Shatterloop

Melange Planes Simpgrade

This update should make melange planes funner, by heavily simplifying their puzzle and having implicit rather than explicit path variety.

Melange planes rarely spawn symbols rather than conjuncts -- these correspond to the elements defending from it. They're still called "conjuncts" however.

Touching one will thread a circle of the existing plane into the plane that the symbol corresponds to (basically cloning it). Where the element would be there is instead the appropriate fusion. Back on the first plane, the conjunct gets removed.

The first plane will have a level of Instability applied to it.

Instability 1 has mild quantum effects, instability 2 has strong quantum effects, and with instability 3 everything becomes chimera.

In instability 3 you're unable to pick up items anymore. Perhaps they don't generate at all.

Instability can be removed via the Plane menu -- this is how it's removed for the aleph naught and story stuff as well. Still requires 3 of the appropriate myriad.

Dimensional shifts

Existing dimensional shift code (the white gradient windows) will be removed.

Chimera symbols will start appearing in any level of instability. These will replace the element's position in the chimera name with the appropriate symbol, so that symbol shouldn't be able to appear.

In instability 1, the last position changes. In Instability 2 the second to last position changes. The other positions happen in instability 3 and depend on the melange plane element:

For example, if the symbol is ♑︎ and your dimension is ♊︎︎︎♌︎︎︎♏︎︎︎☽︎︎︎♒︎︎︎ℵ︎︎︎♊︎︎︎♒︎︎︎:

Element	Position	New dimension
Ice	0	♑︎♌︎︎︎♏︎︎︎☽︎︎︎♒︎︎︎ℵ︎︎︎♊︎︎︎♒︎︎︎
Wood	1	♊︎︎︎♑︎♏︎︎︎☽︎︎︎♒︎︎︎ℵ︎︎︎♊︎︎︎♒︎︎︎
Water	2	♊︎︎︎♌︎︎︎♑︎☽︎︎︎♒︎︎︎ℵ︎︎︎♊︎︎︎♒︎︎︎
Earth	3	♊︎︎︎♌︎︎︎♏︎︎︎♑︎♒︎︎︎ℵ︎︎︎♊︎︎︎♒︎︎︎
Fire	4	♊︎︎︎♌︎︎︎♏︎︎︎☽︎︎︎♑︎ℵ︎︎︎♊︎︎︎♒︎︎︎
Wind	5	♊︎︎︎♌︎︎︎♏︎︎︎☽︎︎︎♒︎︎︎♑︎♊︎︎︎♒︎︎︎

In this example, if you're in the fire plane, ♒︎︎︎ can't appear in instability 3.

Shifting dimensions will warp you to the new dimension inside the same melange plane type. The new dimension will take on an instability of 1. This will also break the plane you're leaving, turning it into pretty much permanent void with nothing in it. You'll also collect a glyphshard of that symbol, so for example in this case a ♑︎ Glyphshard.

Strange loops will be changing where you can only use glyphs that you've unlocked -- to unlock a glyph you need 3 of its glyphshard. Trade routes will also cost money. This makes alternate dimensions less accessible - however there will be reroutes like the quest system opening routes up or an alternate way of getting glyphshards (Getting them from subversive magic groups makes the most sense based on the lore, since they'd be able to avoid the maintenance guild's eyes and also would be more likely to hold onto the old decplicated glyphs. And also this would explain how they can transport you around shatterloop outside of other systems).

Owning a glyph should lower your cost of that trade route by the amount you'd expect (with ♑︎︎︎☽︎︎︎♏︎︎︎♌︎︎︎♍︎︎︎♈︎︎︎☉︎︎︎☽︎︎︎, owning ♑︎︎︎ would cost 7/8 as much and if you also owned ☽︎︎︎ it would instead cost 5/8 as much.

Quantum Plane Simpgrade v3

Merges the last two ideas together.

There is a quantum plane for every single alt dimension. In the case of the home dimension the chimera is 8 alephs.

