Lanternhold

A cozy-dread automation game: every machine you build brings the dark a little closer.

Design in progress — iteration 5. This page is the living design dossier, redeployed at each milestone.

You keep a small floating island drifting through an endless night. There's a warm house, a hearth, a pond where wisps rise, a lantern tree, and a cat named Wick. Below the grass is soil, then the bones of earlier keepers, then the crystal that holds the island up, then roots that move at night, then the thing the roots grow from.

You research what the world is made of, then build machines so you no longer have to do the chores yourself. Every machine leaks flux. Flux sinks into the soil, rides the rain and pools in low caverns, and it calls the things that live in the dark. They never attack. They take, rearrange and whisper. Your only wall is light. The crystal that powers your deepest lamps is the same crystal that keeps the island floating.

One line: a cozy-dread automation game where every machine you build brings the dark a little closer.

Genre: 2D side-view simulation/automation, building and digging (Terraria-style cross-section), no combat. Session target: 15–20 hours to a first ending, then endless play. Audience: players of Thaumcraft, Create, Factorio, Noita, Caves of Qud, Dwarf Fortress, Against the Storm and Outer Wilds.

Read

Rubric scores (iteration 5)

Latest iteration

Iteration 5: #13 Build-ready

Focus: remove the questions a developer would ask before starting M0/M1.

Evidence: canonical data + validator.

• docs/data/make_data.py emits 13 JSON files: 31 essences (with pools and palette colours), 35 items, 19 recipes, 19 tiles, 31 machines, 7 lamps, 3 golems, 11 tools, 4 entities, 5 strata, 7 LUT zones, and all tuning params.
• validate.py checks:
  • referential integrity and the pool tier rules (Taint only in Fetter and Abyss);
  • the synthesis-only set matches GDD §6.1.2;
  • every essence has a use;
  • flux params equal the S01 tuned set and AE = escale/3;
  • the S05 generator succeeds on 500 seeds with these pools.
• Result: 176 records, 0 problems.
• Building the data surfaced:
  • 5 malformed recipe refs (fixed);
  • missing homes for the Clarity Lens, Stethoscope and Echo Bell (a new tools.json);
  • Kindred had no use (added the Kindred Font, which blesses a water body for the Mend ending);
  • a stale Hand Mortar flux value (1 → 9);
  • jump velocity 196 → 180 (3 tiles, not 3.75).

Changes

• GDD §20.3 rewritten: the data exists; TS interfaces match the JSON exactly; reference implementations named.
• New GDD §20.6–20.12:
  • 20.6 world generation in 10 deterministic steps (M1 subset named);
  • 20.7 controls;
  • 20.8 UI flows (adding the essence satchel and the desk panel);
  • 20.9 entity navigation (passability per kind, flow fields, retreat, middens);
  • 20.10 save format (header plus RLE/deflate typed arrays, recomputed fields, migrations);
  • 20.11 player physics;
  • 20.12 M1 object state machines (hearth, lamps, wisp lantern, desk, alembic with fuel rules, chest, jar, gleaner, wisps, Wick).
• Tests 13 (data validation) and 14 (TS ↔ reference parity) added. The M1 manifest now lists data and prefabs.

Critique

• Systems designer: M2+ machine behaviours are parameters plus table prose, not state machines. Acceptable, since M1's are complete and each later milestone can add its own §20.12 block. Recorded as the main remaining gap.
• New player: the controls follow genre convention (Terraria-like), with right-click to interact and tooltips that don't need hover.
• Optimizer: solid fuel (log = 4 Ember-equivalents) vs distilling (2 Ember + Growth 2 + Loam 1) gives a small fuel-or-research choice. Fine.
• Art director: prefabs are tile maps, so the house is built from the same procedural tiles as everything else and stays cohesive.
• Scope critic: hidden M1 work surfaced (prefab authoring, the satchel UI) and added to the manifest.

Scores: 1:3 · 2:3 · 3:4 · 4:3 · 5:3 · 6:3 · 7:4 · 8:3 · 9:3 · 10:3 · 11:3 · 12:4 · 13:4

Next focus: #1 First hour (S06 pacing).