[Feature Request] [Discussion] Clear Grid Pattern

[KirinDave]

Feature Request: A pattern to clear the current grid without losing the current stack or ravenmind. This pattern should be a nop for circles and artifacts. It should not have any special escaping rules, so it won't cause a grid clear in the middle of an intro/retro pair.

Why This Might Be Good:

We have been playing with a method in the discord we call "Flash Casting" where you store a spell in your ravenmind, and keep a quine on the bottom of your stack that invokes your ravenmind spell. This is a pretty cute way to turn yourself into a trinket that's slightly slower to activate (and an ideal playground for self-modifying spells), but the practical limit of it is that your grid fills up with hermes pretty quick.

Also, when stringing together lots of spell fragments, it is nice to be able to clear the grid to make room for the final assembly and arfactification of the spell. It'd definitely be a quality of life improvement.

Why This Might Be Bad:

One dangerous part about this is precisely that it lets us keep our ravenmind around for a long time. It's been observed that it's safe to put a player you meet into your ravenmind and so long as you don't clear your stack, it stays there. Given the new player range rules, it'd be possible to write a spell that assembles a list of players and then curses them even if they don't write their true name to a focus.

The only practical limitation (and this is a fairly soft limitation) to this is that the grid has a maximum size and eventually you'd run out of grid space to inflict new harm.

[TacocaTYT]

it would probably have a use in artifacts if it cleared the stack though, as it could be used to discard any access data or preloaded spell effects for large multi step decision making spells. perhaps a limitation of this pattern could be that it turns player references to garbage elements?

[KirinDave]

If it cleared the stack, it wouldn't really have any purpose and would invalidate bookkeepers. I also think it's going to be a game of cat and mouse trying to trace through nested data structures looking for player references.

[yrsegal]

afaik this deliberately does not exist - grid size is a limitation that's intended. Especially with how it makes holding on to a true name harder.