When you enter you'll go to a random one of them.

Quantum dimensional shifts take you to an entirely new quantum chimera. This is procgen -- the place you start will always have the same destination.

They happen every 30 seconds, but can be made faster or slower with Exotic Matter on the Quantum menu (known as a "Frequency change"). Idk what the scaling is, but I want a setting where it happens every second. Maybe literally just:

Very fast	1 second
Fast	10 seconds
Normal	30 seconds
Slow	2 minutes
Very Slow	10 minutes

Exiting the plane will go to the appropriate alt dimension.

On the quantum plane menu you can unlock the "Quantum Tunnel" elemental ability for 100 exotic matter, disappearing that button in the process. It's just an elemental ability like fire/water that costs aether.

If used in a dimension it warps you to the appropriate quantum chimera.

Void Pivots

Void pivots / exotic matter work how they do already, except that the solid color doesn't turn fully gray and it's the solid color that turns into exotic matter. You can still walk on it though. Should also remove the existing terco code since it's obsolete.

Void pivot range can be upgraded with exotic matter in the quantum plane menu, though the final size is a bit lower than before.

Chimera Pools

Starting out, you're in pool 1 -- this is every single chimera other than the starting one. Your routes are completely random, for example:

♈︎♓︎是︎♍︎☯︎♑︎ℵ︎♌︎

♌︎︎︎♓︎︎︎♉︎︎︎♑︎︎︎♉︎︎︎♉︎︎︎♉︎︎︎♐︎︎︎

☽⊕⊕☽⊕

Your first chisym (chimera symbol) interaction will bring you to pool 2 -- every chimera that contains that symbol and another symbol, where the second symbol is sequential every time. So for example, your route might look like:

☽⊕⊕☽⊕

♒︎♒︎♒︎☽♒︎☽

☽☽☽♓︎

assuming that ☽ is selected.

Your second chisym interaction will bring you to pool 3 -- every chimera that contains those two symbols. So for example, a route might be:

☽☽☽♓︎

♓︎♓︎☽♓︎♓︎☽♓︎♓︎

☽♓︎♓︎☽☽♓︎

Routes are procedurally generated based on the previous entry, and nothing sequential is happening, so it's possible to get stuck in small loops. To fix this a bit (though not fully obviously), here are a couple small changes to the algorithm that picks the first symbol:

Pool 1 chooses a symbol that the first symbol isn't. So a route from ♈︎♓︎是︎♍︎☯︎♑︎ℵ︎♌︎ will never start with ♈︎.

Pool 2 switches back and forth from chisym 1 and chisym 2. So ☽⊕⊕☽⊕ can turn into ♒︎♒︎♒︎☽♒︎☽ but not ☽♒︎☽♒︎♒︎♒︎☽, because it can't start with ☽.

Pool 3 does the same thing, switching between chisym 1 and chisym 2.

It's still possible to get stuck between 2 chimeras, but it's at least obvious that things are still changing.

Chisym Activation

Certain fixed X and Y ranges (hardcoded entirely) will render chimera symbols rather than void pivots. The actual symbols are all the symbols used in the address, possibly with that kind of weighting.

In pool 1, the chisyms that appear are the ones in the chimera, possibly weighted according to how many of them are in the address.

In pool 1, interacting with a symbol will warp you to something in a pool 2 of that symbol. These route changes are all procgen based on the seed, so ♌︎︎︎♓︎︎︎♉︎︎︎♑︎︎︎♉︎︎︎♉︎︎︎♉︎︎︎♐︎︎︎ will always warp you to ☽⊕⊕☽⊕ when you activate ☽.

In pool 2, the activated chisym will appear a different symcolor. If you interact with it, it'll deactivate it and warp you back to pool 1. Like the above, the 2-->1 transfer is also procgen, so ☽⊕⊕☽⊕ might always warp you to ♏︎︎︎♒︎︎︎♐︎︎︎♎︎︎︎♑︎︎︎.

