This is the online version of the Hexic documentation.

Echo Shards

Ever since acquiring a few Echo Shards from one of those ancient cities, my Hexes have felt... restrained in a way, as if the shards were trying to absorb them. Holding a shard in my other hand would let it do so, and would let me release all of the patterns I've drawn at once.

This behavior seems rather useful for quickly casting prepared spells. For example, if I let my shard absorb a simple raycast Hex, I could release it all-at-once against an entity rather than having to catch it off-guard standing still. Patterns released from an Echo Shard are cast against my staff stack, letting me use the newly-found entity by hand.

Mediaweave

A perversion of Edify Sapling lets me knit a fabric out of wool and media. It acts similar to a Thought-Knot, but can only hold Hexes — standard iotas fizzle instead of embedding themselves in the fabric. Additionally, the weave, radiating with raw energy, can passively exert force on nearby media, with no mind involved — nothing as powerful as a Hex, but still useful nonetheless.

Stringworms

A strange object I've discovered, stringworms are worm imitations made from fuzz. I'd imagine some people would have fun playing with them, but they have no use in my studies.

Media Pouches

Though a Phial is my ultimate goal for media storage, knitting a pouch out of mediaweave may help me manage my amethyst better. Only a few cloths are needed to give me some decent capacity. Each pouch holds six slots, and I can extend their capacity to twelve with a bit more weave. A small pouch may go within a large pouch, but neither size can be placed within itself.

Upon Nature's request for media, my pouches will offer themselves and their contents first of all; similarly, if I attempt to Recharge a pouch, the inserted media will form a 'cloud' of sorts inside, which will settle into any trinket or similar within.

Advanced Lists

These patterns seem to represent common operations I perform on lists. Though these are perfectly possible to do with normal List Manipulation, it often requires more effort. Perhaps Nature willed them into existence to better understand what I'm doing... or perhaps they are my own invention?

Greater Reveal

Though my Hexes can use Reveal to transmit information to my mind, the resulting message is ephemeral — unless I stand still and reflect on what I've heard recently, it will slip away like anything else someone says. Additionally, constantly hammering my mind with iotas distracts me from more important things.

Thus, I've devised a new pattern of my own. It's similar to Reveal, but the message is lodged well within my mind, and I forget it instantly if I replace it with something else. It can also take a list of messages, for convenience.

To be a Hexcaster is to glimpse a truth that might best be hidden.

Iota Patching

I've discovered a way to create a new type of iota — an abhorrence against Nature of my own doing. This pattern weaves a 'sheath' of media out of some iota, letting me customize several attributes of the new iota. Though this can make my spells more expressive, this ability is not to be taken lightly — I cannot imagine the mischief others would do with these 'patchwork' iotas.

To assemble a patchwork iota, I must provide four source iotas:

The 'userdata' iota, passed to my overload Hexes.

The 'display' iota, visible to my eyes.

A color for the iota, as an RGB vector in the 0-1 range.

A pointer to an overload map.

Such an 'overload map' is merely a regular Map iota (mapping patterns to the Hexes they should be replaced with), but stored within a Property. I assume that Nature's reason for boxing like this is to save space: it's likely I'll have many patched iotas all using the same overloads. This also gives me the convenience of updating every instance with merely Schrödinger's Gambit, rather than finding and updating them all by hand.

These overload maps resemble a technique I've seen before — the concept of redefining patterns on a fundamental level resembles the moon cultists' (little time to explain) metatables, which allow associating a table with another table to redefine its operations. When my 'metamethods' are invoked, the userdata iota is pushed to the top of the stack. All other information about the patchwork disintegrates: I'll need to recreate it from scratch (maybe I should use a 'constructor' macro?) if I want to return a new iota of the same type.

Important note: unlike these 'metatables' I've heard about, patchwork replaces the behavior of the underlying iota. For example, operators such as <ne,waaw> won't work on two patchwork numbers unless I define it myself. However, I feel uneasy relying on this behavior — Nature will be perfectly happy to change this at any moment.

Maps

Maps are an efficient structure holding pairings of some iota to some other iota. While this is perfectly possible using merely list operations, dedicated map iotas use some arcane substance called a 'Hash'. While this doesn't reduce the operations required to access a map, it desperately reduces the load on Nature, nearing O(1) for most access.

Staffcasting Patterns

These patterns force me to cast a Hex as if I drew it by hand. There are two variants of this pattern: the Greater version keeps the stack from the outside, while the Lesser version uses my staff's stack. My ravenmind is preserved in both cases.

Something's odd about how these patterns are named. I can simulate the Greater variant with merely a wrapper around the Lesser variant, but accessing the staff's stack itself is impossible with purely Greater. Does this not make Lesser strictly more powerful than Greater?

Strings: An Addendum

For some strange reason, I feel the need to document this pattern in a separate chapter, despite its resemblance to Whisper Reflection — something about "mods shouldn't modify other mods' entries" and all that.