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. The required keywords varies based on your choice of architectural style when making a new game. 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" means left, right, up, or down. This can be slightly confusing when reading the definition of something like Elevated, which actually just means nothing can be below an Elevated room, but adjacency to the left, right, or above, is fine.

"Adjacent" also considers every single wall block in the room. For example, if a Towered room has a single square of wall shared with another room, it will not work. Additionally, "adjacent to walls" means that if, for some reason, you made a wall around your tower two blocks thick, it would not be considered Towered.

This section explains a few of the more difficult to understand keywords, as well as some tricks to achieve them. Whenever a keyword is described as "adjacent", it means to the left, right, above, or below the current room. "Adjacent" also considers every single wall block in the room. For example, if a Towered room has a single square of wall shared with another room to its side, it will not work.

"No adjacent rooms or foundation below."

If you read this the wrong way, it sounds like it's saying no rooms can be adjacent in any direction. This is not the case! Elevated only considers the space below it. As long as there are no enclosed rooms or foundations directly below any part of the room, it is considered Elevated.

This can be a bit of a tricky one to build, particularly if you have not researched support pillars. If you need an Elevated room early on, you can build one hanging off of one side of your building.


An elevated room buildable from the beginning of the game.

You can also use the "floating walls" trick. This feels like a bit of an exploit, but is one of the tips written in the game! If you delete walls after building them, the existing structure will magically stay where it is. The only caveat is that you can't build further or adjust anything about these structures until they have the proper support. You can use the Support Overlay (F6) to see exactly what parts of your structure are supported.


Two elevated rooms built using the floating walls trick.

"Must touch foundation or be underground."

Only certain underground rooms are considered actual rooms with keywords, despite the fact that you can place furniture in some bespoke rooms (such as the mana font).

For foundation, only one part of the room must touch the foundation.

"Taller than it is wide."

This measures the highest point of the room, not just the wall height of the room. This means you can have a tall vaulted roof on a wide room, and it could still be considered lofted if the roof is high enough.

"Only one point of entry."

A point of entry is any door, stairway, or hallway (the free arch-shaped doorway). Two staircases leading to the same room will make it not Private, even if both stairs come from the same room. Similarly, any additional attached room will make it not Private (e.g. a small bedroom attached to a larger room will be considered a point of entry for that larger room, even if the bedroom is a dead end).

Not adjacent to Rec Rooms, Workshops, Ritual Rooms, or Classrooms.

As per usual, this counts any rooms above or below the room. However, if an offending room is to the side of a room that needs to be Silent, you can add a two block thick wall between the rooms, and it will no longer be considered adjacent!

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.

This is probably the most tricky one to understand mechanically. Specifically, the game looks at the outermost portion of the room's left and right side. Of these sides, it adds up the visible wall blocks to calculate the comparison. This means if a 7 block wall is interrupted by a small platform of floor jutting out of it, it will be considered 6 blocks high. Any the height of any inner walls in the room are ignored. Roof pieces are also ignored, even if they appear to be in line with the wall.


In this picture, the left wall is considered 1 and the right wall is considered 3, which means the room is not Skewed...


However, if we fill in the one block on the left, and one block on the right side, the left wall is now considered 5, and the right wall is considered 2. This room is Skewed!

Obviously, in most cases, you won't be making a room that looks like these examples. However, knowing that you are only considering the outermost portion of wall allows you to have some creative freedom...



Or allows you to make a room Skewed using very minimal adjustments.

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.