In pool 2, the chisym you've selected appears maybe 25% of the time and every other chisym appears with equal weight distribution 75% of the time.

In pool 2, Interacting with an unactivated chisym in pool 2 will warp you to the appropriate pool 3.

In pool 3, You get a 50% distribution of chisym 1 and chisym 2. Interacting with either one will make the other one chisym 1, and go to the appropriate pool 2.

Infinity symbol

Where both the x and y axises are chisym-oriented, an infinity symbol will rarely appear -- should be about once for that entire region, whatever size it is (was thinking 50x50 or something -- so it should be a 1 in 2500 chance).

Interacting with it will turn it into a glyph whose probability matches the glyph distribution in the chimera address. This can be picked up for the appropriate glyph, risk-free. These glyphs should look a bit different from chisyms but match the glyph appearance in melange planes.

Chromodynamo Puzzle

For exotic matter on a quantum plane in pool 3, you get the chromodynamo location of the opposite chimera address in the same pool. So for example ☽♓︎♓︎☽☽♓︎ will give you the location of the chromodynamo in ♓︎☽☽♓︎♓︎☽ and vice-versa.

The Chromodynamo is an item, not a game prog thing. You need one to unlock the event horizon puzzle but presumably you can use them for other things as well, like really advanced recipes.

The actual location is somewhere procgen based on the size of the parent dimension. Getting there probably requires using the town/nonad route systems / repulsor tech. From there you can quantum tunnel to the right spot, and hopefully collect the chromodynamo before the world changes. Changing your worldshift frequency should help a lot.

Reaching the actual correct dimension requires either setting the shift to fast/very fast and hoping it works out or having the glyphs unlocked and strange-looping your way over there. Hopefully by this point you have glyphs unlocked, but if not, you can get them more easily with the infinity symbols system. There should be some kind of additional complex navigation to use the quantum plane system to your advantage, though sufficiently complicated to where you can't just do it easily.

Misc Changes

The actual generation should exclusively be the shrine generation, or maybe also the snake generation. These look the best to enhance the bizarre nature of the quantum plane.

To beef up the lore somewhat, melange planes should occasionally have entropic holes and the quantum plane should have melange holes. The entropic holes (when activated by Monad of course) go straight to region 0's entropic plane, which is the only one that exists. This enhances the lore of the dimension fractalization hierarchy -- the quantum plane is going to have the most possibilities (almost all chimeras, infinite tetrads), followed by melange planes (6 per dimension), followed by loops (one per chimera), followed by the entropic plane (only one).

I like the "chunk warping" item in gem genie -- might want to import something like that as a function of repulsor tech to make getting between infinity-symbol areas easier.

Entering a chimera (via region-0 or quantum tunneling) where the activated chisyms don't make sense will reset them.

Need to alter the chimera random generator so that 2-sym, 3-sym, 4-sym, 5-sym, 6-sym and 7-sym combinations are all as common as 8-sym combinations, which seem to be the only thing selected for atm. It might have something to do with a bug where blanks are rendered as ♌︎, however.

Pressing tab changes the way the generation is done pretty much infinitely, but not the actual generation mechanics, that's based on the chimera.

Caves 10 should no longer have quantum storms, that'll exclusively become an instability mechanic.

Exotic matter should randomly move around you and/or disappear. Possibly in real time.

Random Rerouting

There's a couple areas of the main game progression that are unusually weak:

You can go to all three dungeon types in the starting dimension, meaning that you don't have to visit alternate dimensions except to put tetradshards into mana Cracks (which is the other very weak mechanic).

I'd like to incorporate alternate dimensions more, but this is tricky as they should be harder to get into (chisyms and/or trading and/or quest targets).

The current progression is getting tetradshards in dungeons and feeding them into mana Cracks to get the elemental powers to get into melange planes easily. However if you're going to alternate dimensions anyway for mana Cracks, you might as well be going for different dungeon elements as well. The speciation of dungeons is also weak-- different elements don't influence anything other than the items you receive there.

