Devlog · 10 Oct 2026

Painting the builder's ground by dragging a picture onto it, with straighter borders and lighter files

12 commits that day. Written up from the work itself.

A dwarf in a lantern-lit stone workshop laying painted tiles of grass, cobble and dirt over a small model landscape.

A quiet day for players and a busy one in the workshop: the zone builder got easier to paint with. None of it is in the game yet.

You can now paint by dragging a picture onto the model. In the builder, which works inside Blender, you can drag a picture from a folder straight onto something in the 3D view, and it is painted with it. Drop a cut-out or a single picture on a wall and it is hung there, facing out into the room. Drop a texture on the ground and only the kind of ground under the mouse changes, so you can turn one patch of grass into dirt without touching the rest. That change stays put when the ground is shaped again or made again.

A new way to paint from a picture file. In the Start here section there is now a button to paint whatever is selected from a picture file. It opens a file window on the textures folder and lays the picture out in real metres, so a stone wall comes out the right size. If you are editing a shape and have picked some of its faces, only those faces are painted.

The ground looks cleaner in the builder. The ground now wears the hand-painted textures where the file has them, instead of the kit's plain ones. Each square of ground now takes one material, so the borders between grass, road and dirt run straight instead of in a saw-toothed line. Pressing the ground again now starts from the settings it was first made with, so you do not have to set them all over again. If a kind of ground is missing from the list in hand, the builder now makes the kit again instead of stopping with an error.

Smaller files with the newer graphics. When a zone uses the newer graphics, the builder now brings up only the textures that zone actually wears and keeps the rest small. A zone file is now tens of megabytes instead of hundreds, which makes it quicker to open and save.

In the workshop. All of this is in the tool for building zones, not in the game itself. No zone made this way can be visited yet, and nothing you see when you log in has changed today.