Build Mode & Farming

Build mode is how players change the world itself — placing objects, painting tiles, raising walls, tilling soil, and fencing animals in. Everything is server-validated and renders for every player, not just the builder.

The Build Bar

Opening build mode swaps the HUD for a Sims-style bottom build bar:

• Tools — place, remove, paint, fill
• Material tray — every buildable item the player owns, with its real sprite, live count, and search
• World cursor — the armed item ghosts under the mouse, tinted green where it can go and red where it can't; click places it at that tile
• Remove mode — highlights what's under the cursor and refunds the item when you take it back
• Audio feedback — placing thunks, removing pockets, painting ticks, invalid placement buzzes

The server enforces one placeable per tile, checks the placement against the item's own build descriptor, and refunds the exact item that was consumed.

Authoring Buildable Items

Any item can become a building material. The item editor's Advanced → Building Placement section links it to one of:

Pickers are searchable icon dropdowns of your project's real map objects, tilesets and wall materials — the item that builds a thing and the thing itself don't have to share an id. Decal / fake-tile sheets are detected automatically and routed to the overlay layer so they paint as decals in game.

Painting & Claims

Player-painted tiles render in-world using the same autotiling stack designer terrain uses, across floor, overlay and wall layers. The paint tool offers pencil, rectangle and erase with 1–3 brush sizes, plus a fill tool that flood-fills the contiguous region under the cursor in one batched action with a live preview. Land claims themselves draw as a ground-painted decal — a tinted fill with a tile-following border under objects and entities — instead of a floating box.

Revoking a plot cleans up after itself: the plot's edge walls and painted tiles are cleared with it.

Farming

• Till soil with a hoe to create a farm plot
• Plant seeds authored in the crop editor
• Water with a watering can — a crop authored as water required stops growing entirely while dry
• Rain waters everything for free

Growth stages, seasons, yields and skill requirements are all authored per crop.

How a player starts farming

Farming has four prerequisites, and a player who is missing any one of them sees nothing. Walk this list before assuming the system is broken:

1. The Farming feature is on (World → Features). Off = the panel and the hoe's right-click are hidden and the server rejects every farming action. 2. The player is standing on a land claim they can farm. The Farming panel only opens inside a claim, and tilling needs the Can Farm/Till permission on it. Claiming needs the Housing feature. 3. A hoe is equipped in the Tool slot. Not carried — equipped. Anything else gives "Equip a Hoe in your Tool slot to till soil." 4. They own seeds. The planting list shows inventory items whose type is Seed.

Give them a way to get the tools. A hoe and seeds don't appear on their own — this is the single most common reason farming looks dead on a new world. Pick at least one route:

The demo world ships all of this already: new characters spawn with a hoe, a watering can and a first planting of wheat and carrot seeds, Blacksmith Hilda sells the tools, and Herbalist Mira restocks every seed type.

Dynamic Animal Pens

Pens aren't a placed object. Any closed loop of fencing tagged "animal boundary" — fence objects, isometric edge walls, or painted wall tiles — containing at least one gate is automatically detected as a pen. Claim borders never count as fencing.

Capacity is spatial: each animal reserves its authored N×N floor footprint, so an 8×8 pen fits one 4×4 animal plus four 2×2 ones, and assignment fails when the shape doesn't fit. Detected pens render with a soft green interior tint.

If the fence is broken open, the pen turns red, players get a chat warning, and a creator-authored grace window starts (24 hours by default): produce pauses and repairs are free. Repair it in time and everything resumes; let it lapse and the animals return safely to their owner rather than vanishing.