Similarly, finding mana Cracks is kinda boring-- you use the same npc system three times, and then again you're going into at least three dungeons and they're not distinct enough from each other for this to work well.

So here's a rough draft idea:

Leverage labyrinth and mine structures to be two different types of dungeons with somewhat different mechanics. The existing structure probably makes the most sense as fire/wind types. Labyrinths could be waterearth in a literal sense if the passageways were water, and maybe there's currents or something to add challenge. Leaving mines to be icewood. All three require metallic keys to unlock, so caves are still a necessary progression step.

Mana Cracks are a part of the dungeon complex so once you get enough tetradshards you can unlock them.

Unlocking them creates mana holes in the structure, basically turning them into mana shrines. You'd get both element types here.

The elemental super powers get unlocked via something found in the melange planes. These enable faster transport into them but aren't strictly required anymore.

Instead of being a power, the monad thing permanently changes the appearance of quantum and entropic holes and allows access into them.

Other reroutes

The home dimension no longer spawns dungeons. This fits in better with the lore since the plane is effectively neutral.

To get to the required dungeons, you need to be able to access three elemental planes.

Alternate Dimension Access

In order for the above to work, alternate dimensions and particularly their element needs to be accessible. Here are all the ways to access them that's currently explored:

Having enough wealth will allow you to buy access to trade routes. As you unlock more you're more able to gain wealth via the trading mechanic, but originally you're going to need to sell valuable loot or found/crafted/farmed items.

Quests can give you access to trade routes directly. The issue with this is cross-province quests require a certain amount of Trust.

Melange planes give you access to glyphshards, which when used on a Strange Loop will unlock the appropriate glyph. A single glyph by itself will unlock 6 dimensions, while 2 will unlock a lot more and so on.

Glyphshards can also be found as Melange loot, which is highly random so not great. They can also maybe be extracted from Crystals with a 1% probability, however Crystals are probably getting pulled from the home dimension.

Melange planes also occasionally (and rarely) give you portals to alternate Melange planes.

NPCs can sometimes transport you to alternate planes. I'm not sure what the ruling is on this exactly, but it's one-way and an expensive service to boot.

The hidden Easter egg will transport you to the next dimension in sequence. This isn't common knowledge or maybe even lore knowledge however. Maybe something that can be instead inferred from the lore.

So since dungeons are required to gain access to Melange planes, and they're exclusively on alternate planes, your early game initial options are trading or questing to unlock trade routes. The npc service is effectively the same thing. So you basically have to go through the Civilization systems in order to progress to that point, which is probably for the best.

A couple addendums:

Trade routes, services, and any alt transport option that requires money should tell you the element up front.

Post-melange technology

You should be able to unlock the following technology:

Activate arbitrary melange plane chisyms via the chimera keypad. -- this costs fusions and is also melange element specific, so you'll need to unlock it separately in all six elements. This is not in the lab, I'm just including it here.

Activate arbitrary quantum plane routes, possibly several layers deep. This costs a chromodynamo and some PGCS collection of exotic materials.

Be able to go down trade routes from anywhere, warping to that position (or moduloed) in the process. This also doesn't cost energy, and you should also be able to go several layers out potentially. This costs the same as the above to make.

Have a portable Strange Loop which lets you go anywhere from anywhere. Doing this in a dungeon has strange results and may be an easter egg or even a story thing. (Depends on the lore around dungeons really). This costs the same as the above.

These are all behind a Quantum Lab, which itself requires a chromodynamo to unlock.

Additionally it might make sense to bundle the event horizon puzzle unlock in here -- you could then do that puzzle via the surface/etc menu regardless of how you're switching dimensions. And similarly reaching the event horizon would no longer require a Strange Loop either.

Thus does however tie in heavily to the Story and Lore, so the UI might not appear the way it seems to.

