Several biome-themed Altars as well as a Nest for you.
The Altars lead to finite procedural worlds of that particular type instanced via Sigils, which alter the properties of each world.
The Nest is where you build out Rooms and general material refinement / Farming mechanics. Farming is a bit unusual -- instead of happening in real or fake time, it uses some type of Chronons, which can be Aetherized basically in a diverse Alchemist way. Any raw organism can be Farmed. Rooms, meanwhile, have types and require some kind of Locon in the same way.
You have Tools which allow you to collect materials in various ways. These have starting property values and their own mechanics.
Tools can be upgraded by attaching Runes, which either influence property values or contribute to a quasi-magic system that may also introduce additional mechanics. Tools start out with 3 rune slots, with an additional 3 being added every time a Mechanic is introduced. Leveraging passive or active Rune effects is a big component of gameplay, leading to a better chance of getting certain items, yielding more, and some other things like cross-resource duplication.
Runes are constructed with materials which are either raw or refined -- you do know in advance how the PGCS works here so you can target specific effects, which are assigned. Better effects go into deeper PGCS territory.
All materials in the game are handcrafted and biome-specific. Refining/crafting recipes are similarly handcrafted. PGCS is known but randomized by world seed. Same deal with Locon/Chronon -- a fair distribution for each farm/room type and random values outside of it.
Materials are scattered around in various ways, behind systems that require the appropriate kind of tool. Several materials will share the same tool in whatever way makes sense.
Worlds are procedural but heavily designed with variations of various kinds in mind, which get randomized by Sigil.
Refining or Crafting materials requires the appropriate kind of fixture. These will again use the PGCS to build and are known beforehand so you can plan your moves better.
Fixtures can have their own mechanics and use their own Runes -- again, all of the recipes here are known beforehand. I want to introduce a lot of variety in mechanics (as well as the way runes interact) herein. Things like Cooking and Fermentation will *definitely* be supported. Time constraints here aren't affected by Chronons but are instead things to route around with Runes.
Sigils are built from Locon/Chronon combinations, which prevents softlocking. There'll be kind of a lot of these (though finite), so it can be purely random what does what. You can experiment freely here to find recipes that you like, and they'll affect a single biome (you get to see all properties while making them).
Save data is stored by biome and sigil, so you can Refresh a World by placing the same exact Sigil there after crafting it. They're a bit expensive, but not bad; definitely nothing within potential softlock range but you can't just make a thick stack of them without a bunch of work either.
