Wizard School · October 2026

What the wizards actually cast

I got curious about which spells actually get used in Wizard School, so I had the game keep count for a month.

Some background first. There are 31 spells in the curriculum and I never wrote rules for when each one gets cast. People in the game have needs. If a student is cold they go looking for a way to warm up, and a warming spell they know counts the same as putting on a coat or going to stand by the fire.

For the count I ran two schools for 30 days each, with an autopilot playing headmaster, and logged every cast: which spell, who cast it and what they were doing at the time. Seed 1 made 1,040 casts using 19 different spells and glyphs. Seed 9 made 500 using 17.

The top of the list is a pocket hand-warmer

Kindle is the first fire cantrip, the kind of thing a smith's apprentice turns up already knowing. It's the most cast spell in the school by a long way, and it almost never goes near a fire: 438 of the 439 casts were a cold student warming the spot they stood on. Magic in this game works by equivalent exchange, so the warmth has to come out of something, and what it comes out of is the ground they're standing on. Every shivering first-year leaves a slightly colder patch of school behind them.

Frost is the same trick run backwards. In summer the students who know it cool the air around themselves and push the heat into the ground. I didn't plan for any of this. People look for ways to get comfortable, and a spell that changes the temperature where they stand is one of the ways.

The students make their own

A few names on the list aren't in the curriculum at all. The Heavy Cinder was cast 208 times in one 50-day run, nearly all of it by students. There was also Hawkesbury's Great Cinder, the Lingering Ember, the Plain Brand and the Falling Spring.

The school invented those while it was running. A spell here is a drawing: a sigil (ember, tide, stone, bloom, gale, flesh, glimmer or knell), up to three signs that shape it, and a ring for strength. A botched cast sometimes works anyway, as a slightly different glyph than the one intended. Students reading in the library occasionally work one out on purpose. Once a design exists other casters pick it up by watching, and if everybody who knew it dies, it's gone. The Heavy Cinder is a warming glyph some student drew one afternoon. It went round the dormitory because it beat plain Kindle.

Pranks, hares and raiders

The "what they were doing" column is the fun part. Conjure Water and Douse both got used for pranks: a mischievous student who knows a water spell will flood a room to see who notices, and eleven of seed 9's nineteen Conjure Water casts were exactly that. When the headmaster marks a hare for the hunt, any teacher who knows Fire Lance or Dazzle uses it, so hares get Fire Lanced. When goblin raiders showed up, out came Dazzle, Fire Lance and Petrify.

The only casts on the whole list that the player asked for are the ones logged as "working the headmaster's Hearth", which are sigils you place on a room. Everything else happened because somebody in the school wanted something.

What never gets cast

Graft, Sever, Extract and Implant didn't come up once. Those are the surgeon's spells, the forbidden ones, and they only appear when somebody needs an organ put back. Hush, Amplify and Thunderclap never got cast either, because nobody in these schools wanted quiet badly enough. That one I count as a bug. A student who can't sleep in a noisy dormitory should think of Hush, and right now they don't.