Thank you very much for your feedback and especially for the time you put into playing/testing this "game". I agree that I definitely need a tutorial. Overall I also realized that the current game loop, therefore having a "exploration" and "defense" phase feels unnatural, which is why I am currently reworking the game loop. Once this is done I will also take my time to add a tutorial, since this is really missing right now. The pentagrams are teleporters, which technically should activate when you throw stuff on them. You can find "Shymiggles" by throwing items at the trees standing on the map -> which causes them to collapse into items. To unlock more parts of the map there is a shrine where you can put enemy corpses into (til it is saturated). You see there are a lot of mechanics, but currently there is no clear "path".
What is surprising to me though, is that the game sometimes freezes once you can collect modifiers. This did not happen to me while "play-testing". I suppose there is one broken mod, which just lets the game collapse (but as of now I will get rid of this system anyways).
(This shows you how the teleports are supposed to work: https://x.com/1lonelyWiz/status/2056400975078867265?s=20)
Once again: thank you very much.