I went ahead and placed the new animals and plants.
Now that I’d actually done it, I found myself wondering about some of the assumptions I’d made.
Could I have made a world where there was no real difference between animals and plants?
Where every creature was of the same basic type?
Could I create something else entirely… something in between?
Would it be possible to make something that was living rock… or something even stranger?
I mulled over those thoughts, but didn’t spend too much time on them.
Maybe I could use them later, but for now, it was probably best that I kept things at least a little familiar.
Even if I was making some changes, like with the bacteria.
Just musing over those ideas – and the fact that I’d already made a few structural changes – made me realize I needed to start using the Scratch Pad properly.
I pulled it up and made a few entries.
I stared forlornly at the Dinosaur Island item.
I really, really wanted it, for some reason, but I knew better than to prioritize it over things like diseases or other systems that would help cull the population aside from predation. The Time Dilation was still set at a 1:10 ratio, so I knew I had some time. Even if I spent a few hours fiddling with this before I got around to decomposition or similar functions, it wouldn’t make much difference in my universe.
“Orpheus,” I suddenly spoke up, “does it cause a problem to change various rules of reality while time is running? I’m guessing not – because you can’t pause it – but are there any potential pitfalls I should look into?”
“It depends on what you are doing,” the small fairy replied, “and what Epoch you are in. Currently, things have just gotten started, so it shouldn’t cause any serious problems. Once you have a very large population and everyone is actively doing things, changing rules in the middle of creatures using those rules can lead to some strange effects.
She shrugged, “Unless you are outright rewriting massive systems, though, these small instabilities and edge cases are usually smoothed out very quickly.”
“I figured as much,” I said. “If you can’t pause time and the interface lets you make changes, it would be weird if every little adjustment broke everything horribly.”
But now I really had a problem.
I’d been in such a rush to get things moving that I’d kicked the can down the road on developing the magic system. A lot of it was still undefined. And now that I had time running, changing it was going to be more expensive.
Another mistake, now clear in hindsight.
But at least the costs of doing those tweaks didn’t seem too bad. Maybe that was because nothing was consciously using magic yet.
My first instinct, of course, was to just start building your standard elemental-aligned types of Mana and then link various magic systems to those.
But that felt a little too simplistic.
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I’d already gotten various things to do certain magical abilities even without elemental alignment. If I introduced it now, I’d have to go back and revise the camouflage plants and animals… and that ice serpent, too.
Then again… if I was going to do it, better earlier than later.
I sat up in my chair and drummed my fingers on my knee.
Maybe I should get a desk, I thought.
No. That’s procrastination talking.
I really had to face what was going on.
Now that the initial disaster had been dealt with, I was facing a potentially very complicated problem… and my earlier mistake had reminded me just how far in over my head I was.
I’d gotten overconfident.
I couldn’t just rush into this, but I also couldn’t sit here and do nothing. I had to move forward, without spending all day planning without action.
While I was doing all this thinking, I was also investigating the menus available for defining my Mana energy.
To my surprise, the menus were even more sophisticated than before.
Was the interface adapting? Or was it just letting me do more now that life was active on the planet and interacting with that energy in various ways?
I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t bother to ask Orpheus. I didn’t want to get distracted.
After a little experimentation, I finally settled on a path forward that looked like it might actually make sense.I was trusting in the interface a lot here, because I wasn’t sure how easy it would be to define what I wanted just through numbers and menus.
First, I designated a base type: Pure Mana.
This was the raw, potential-filled stuff – untouched and unshaped.
And just to make things interesting, I made large quantities of it poisonous to most kinds of life.
It could still be filtered through objects and bodies, though… and in doing so, it would “color” the Mana, changing it into something easier to work with.
Now I just had to define some basic types.
I’d already noticed an option that allowed for hybrid types, and I toggled that feature to run through a notification system. That way, if a new hybrid type seemed about to be created, I’d be alerted. I wanted to watch that process carefully.
If I could guide the development of the system instead of brute-forcing everything, maybe I’d have a better chance of making something elegant.
I looked at what I’d already done.
I’d used some illusion magic, some ice magic, and the darkness mushrooms… that could be three different types of magic right there. But none of them covered the general enhancement magic being used by the enhancement fibers. I was very tempted to just use earth, air, fire, water, light, and dark, but that just seemed too trite and limiting.
I sat back in my chair again and rubbed my chin.
I felt a slight tickle at my ear as Orpheus settled on my shoulder. She didn’t say anything, but the gesture made me wonder what she was thinking. I didn’t have time to really consider it and returned to going over my options for colored Mana.
Instead of “dark” mana for the darkness… how about something specifically for obscuration? That seemed like it would be much more interesting. It would also cover the illusion magic that the plant and that one predator I’d designed used.
I went into their entries and looked them over for commonalities, and then I nodded to myself.
Then I created my first type of colored Mana.
I dubbed it Umbral Mana, though it could also be called Shadow Mana.
It was Mana that specifically interfered with the senses. That way it could cover darkness, illusions, and even mental manipulation if I wanted to add that later.
I left that last part off for now.
This was one of those things that’s easy for me to say, but actually doing the work took several hours of defining, tweaking, and running simple simulations in the simulation tool of the interface.
I queued up the changes I had made, but didn’t apply them yet. The rest of the Mana needed to be defined so I could properly handle interactions between the types before going "live" with the new system.
The rest were a little trickier—well, most of them.
Luminn Mana was easy. It was basically the counterpart of Umbral, and it was just light magic. It revealed hidden things, provided illumination, enhanced the senses, and so on. Most of what the sun put out was light magic like this. This would make it harder to use illusions in direct sunlight, but I thought that was an interesting way to limit them. I’d have to see how that worked out. Might be making the sun too OP.
After a little more thought, I created two more types of Mana.
Flux Mana handled change and chaos – transformation, mutation. That made it one of the more dangerous kinds of Mana to handle in a pure form, but also incredibly useful.
Countering it was Cruxis Mana—which could also be called Order Mana. This was for stability, defense, stasis, reinforcement, and that sort of thing.
Once I had those down, it got a little easier.
My uncertainty about how to handle the enhancement fibers melted away as I moved down the list and created Vital Mana. This was the Mana of living things… regeneration, growth, healing, and so on.
Countering it was the dangerous Entropic Mana, which would attempt to leech out Mana from both living things and anything else that held another kind of Mana.
I was really getting into this now… but I was still missing a few types.
I added Flame Mana, for consumption, destruction, and of course, fire.
And I countered it with Aqua Mana, for water, fluidity, resilience and calming.
Finally, after all this, I sat up and examined my interface.
Could I use what I just made to do what I wanted… or would I need more types?