will make sense when I build out the lore but not right now). The biological systems affected are:

Medical Biologics -- starting health and health regeneration essentially.

Gastric Biologics -- You should start out with some kind of difficult food/water issue, though not as bad as it currently is in hard mode. And/or it should also be upgradeable fairly easily.

Neurological Biologics -- Your memory's fucked, as are digital memories in your gear (on the same system). The Maintenance guild prepared for this and hardcoded some stuff (like finding Asher). Repairing this will unlock bits of the story, with maybe cutscenes or something.

Aural Reintegration -- When you die you lose all nonphysical stuff on your person (aether, currency, enchantments if I get there, etc). This can be improved but only with exotic materials in the late game.

There are additionally some machine malfunctions:

Atomizer -- needs something to bypass its issue.

Fishing Rod, Crossbow, etc -- Shape integrity issues, need to create crude facsimiles to restore function.

Leaping Latch -- can't jump into the fourth tetrad. This is unfixable - it'll point you towards cave holes instead.

Also probably other stuff that'll tie into the game and/or lore. The early game should feel kinda sci-fi-ish.

Also

Adding to the above, one idea is to make newflesh recalibration a missing biologic. This would force the early game to be a roguelike (with a limit somewhere so you don't forget that upgrade) with permadeath and I can up the difficulty a good bit. This also ties into the lore and story some since you presumably go to a different seeds when you die.

You can't complete a base or enter a town without doing this upgrade.

all named machines should also be key items - you should be able to start with a bunch of them so you can see their desc and lore easily. This also allows you to enchant them. Same deal with modules probably, wherever it makes sense.

Messaging Framework

After a bunch of time thinking about it, I think I know the best way to do this.

Basically a tooltip feature, with the usual caveats of what happens if the text goes off the screen.

Some will appear near wherever the mouse is -- this is true for menus.

Anything activated by player movement will appear near the player position or maybe at the bottom of the screen.

There's some kind of minor log for messages that you can scroll through.

Pressing enter or escape will erase the tooltip quickly.

The UX Drag framework needs work, so there's a TODO in pet_scouts about its hook.

Farming shops that sell feed (mentioned in the video). Honestly, will want to look at the splay of shops in general around this stage.

Going infinite

To fit into the lore and also the gameplay, you should be able to "go infinite" on various things, particularly stats and items.

Infinity is represented internally by literal javascript Infinity, which seems to just work without additional coding. Getting that value into things like the inventory seems to require a backdoor, however.

It gets hit well before mathematical infinity, because of the physics of the universe. Solid light for example hits it at exactly a million -- it varies depending on what you're doing it with, but a million is a good example. There's some lore to describe why this doesn't consistently happen when people are shipping bulk products or w/e.

.take() and .give() does nothing to change this number, while .has() always works.

Things like the magic system can occasionally cost an infinite amount of something -- in those cases the infinity going into it will work, but will turn to 0 once done.

To get around this, you need to turn the stat or item into ℵ︎ (probably represented by -2). Idk how you do this exactly - I thought up things like enchantments that add infinite mana (or whatever) infinite times, but idk how that would work or if it's even feasible. In any case, ℵ︎ handles both finite amounts and infinite amounts without changing.

Infinite spells do various things with the systems they affect -- this needs to be taken into account when I build the magic system so it doesn't literally try to handle infinity.

Some kind of potential pipeline to hit aleph mana:

Have a way of gaining "infinite" mana, maybe by some kind of ramp -- maybe a megalith that fortifies mana and a spell that revives megaliths that costs less than the mana the megalith gives.

Similarly, have a way of gaining infinite currency -- a decplicator spell plus infinite mana would make short work of it.

With infinite currency, use the Enchanter to make an Enchant Megalith that when the spell is cast, copies it an infinite amount of times. This costs infinite currency to make so it goes down to 0.

Regain infinite currency.

With infinite currency, make a spell that gives you an infinite amount of mana.

Apply this to the megalith, and then also apply the enchantment that recasts its spell infinite times.

Activate it and go aleph.

With aleph mana you'd be able to cast anything that costs infinite mana as many times as you want (including an infinite number of times) without losing any. So from here you could use infinite currency to make a spell that makes your currency infinite, then give it the infinite-cast enchantment so your currency goes aleph.

With those you can make infinitely powerful spells and cast them for free, however you still need a nearby crystallizer. To get around that, make your base fuel infinite (the refinery itself can probably do this, although you have unlimited magic potential at this point and can do it in other ways), turn it into an infinite battery, and make a crystallizer portable -- now any time you camp you can make infinitely-powerful spells. You can also easily get the number of tents to infinite as well.

Uniquification

Run through the itemgen, sticking a "unique" property on items where the properties are going to vary or are changeable.

This is going to mess with the genetics system a bit -- maybe those species get special names separate from the base species. And again, they need the unique identifier.

Anything that's unique, if you gain more of it, instead append a number on it (and maybe index it in the props as a groupslug thing) so the inventory system works right. Also change the name prop.

Ghost Station (( Post-Disenchanting Feature))

The ghost station is a weird fixture that has limited use but can be useful. It essentially targets things that have been Lost for whatever reason.

Bring back Atomized items for 2.0x the aether gained from them (upgradeable up to 1.0 with magic)

Restore Disenchanted Enchantments.

Gain back Sold items.

Restore Fractured items

Pretty much any item that's deleted in some way is instead stored in a "Ghost dimension" and can be revived at a Ghost Station.

Using it requires Ectoplasm, which is gained by *permanently* deleting stuff that's been recycled. There might be other costs as well depending on what you're doing.

Note also that only one copy of whatever the item is will exist in the Ghost Station, regardless of how many you sold or atomized or whatever. You can get around this late game via decplication.

Quantum Recycler

Another weird fixture that shares some elements with the Prism. Basically there are a variety of consumable currencies in use in the game, and this (relatively expensive and late-game) fixture allows you to transmogrify between them so you can distribute your wealth in one area better.

The currencies targeted are:

Mana Pool -- the amount you have total, not your maximum.

Dimensional Currencies

Starshards

Base Fuel

Aether

Ectoplasm

Probably stuff I'm forgetting.

The implementation is similar to the Prism -- you need a certain amount of that consumable to be able to work with it, and then you can make trades between it and other ones.

This can be a pretty good way of boosting your mana or starshards, however it's not as broken as you might think because these are expensive and late-game to build. They're definitely a good way to transfer infinities.

Starseeding Notes v2

Starseeding is a system that allows you to change the properties of various items randomly.

Uses a Starseeder fixture (name subject to change obviously).

An item will list out its properties. You can "keep" whichever properties you want, and starseed the rest.

This will then create a brand new item via those properties and apply them to the old item.

Each time you do this costs 3 starshards. Gets expensive quickly, to deter using this to get around tercos/natural game progression.

Unlike v1, there shouldn't be limits because it's just exclusively using the natural itemgen{}. Instead, it should only look at properties the itemgen{} produces.

The hard part of this engine is assigning each item type to an itemgen, based probably on its category and/or properties within it. Nevermind, industry{} simplifies the hell out of this.

The starseeder should be able to make potion ingredients do different things.