Alternate Provinces v1

Basic differences

Void pivots don't spawn.

Province generation

Essentially, alternate provinces break the delicate handcrafting that goes into the starting province. They're instead designed to be as unpredictable as possible, both to make the Aleph Naught more challenging but also to provide some variety and opportunities to explorers.

The color palette, enemies and terrain varies. This is true for starting dimensions as well, but it's definitely the first thing you'll notice when going to a different dimension.

Provinces have different rules that generate them -- different numbers of cities, towns, cities and nexuses in weird places, different routing limits, etc. They can be quite bizarre.

Same deal with the rules for towns / houses. It's a free-for-all out there.

The amount of distance between nonads in a province can vary as well. (which also varies the overall size of the province)

Both inactive dungeons and active dungeons have more variety in those variables.

Water colors are more random, and there's not necessarily 5 of them.

Caves have a LOT of changes -- the terrain generator can be completely different, and the distribution of all terrain and resources can vary a lot. The floor minimums for certain things can be different as well, including things that are universal in the starting dimension like gashrooms or resources (but not cave holes, fortunately).

All the information here should be symbolized and randomly attached to the loop center secret.

Aleph Naught v1/v2 Improvements

These simplify the aleph naught from both a player standpoint and a programming standpoint:

I'm removing Tier 5 -- too annoying for the player, too much work to program. This change means that I really only have some work in Tier 4 left before hitting early alpha 3.

Using the aleph naught creates Instability, regardless of the Tier you're working with.

Instability leads to Quantum Storms -- these are probably way too annoying to have in the quantum dimension (especially since you're going to be looking at terrain and the terrain changes a lot anyway). Making them happen when players abuse a dimension is pretty neat though -- it kind of encourages exploring other dimensions since quantum storms can be quite annoying. Storms don't affect Strange Loops, which are needed to exit corrupted dimensions.

Other Instability weather will include everything turning to Chimera and everything Phasing (turning into Void). I also have some ideas of turning down contrast or making things black/white, darkening things, etc. I should be able to have some fun with this. Yes, you can have more than one type at once.

Storms will become more frequent and more severe over time as you remove more and more of the dimension, which makes it harder to continue in the same dimension.

Refined Aleph Naught v2 Notes

Dungeon tiers can definitely come back now, and honestly there should be more by the end of the game to actually remove.

As I pointed out elsewhere, instead of gaining progressively more soulshards (with procedurally generated values), you instead have to "complete" pieces of each tier by getting some number of them (say, 3 house staircases), with new tiers unlocked by "completing" a percentage of each tier. This encourages exploration, especially since with the Alternate Provinces update, dimensions can be very different from one another.

You do still need to return to the Singularity to get each successive tier, as well as the Soul's Pivot. This is essentially just padding/useful to story progression.

Myriad Changes

You can remove a dimension's Instability (Aleph Naught v2 feature) with the defender element's myriads -- so for example in a fire dimension you can restore it with Ice Myriads or Wood Myriads. Ideally this is the opposite of how the event horizon works -- I forget whether it uses attacker or defender elements. Defender here works a bit better with the lore, but I can stretch it either way.

Both Strange Loops and activated Aleph Conduits have a "Myriad Scanner" function that lets you scan different dimensions to see what kinds of things they contain. The different functions and options here are differentiated into the six elements, and thus the process itself costs some amount of the respective Myriad. Better idea -- elemental shrines let you do myriad scanning of their specific type. This gives them more of a point besides looking pretty, and also makes hunting them down pretty important (or using town scanner functions to find them). Maybe the actual functions are differentiated across different shrines as well, though maybe it's like core doors and you just "unlock" the kinds you need over time.

I wouldn't mind re-integrating a "Genesis Device" -- this thing would cost myriads as well. It would depend on how accessible the alternate provinces framework is, however. The Genesis device would take over those Soul's Pivot functions. The Soul's Pivot itself could just be a combination Aleph Naught, Genesis Device, Crystallizer, programmer debugger and stat/item editor, which would simplify that set of notes a lot.

