it's missclick-driven shareholder value inflation. "fat finger economics", if you will

Also, I'm sure you've seen it, but Caves of Qud has some mechanics that you might find interesting - not seed-jumping, but there's other weird "meta" stuff, like you can meet your evil doppleganger self, or manipulate time, or uh, become a door. It's great food for inspiration, *and* super fun.

... it feels like topology would fit naturally fit in with that concept, but honestly it slipped past me as I was writing 😅 i really like your "ribbon" idea too, it seems both more manageable to implement for the dev and to comprehend for players vs getting topology and maybe graph theory involved.

thanks! i've been sitting on this idea for a game inspired by the TV show The Magicians (actually books, I suppose, but I've only ever seen the show), where magic is greatly influenced and even made possible or impossible by external and internal Circumstances - reading my own post again, ...

... or "point surrounded by the most similar terrain". Seems fun to experiment with various ideas, especially if you start considering failure to cast the spell :D

... maybe Lv1 can only teleport between identical topologies of maps, but Lv2 lets you teleport to maps having one more (or fewer) topological holes in their walkable geometry, if you can somehow hack that mapping in ofc. Maybe "here" is "any point with the same number of trees in a 10m radius", ...

... but I suppose "here" can be defined in many ways, maybe you could apply Algorithms™️to the walkable parts of a map, e.g. some kind of topological comparison or distance to define a mapping from one map to another, then use that for teleporting. You could even level that spell, ...

when writing that post I basically assumed maps and their corresponding world chunks are aligned between seeds, and meant the exact same chunk-relative coordinates of the player, assuming they're walkable. these concepts/assumptions might not apply to your game ofc, ...

consider: a "spell" that teleports you to maps of whatever "here" is, but with a different seed, perhaps only for a few turns? could be an interesting way to get out of (or into) various challenges, like a discrete fourth spatial dimension. feels quite gamebreaking though