Mind Over Magic: Keywords and Architectural Styles

In Mind Over Magic, every school room can become a specific room type that receives significant bonuses to the actions that take place there. For example, research can be done in any room, but if it takes place in a Mage’s Tower, it’s 200% faster! Most of these rooms have certain requirements for furniture, workstations present, or luxury amounts, as well as many forbidden items (no one wants a gruel pot in their bedroom). Once a room meets these requirements, it transforms visually, and changes from a generic “school room” to the appropriate room.

In addition to the regular requirements for rooms, there are also “Keywords”; requirements that define how a room is shaped and positioned in your school. A room can require 0 to 4 keywords to be valid. Currently, there are 12 keywords in the game:

• Elevated: No adjacent rooms or foundation below.
• Grounded: Must touch foundation or be underground.
• Interior: Not adjacent to an outside space to the left, right, above, or below.
• Isolated: No path to another room. (Doesn’t appear to be used in any normal room requirements)
• Lofted: Taller than it is wide.
• Open Back: Must not have any furnishings on the back wall, such as windows.
• Pristine: Contains no negative luxury items. (Such as wall torches)
• Private: Only one point of entry. (Counts doors and stairs)
• Silent: Not adjacent to Rec Rooms, Workshops, Ritual Rooms, or Classrooms.
• Skewed: One outer wall at least 3 blocks taller than the other. Skewed rooms do not require a roof; split-level floors on top or bottom will also work. (More on this later)
• Skylit: Entirely covered by Glass Roof. (Primarily used for the greenhouse)
• Towered: Must not be adjacent to walls or rooms to the left, right, or above.

* Note that “adjacent” counts every part of the room. For example, if a towered room has a single square of wall shared with another room, it will not work.

Unlike the basic requirements for each room, keywords can vary from game to game. Your “architectural style” determines what keywords will be chosen: basic, balanced, wonky, airy, lofty, or chaotic. The game describes these well enough when you pick them, but I wanted to know more about the exact difference was between the modes, so I wrote them all down in a chart, which is the main purpose of this guide, along with some keyword-related explanations and tips.

The game gives you a general idea of what these settings do, but after reviewing them, here is how I would describe them.

• Basic: Basic is meant to be the least demanding of the styles, with several rooms having no keywords or fewer keywords than the other styles. Many common rooms have no shape requirements (such as bedrooms, which only require Private and Silent for the most advanced rooms). This isn’t a fully freeform mode, though, and some things like classrooms have similar requirements to the other modes.
• Balanced: Balanced is recommended for new players and for the most part, feels like the “intended” way to play. It has the same number of keywords as all the other modes, but doesn’t really stick to one recurring theme.
• Wonky: Wonky, on the other hand, is much more thematic. The majority of the rooms need to be Skewed, which greatly discourages square layouts. There are tricks to get skewed requirements easily, but this mode is supposed to be for those who want an organic, twisted looking school. Because Skewed overwrites other keywords in a lot of places, it can actually be slightly easier to plan around.
• Airy: Airy is a strange combination of towered, elevated, and grounded rooms, with all classrooms required to be on the ground, and almost everything else needing to be higher up, often with no adjacency. This means you’ll have several towers, along with bridges and outdoor structures connecting them.
• Lofty: Lofty is a bit strange. It is designed to be closer to how the game was designed during early access, so in a lot of ways, it feels like a slightly more chaotic version of balanced. It favors Lofted and Private rooms a lot, so it encourages layouts with a lot of tall rooms.
• Chaotic: Chaotic is a randomized style. The other modes can be played in “shuffled” which gives some lighter randomization (more on that later), but chaotic only keeps some essential keywords and picks any valid keywords for everything else (though rooms will still have the same number of keywords as the other styles). This is sort of a challenge mode, and can result in some really difficult combinations (for example, I got Towered and Grounded for one room, which essentially means it would have to be an untouched building of its own).

I originally started making this guide just to make the charts listed at the bottom, which show what keywords are used in the main 5 styles for every room in the game. Without this, the only way to know exactly what the styles do was to create a new game in each style and read through them. Hopefully, this guide will help you decide which style is right for you!

The middle four styles, Balanced, Wonky, Airy, and Lofty, can all be played in “shuffled” mode. Rather than being fully chaotic, this only replaces a few keywords with random ones, while maintaining the overall feel of the original style. For example, this is the difference between bedrooms for Airy and what could be an Airy Shuffled style:

As you can see, the Elevated keyword wasn’t shuffled, but less thematic keywords like Silent and Skewed were.

Shuffled mode is a good choice if you want to add a bit of randomness and uniqueness to your game, or to make a second playthrough of the same style slightly different.

Skewed is a bit more fiddly than some of the other keywords. As defined in the game, a room is considered Skewed if one side of the room is 3 blocks shorter than the other side. They can be covered with floors or with roofs.

A couple Skewed Bedrooms, and a Skewed Auditorium.

This also means rooms can be split into different levels and be considered Skewed. When one side of a room has more than one horizontally positioned wall, the game appears to consider the largest wall on each side.

A Skewed Common Room. Because the lower right corner of the room is carved out as a balcony, the full length of the wall on the left (9) is compared to the upper section of wall on the right (5).

The simplest (and least visually interesting) way to get a Skewed room is to simply put a jutting out section of wall to break one wall into two pieces. However, because of the above rule, the you have to use the right size of wall.

This room is not Skewed, because the largest part of the right wall (6) is not 3 away from the size of the left wall (8).

However, if you move the wall down one space, the lower section of the right wall is now 5, and the room is considered Skewed!