For the last couple of weeks I’ve been wending my merry way through UI features.
The main one of these was the Refinery interface. In this window you should be able to put items into the refinery and it will extract essence from it – essence is an essential part of all magic, and is extracted from plant parts.
We’re working mainly here on the something along the lines of sympathetic magic and the doctrine of signatures, where plants have a corresponding essences based on their features. Hopefully this is quite a simple and explainable – dandelions, because they have seeds that fly far and wide have essence of air and growth; nettle has essence of death and protection as the sting is both a poison to it’s enemies but also a protection to itself.
This means I now have a small interface in which I can add various plants and they are slowly converted to their essence. I like to think of it as being a sort of magical distillery – I’d imagine glass tubes and braziers. This lives in the home cottage.
It’s not a very pretty interface as I’ve been struggling with making it all fit together – the main problem is the materials in your inventory change very frequently – but it’s a start.
The next challenge is making the world map screen a bit better!