Every world used to draw the same meadow

A world could open as a frozen north, a clockwork city or a pastoral valley, and the prologue would say so in a paragraph. Then the player stepped into it, and all three drew the same meadow.

The type was the only key

Everything visual in the game keyed off one thing: what kind of place a location was. A village drew village ground, a road drew road ground. The world’s tone, and since September the player’s own wish, reached the writing as prose, but nothing that drew a tile ever read them.

So the world had a rich description and a single skin. A snowbound village and a desert village were the same grass with a different sentence above them.

A look, in two parts

As of 28 September a world has a look, and it comes out of the opening along with the rest of the world. The look is chosen from a fixed set of settings and a fixed set of colour grades.

It is two parts rather than one because most tones are a mood, not a place. A grim world says nothing about whether there is snow, and a frozen one says nothing about whether it is grim. The setting is the land’s skin; the grade is the light over it. The kind of place stays what it was, so a frozen village is still a village. It just isn’t made of grass.

A single place can wear a different setting from its world, so one place can stand apart from the land around it.

What follows the look

Once there is a look, everything that draws or plays asks it, and nothing else decides.

• Tint. The grade is laid over the day and night lighting in towns, on roads and in rooms. Later the same day, dungeons and the tower took it too.
• Weather. Picked by the setting first: snow, blizzard, sand, embers, smog, spores, neon rain.
• Music. Chosen by setting, from tracks already in the game.
• Ground. Seven settings got their own terrain the same day: frozen, arid, blighted, volcanic, wasteland, stormland and eastern. Water becomes ice, lava, sludge or murk, and the arid one keeps its oasis. Trees became snow pines, palms, dead trees and blossom.

A road now carries the setting of where it leads, so the road into a frozen village is already snow. Rooms take the skin of their setting too. Before that, a neon bar had the inn’s tan boards and orange timber.

The look is cosmetic. It changes nothing about travel or combat.

Old saves

A save from before the look existed reads as temperate under a neutral grade, which is exactly how it always drew. Nobody’s world changed under them.

Two worlds, two looks

On 1 October we started two runs on 0.9 and wrote down the look each one was given.

Run 65 asked for a volcanic world and got one, graded ash grey: a dark red road past charred trees and scattered embers.

Run 66 asked for an industrial world and got the industrial setting under a sepia smog. Its first morning is the screenshot above: The Sootfall Encampment, brick sheds and a barred red-brick works standing on black ground, patched with smog.

Neither of those would have been possible a week earlier. Both would have been grass.