but wouldn't that simplify things too much?
The chain itself is fine it's just that my brain sees blue and thinks "fire" and then it sees icy white and thinks "fire" and then it sees neutral white and things "fire?" and only one of this is correct and it always throws me off when I see a bunch of blue, white and cyan circles next to each other. Countering blue with purple is not as immediate as countering red with blue. Maybe electricity should be yellow?
Please note that it's just my tired brain playing a hard game's hard mode after a long day, it's probably not that big of a deal if a player is paying attention and has a fresh brain.
I could make it so self-inflicted statuses don't trigger the barrier, but I'm not a fan of breaking generality like this.
Applying fire to myself would have resulted in me having no status effect so it felt unintended but if it's working correctly then I see no issue with it, it's just a quirk of the effect that the player can work around if needed.
I could highlight the player's current recipes in a dedicated UI gizmo
My first instinct was to check the almanac, maybe that can have an indicator of what you can currently make. Like a lock icon or something.