A toolkit for building zones by hand, with textures painted to order

A quiet day for players and a busy one in the workshop: a new tool for making the world's places by hand, none of it in the game yet.

A new builder's tool for making zones by hand. It works inside Blender, the program the game's places are already shaped in. Everything sits in one tab, with a section for each kind of work. You start by saying who the place is for and whether it uses the classic graphics or the newer ones, and you can find any tool by typing a word. From there are sections for scale, the zone plan, a library of ready structures, your own models, doors, ground, water, lava, goo and ice, underground places, the sky, painting and lighting, the retro look, weapons and objects, and boats, with big ships, their parts, docks and routes. A last section places markers, checks the work and exports it.

Textures painted to order, in the classic sizes. Describe a texture and the AI server paints it at 256, 128 or 64 pixels, the sizes the original used. It can make a repeating tile, a single picture or a cut-out. There are 225 ready descriptions to start from, and a way to paint a long batch in one go.

In the workshop. The builder can export a finished zone with its own textures, pictures hung on walls, pools, slippery ground, boat docks and routes, its lighting style and its graphics. Nothing in the game reads that export yet, so no zone built this way can be visited. The game also still lacks slippery ground and boats with their own models; both are on the list. For now this is a tool for making places, not a change you will see when you log in.