Buildings & Walls

ED5's building system is a Sims-style way to construct structures on an isometric map — walls, multi-storey floors, doors, windows, and auto-generated roofs. It works in two places that share one underlying model: the Map Editor (designers authoring towns, dungeons, and houses) and in-game build mode (players building on their own land).

The core rule: floors occupy tiles, walls occupy tile _edges_, objects occupy spaces, and roofs sit above enclosed rooms. Terrain elevation (hills) and building storeys (floors) are two independent axes — you can stack floors without touching the ground heightmap.

Edge walls and multi-storey building are an isometric feature. Top-down games use a simpler claim tile-painting build mode instead (see In-game build mode below).

Building in the Map Editor#

In the zone editor the layer tabs run Floor → Walls → Object. Select the Walls layer to open the Walls palette. (The Walls layer is hidden for top-down games, which build with tiles.)

Drawing walls#

1. Pick a wall material from the palette (and optionally a height).
2. Click-drag along tile edges — the run follows your drag direction and snaps to the dominant axis. A live ghost preview shows the run before you commit; right-click cancels an in-progress drag.
3. Release to place the whole run as a single undo step. Walls auto-join at corners — each tile canonically owns its north and west edges, so shared walls never double up.

Tools in the Walls layer:

Placement is colour-coded: cyan = valid/preview, red = erase, orange = no support. Grid snapping and alignment "meet" guides help pieces line up.

Floors (multi-storey)#

Use the floor selector dropdown (F1–F12) to switch storeys, plus a roof view that shows the whole building. Each floor keeps its own walls. Upper floors must rest on a wall below — the editor enforces no floating structures.

Doors & windows#

Doors and windows are built-in Object items (Object panel → "Doors & Windows"). Select one and click a wall segment to snap it in — a door cuts a floor-level gap, a window insets a pane. They're stored as attachments on the wall and persist with it.

Roofs#

Each enclosed structure is detected automatically and gets its own roof. L- and T-shaped footprints are split into rectangles so they render as clean hip / gable / flat sections meeting at valleys, instead of one bounding-box cap.

Wall materials#

The Walls palette ships with starter materials (including Short Fence and Tall Fence). Wall sprite art lives in the user-replaceable project asset folder data/assets/building/ (served via /api/assets/...) — drop your own art in to override it.

Importing your own wall materials — the Wall Creator (import a spritesheet, pick the two front faces, and the back faces mirror automatically) — is rolling out. Until it lands, the palette uses the built-in starter materials.

Saving#

Editor walls are saved per map (serialized into each chunk's wall layer) and reach the running game through the normal map sync, so a draw → save → reload round-trips cleanly.

In-game build mode (players)#

Players build on land they own. Press B on your plot or inside your house to enter build mode: your claim bounds highlight and everything outside dims. The build bar shows categories built from the buildable items in your inventory, with place / remove, rotate (objects), and exit. Removing a piece refunds its item.

What you can build depends on the game's view mode:

• Isometric games — edge walls, multi-floor structures, and room/door tools (the same model as the editor).
• Top-down games — paint floor / wall / overlay tiles directly onto your claim grid (pencil / rectangle / fill / erase); tiles autotile against their neighbours. No edge walls or floors.

Every piece is permission-gated (you need build rights on the claim), economy-backed (placing consumes an inventory item, removing refunds it), and bounded to your plot or house interior.

Status: the in-game build panel and the editor building system are the same new feature, still rolling out. The editor Walls layer is the most complete today; the full in-game edge-wall drawing experience is being finished, so expect the in-game flow to expand as it lands.

Making items buildable (creator setup)#

Any item can be made buildable by giving its definition a building descriptor — it then appears in players' in-game build categories. The descriptor's kind decides what it places:

Give items a category (e.g. "Walls", "Floors", "Furniture") to organize the in-game palette. The server validates that an item's build action matches its descriptor — so a sword can't be used to build a wall.

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Related: Housing & Land for land claims and ownership, and Terrain & Layers for the elevation system that building storeys sit independently above.