Chimera Update

This needs a merger with the altplanes update, the melange planes update and the myriad scanner update since they all reference each other.

This update fits the chimera system in better with the lore and improves trade routes a good bit, as well as potentially making large civilization-free spaces or potentially making the world close to infinite.

Can probably merge this with the alternate planes update because of the last point.

Basic Changes

The glyphs are arranged in a hexagon like this.
https://css-tricks.com/hexagons-and-beyond-flexible-responsive-grid-patterns-sans-media-queries/

The above should be useful.

Aleph is taking a more center role, while 是︎ and ☯︎ have been removed. In their place, there are three new ones corresponding to ceres, vesta and chiron to fit the astrological theme (and to also be more recognizable -- mercury is too close to other symbols).

This change adds a glyph, so it increases the amount of available addresses and the overall chimera formula, so all my bugs/etc will have to be changed (or I could just fix those particular bugs). Same deal with heavily rearranging and changing symbols like this.

The size of loops needs to be a good bit bigger. I'm undecided on whether they should all be the same size or not -- having them be different alters the math a bit but not as much as you'd think -- only altering one variable. Aleph conduits go to aleph conduits and strange loops go to strange loops (possibly changing tetrads in an attacking direction) so their differences are really only affecting my debug tool. The overworld needs to again be super small relative to all other loop sizes.

Some melange planes should start out in some kind of Uncertainty -- this fits into the lore better plus is more useful and probably also looks cooler.

When ℵ︎ precedes something, it's basically like a 0 so it truncates. ℵ︎ℵ︎ℵ︎ℵ︎ℵ︎ℵ︎♋︎♏︎ is therefore identical to ♋︎♏︎ as well as ℵ︎ℵ︎ℵ︎♋︎♏︎, etc. The home dimension can also be represented as ℵ︎ℵ︎ℵ︎ℵ︎ℵ︎ℵ︎ℵ︎ℵ︎, in the lore it's the exact center of the meta-universe so it is a kind of meta-south-pole and that explains why it has the properties it does. You can get there at a strange loop by typing in ℵ︎ℵ︎. This change should fix the chimera translation math a lot. You lose some loop possibilities here but gain it with the new symbol and also everything's cleaner, so it's win-win really.

Lore Basis

While loops are themselves spherical and loop around (hence the name), they're still arranged in higher hexagonal structures, which are then themselves arranged in higher hexagonal structures, etc. The chimera address is therefore pinpointing where exactly they lie in a giant looping hexagonal fractal.

Each loop curves around on itself, so you can't just jump to adjacent chimeras. However, if you have a jump size larger than the plane size you'll jump to the adjacent plane, with the direction of the jump determining which chimera you land in.

This unfortunately doesn't repeat -- like if you double the jump size you won't end up in a chimera adjacent to the other desination, you'll still end up where you would if the jump size was halved. To get to some far-flung chimera you have to make jumps in number however many chimeras there are on the way to it.

In the current society, making even single jumps is outrageously expensive -- Shatterloop's currency system is literally a form of energy that can be used to make these jumps. To make a jump across a province you're not paying someone money so they'll do it, you're instead using your own energy-currency to make the jump. With cross-province jumping it's a bit different -- aleph conduits lie close to the south pole of the loop so they're able to make use of energy coming in from north poles in other loops (also known as loop centers). They can therefore make jumps to alternate dimensions almost for free, however there's just enough of a discrepancy there that they need a good bit of additional energy to work, so to fuel this, the maintenance guild charges people a bunch of money to "unlock" the free use of trade routes or will allow people that have them unlocked to trade them to other people (which is how quests work), or give guilds special privileges in service to their needs (which is how guild quest unlocks work).

