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 checks every tile a piece covers — not just the one under the cursor: the whole footprint must sit inside the claim, on tiles nothing else is built on and that aren't farmland, and a solid piece is refused on a tile where someone is standing. It resolves the placement through the item's own build descriptor and refunds the exact item that was consumed.

Placed pieces are solid#

A placed piece collides exactly like the art it was made from. A fence post authored impassable blocks; a rug stays walkable; a tree's trunk blocks while its canopy only draws over the player. Pathfinding routes around built pieces for players and mobs alike. The collision comes from the map object's passage grid and the tileset's passage settings, so if you fix a piece's collision in the object or tileset editor and publish, every copy players have already built follows.

Builds on a claim are visible to every player in the map, not only the owner.

Building on a phone or tablet#

On touch screens a tap positions the ghost instead of placing it straight away. Drag it to adjust, then press ✓ Place in the small bar beside it (or ✕ to cancel). A mouse still places on click.

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. You can't till under a built piece or build on farmland — clear one first.

Crop edits take effect on publish, without restarting the server: a new crop can be planted straight away, and a crop you delete stops being plantable.

Farming the wild plants#

To let players cultivate a plant they find in the wild, make the wild plant drop its seed:

1. Items → create the seed: Type = Seed, stackable.
2. Farming → Crops → create the crop: Seed item = that seed, Harvest yields = the same item the wild plant gives. Add the seed itself as a second yield with a chance (say 35%) so a patch can keep itself going.
3. Resources → open the wild plant's resource node → Yield table → add a row for the seed with a chance (15–25% works well).
4. Publish.

Each yield row rolls on its own, so the seed is a bonus on top of the normal harvest — gathering the plant still gives exactly what it did before. Set the crop's Required farming level at or below your level cap, or players can pick up seeds they can never plant.

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.