Herbarium — every reagent draws its own botanical plate (MZ)

Your alchemy system has thirty reagents and thirty copies of the same leaf icon.

Every crafting and alchemy plugin you can buy hands you the data — the recipes, the effects, the inventory hooks — and then asks you for the art. Thirty herbs is thirty icons: a commission, an asset pack, or thirty evenings in a pixel editor. It is why so many otherwise-finished apothecary menus ship with the same three green sprigs recoloured.

Herbarium draws the plant itself, from the herb's own data. Its humour picks the ink, its preparation cuts the leaf margin, its potency decides the root, and the part your recipes take is the fragment in the packet. Ten morphological axes, ninety-seven hand-authored motifs, composed as vector geometry into one mounted herbarium sheet — no PNG, no sprite atlas, nothing loaded from disk. Tag an item and it already has a plate.

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⚠️ Compatibility — the question you actually have

Tested against RPG Maker MZ with the stock scripts unmodified, verified by running the plugin in the real engine rather than only in tests.

Plugin Manager order:

1. HerbariumFlora.js — Herbarium — the flora corpus. 97 hand-authored botanical motifs across ten morphological axes, plus 8 humoral tinctures, all drawn
2. Herbarium.js — Herbarium — every herb, root and fungus in your game draws its own botanical plate, generated from that specimen's own properties.
3. HerbariumPlate.js — Herbarium — the plate renderer. Composes a specimen's ten morphological axes into one drawn herbarium sheet. Pure geometry; no ima
4. HerbariumCabinet.js — Herbarium — the specimen cabinet. A scene this plugin OWNS and draws entirely itself: no windowskin, no stock font, no engine chro

Load order is a tidiness request, not a requirement, and this is quoted from the product's own Readme: every read of the corpus is deferred to Scene_Boot.prototype.start, so the four files work in any order. If another plugin also extends drawItemName or Game_Party.prototype.gainItem, load Herbarium after it and both will run — every patch saves and calls the original.

Core methods extended — all 4 by saved-original prototype extension, none replaced: Game_System.prototype.initialize, Scene_Boot.prototype.start, Game_Party.prototype.gainItem, Window_Base.prototype.drawItemName.

Because nothing is clobbered, Herbarium co-exists with other plugins that patch the same seams, including large suites.

The drawing is legible, which is the whole point

This is not decoration with a lookup table behind it. A player who learns the visual language can read a reagent off the sheet without opening a tooltip: dark umbral ink means a melancholic humour, an incised edge means it must be calcined, a bulb means potency five of five, a saltire cut into the wax seal means it will kill you. Look at "How to read a plate" in the gallery — every line on it is drawn by the plugin, and every caption is read out of the same data the drawing came from.

The sheet finishes as the player learns it

A specimen your party has gathered but never studied mounts as a bare graphite field sketch — no name, no label, no root. Study it and it becomes a pressed sheet with its binomial and a partial reading. Study it again and you get the finished plate: mounting straps, the fragment packet, the full reading, and a wax seal that certifies it. Progress the player can see at a glance across a whole wall of sheets.

The cabinet

One scene, and the plugin draws every pixel of it: stained walnut, a brass rail, two shadowed recesses, the wall of small plates on the left and the enlarged sheet on the right, with a reading underneath that tells the player what they are looking at. No windowskin, no default font, no stock cursor — the engine gate measures zero Window_Base objects and zero touch-UI buttons in the scene, and the plugin's own chrome scan is proven able to detect both.

What decides a plate

• Humour → the ink and wash the whole sheet is pressed in — 8 tinctures
• Preparation → the leaf margin, so an infusion and a calcined ash never look alike
• Potency → the root form, 1 to 5
• Part → which organ the plate emphasises and what sits in the fragment packet
• Habit · blade · venation · phyllotaxy · inflorescence · floral form · fruit · indumentum → derived from the specimen's own key, deterministically, so the same herb draws the same plate in every save

Declare a specimen in the Plugin Manager, or just write <herbarium: moonwort> in an item's note box and it registers itself. Leave a field blank and it is derived, not defaulted — so a project that tags forty items gets forty different plants in forty different inks, not forty green ones.

In numbers

• 97 hand-authored morphological motifs across ten axes — and the test suite asserts that every single one is reachable, not merely authored
• 128 distinct leaf outlines: 16 blades × 8 margins, all of them in the gallery
• 32,514,048,000 distinct achievable plates
• 3,809 lines of raw, readable, commented JavaScript across four files
• 306/306 headless tests, plus in-engine verification in the real MZ runtime
• 0 images, 0 audio files, 0 fonts shipped — nothing to add to your deployment

It fits an existing project

Herbarium extends four core methods, all by saved-original prototype extension, and replaces none — measured by scanning the shipped source against the real MZ runtime, not asserted. It patches drawItemName and gainItem politely, so a loot or crafting plugin that patches the same seams keeps working. Load order does not matter, because every read of the corpus is deferred to the boot scene.

Works with the rest of the catalogue. Herbarium is the plate; these are the systems around it: Bazaar Core prices your reagents, Chimera Core collects and breeds, Lineage draws the descent atlas above a collection, Sigil Core draws a seal for every spell, and Hallmark strikes a maker's mark on every weapon and shield. Want to see generated art in a finished game first? Moonwort is free and plays in the browser.

Asterism — a constellation skill tree where every node draws its own star, generated from the skill it teaches. Same idea as this plate, applied to progression.