Strange Loops can go anywhere from anywhere else, however their system is based around attracting to poles, and they require Glyphs to be able to achieve this -- these are basically concentrated energy vectors. The fragmented version of these (glyphshards) naturally form when a melange plane hits full instability and prevent a dimension from collapsing entirely by redirecting excess energy to alternate planes rather than running along the melange loop (which can no longer support it). Eventually, these will heal via the myriads in the area when the excess energy isn't too bad.

Before the old civilization collapsed, Glyphs were pretty plentiful so people could transport wherever they wanted to with ease. Magic-based Decplication factories turned unique adventurer artifacts into cheap commodities. However during the Aleph Wars Decplication factories were highly valuable and so variously reclaimed and raided, and eventually purged completely by the Maintenance Guild. To solidify their power over the transport system, the Maintenance Guild also tracked down most of the Glyphs and kept a watchful eye on most of the Strange Loops. This wasn't 100% though, so in-game you'll still occasionally find them in melange cabinets, along with fragmented varieties known as glyphshards. Also a higher concentrated where subversive mages gather, and lastly, this also explains how they're able to transport you to random dimensions outside of other chimera networks.

Game Influence

Trade Networks are changing so they're entirely based on the chimeras around whichever chimera you're in. Each dimension therefore always has 6 chimeras around it. In the image above, ℵ︎♏︎ can go to ℵ︎♐︎, ℵ︎⚶, ℵ︎♎︎, ☽︎♈︎, ☽︎♓︎, and ⚶♋︎. In fact *♏︎ will always go to *♐︎, *⚶, *♎︎, #♈︎, #♓︎, and $♋︎, where * is the same level-2 chimera, # is the one sw of it and $ is the one se of it.

This change will make trade network addresses less random, while still having an interesting feel, and then also actually fitting in with the math and lore of everything. Instead of "sw"/"se", I should assign chimera directions an element, as this makes a certain amount of sense, though it's unrelated to other lore. Or possibly use a different set of 6 symbols so things like cryptic loop centers work better.

Aleph Conduit unlock prices will vary linearly depending on the loop size. It's therefore advantageous to unlock them from the side of the smaller loop, and this change also makes the overworld trade routes extremely easy to unlock, which is important.

Aleph Conduits no longer let you visit dimensions you've previously visited -- you instead either have to navigate the chimera maze (which is a cool mechanic now) or place portals down. Strange Loops might be able to store favorites however, that fits into the lore better since they can go absolutely anywhere.

Magic shrines should have occasional magic users that'll own some small set of glyphs. You can then get one-way transport to anything those glyphs can spell out, but it'll cost a bunch of money. You could also buy one of their glyphs, but this would again cost an absurd amount of money. This should be the alternate way of obtaining glyphs and should also replace the village-to-village transport system.

Alt Dimensional Differences

Because of this change, the actual glyphs should dictate some of what alternate planes are capable of, for flavor. So like split all procgen altplane properties across 19 symbols and 8 positions with a somewhat random ordering so info tools and the loop center (north pole) are still useful. This would also simplify the heck out of them as all they have to do is scan the appropriate chimera spaces. This would also make it so that chimeras close to one another are similar, which is pretty damn neat. Should maybe also adjust melange/quantum transport systems to reflect similarities in other positions - I forget how those worked exactly.

The palette should also be based on the chimera system if at all feasible -- like take a layered approach to it so you don't just get the same dimension colors over and over when going down trade routes, but still have similarities at some level.

This change would also bring the loop center to version 1 -- each altplane property would be assigned a symbol and the values would be ints or also symbols, so you'd get blocks like:

♐︎︎︎是︎︎︎♊︎︎︎♎︎︎︎⊕︎︎︎♋︎︎︎ℵ︎︎︎☽︎︎︎ꄑ7

This indicates that on dimension ♐︎︎︎是︎︎︎♊︎︎︎♎︎︎︎⊕︎︎︎♋︎︎︎ℵ︎︎︎☽︎︎︎, the number of ꄑ is 7, whatever that means.

This change could also bring the myriad scanner to version 1.