Mage's Survival Calculator

Overview

Mage’s Survival Calculator is a live Google Sheets workbook and preserved local XLSX artefact for planning builds in Mage’s Survival. The goal is to make build decisions easier to reason about: mage choices, spells, passive levels, items, custom stat increases, and final stat outcomes all interact, and the workbook makes those relationships inspectable.

This project matters because it is a different kind of technical artefact than a web app. The value is in the encoded rules, the formula structure, and the interactive spreadsheet surface.

What I Built

The calculator models mage, spell, passive, item, and stat inputs through visible sheets, hidden or back-end support sheets, named ranges, lookup tables, and formulas. The live workbook includes tabs such as Main, Main Back-end, Spells, Spells Back-end, Items, Items Back-end, Mages Info, and a hidden SpellBreakerGrid.

The result is less about one final number and more about making the system navigable. The sheet helps inspect how a build changes, why it changes, and which reference data or formula path contributed to the output.

Technical Approach

The strongest part of the spreadsheet is its formula-backed architecture. User-facing selections feed reference tabs, back-end tabs, and support ranges. The preserved local XLSX artefact provides a source snapshot, while the live Google Sheet is the current public surface.

Accuracy was not something I planned to clean up later. I would not ship calculator features unless I believed the values were correct. The point of the workbook was not to sketch a rough model of the game; it was to make the numbers dependable enough to actually use.

Why It Matters

This project shows domain-specific modelling, spreadsheet architecture, calculator UX, and formula organisation. It also shows that technical work does not need to be a web app to be worth explaining clearly.

That matters because a calculator is only useful if the numbers can be trusted. The structure, naming, and back-end tabs were all in service of that: making the formula work inspectable enough that accuracy could be maintained instead of guessed.

Next Pass

The next useful media pass should add safe screenshots for the main calculator area, Spells reference tab, Items reference tab, and Mages Info tab. That visual context will make the project easier to understand without making the accuracy-first part vague.