DevlogThe Forge: new races and creatures, made from the ones that exist

A day that began with one new tool and ended with most of the studio rebuilt around it.

The Forge makes a race or a creature from one that already exists. Start from a body the game has, change it, and it becomes something new rather than a copy.

It animates. A timeline, a shared library of clips, and clips that work on any body, kept together with the skeleton they belong to.

It rigs. A body that arrives with no skeleton can be given a race's or a creature's, and the weights that decide how the skin follows the bones can be painted by hand where the automatic result is wrong.

It dresses them. Looks can be worn as plate, chain, gold, leather or bone: a finished shell that shines like the material it is meant to be.

Clay now builds from several shapes at once, a sphere, a box, a cylinder, a capsule or a cone, and connected to the game the Forge finds its bodies again without being told where they are. The Studio moved to .NET 10, the long-term release, and it explains itself now: a tooltip on every control and twenty tutorials.

Clay is shaped by hand now, not by typing numbers. A piece you click grows handles: arrows to move it, rings to turn it, square ends to size it, and squares on each side to pull that side out while the opposite stays put. Mirror does the same to the twin piece on the other side. Every drag is one step to undo, the tools sit over the view where they can be reached, and a size can still be typed in centimetres when that is easier. A model that starts as clay now starts as nothing at all, waiting for its first lump, instead of arriving as a sphere nobody asked for.

Models come in from outside and go back out. Any Blender model or anything already in the game can be brought in as clay in its own colours, opened in Blender with a click, and sent back. The whole thing can be sized to a person, a helm, a weapon, a shield, a door or a house, and stood next to a see-through person so the scale is obvious rather than guessed.

Helms, hair, and painting in Krita. A head piece now says what becomes of the hair underneath: shown, hidden, or painted over. Paint sent to Krita comes back as layers that stay separate, and saving there puts the change on the body a moment later.

Leather, chain and plate for every race. A full set of armour, baked from the race bodies themselves rather than drawn once and stretched: chest, arms, hands, legs and feet in each material, with helms, shoulders, belts and cloaks fitted to each body's head, shoulders and hips. Every race has its own version in its own style, women's bodies included, and a colour can be chosen for any piece — the armour tints, the skin underneath never does.

The ground can be sculpted while you watch. Raise, lower, smooth, flatten, roughen and restore work under the pointer as you drag, and the zone rebuilds three times faster than before — Fairhaven went from half a second to under a fifth. The brush ring also sits on whatever face is under the pointer now, so painting a wall shows the brush on the wall instead of on the floor below it.

Painting stopped leaving splotches. A stroke used to bead up where it overlapped itself, and a drag along a wall left a row of stamps. A stroke is now one stroke: even along the ground, and a single mark across a wall that grows as you drag.

Marble floors that fit any room. A new floor shape whose border follows the outline of the room and mitres its own corners, inside corners of an L-shaped room as well as outside ones, with a skirt down the sides and a solid surface to walk on.

And the Studio stopped refusing to save. Fairhaven's ground carried nearly fourteen thousand paint strokes, more than the content service would accept in one go, so nothing could be published; zones are now listed without their painting, which also makes every catalogue three megabytes smaller. A Studio opened while its service was down now notices when the service comes back, instead of refusing to save all day.

Late in the evening, a new way of making bodies. A staged path through Meshy, with the first human proved end to end, every animation a character needs checked off, and the female human and Iksar rigs brought in — the Iksar's tail moving with the rest of it rather than trailing behind.