Ground shadows under characters, mobs, trees and buildings — aim the sun, set the strength, and override awkward objects.
Shadows
Characters, mobs, pets, mounts, trees and buildings all cast a shadow on the ground. It is the single biggest thing separating a world that reads as solid from one where everything looks like it is hovering a few pixels above the grass.
Shadows are on by default and already look right — one sun lights the entire world, so a player's shadow, a tree's shadow and a house's shadow all fall the same way. This page is for when you want to change that: aim the sun, dial the darkness, fix an object whose shadow looks wrong, or switch the whole thing off for a flat, storybook look.
- World settings — World Config → Atmosphere → Shadows, underneath Weather Particles.
- Per-object overrides — open an object for editing from the Objects palette in the map
Setting up
1. Open World Config → Atmosphere and scroll down to Shadows.
2. Check that Cast shadows in this world is ticked. Untick it and your world has no
shadows at all, and every other field in the section is ignored.
3. Leave Sun mode on Fixed. This is the mode you want — see the gotchas below.
4. Set the Sun direction. The arrow beside the slider points the way shadows will fall,
and the line underneath spells it out ("Shadows fall south-east — down and to the right").
Four presets cover the usual choices. The default 45° matches the light already painted
into the cliff and terrain art, so your shadows agree with your tiles.
5. Dial Strength, Length and Softness to taste, then pick a Color. The two
preview swatches show a patch of lit ground next to the same ground in shadow.
6. Save. Connected players see the change immediately.
7. (Optional) Open a map, switch the right panel to Objects, and set the Shadow
dropdown on any object whose automatic shadow looks wrong — see below.
Checking your work in the editor
You don't have to publish and launch the game to see shadows. In the map editor, open Map Properties and turn on the Time of day preview — the same toggle that gives you the night tint and weather. Your objects will start casting on the map, at the sun direction and strength you authored.
Switch the time between Dawn, Noon, Dusk and Night to watch shadows stretch, shorten and fade the way they will in game — the preview reads the same sun as the client, so this is the real thing and not an approximation. Turn the preview back off and shadows disappear from the editor; they have no effect on how the map is stored, and none on editor performance while the toggle is off.
The preview works in both editor renderers — the standard one and the **GPU renderer (beta)**. Under the GPU renderer shadows are baked into the scene, so panning and zooming around a shadowed map costs nothing extra.
Two things to know. The preview shows object shadows only — characters aren't in the map editor to cast one. And your world's atmosphere is read when the editor loads, so after changing Sun direction or Shadow strength in World Config, return to the map editor to see the new angle (leaving and reopening the editor is enough).
World shadow settings
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Cast shadows in this world | Master switch. Off means no shadows anywhere, for anyone — this is how you turn the system off for your world. |
| Sun mode | Fixed keeps one sun direction all day and expresses time of day through shadow length and strength. Rotating sweeps the sun across the sky instead — legacy, and discouraged. |
| Sun direction (azimuth) | Which way shadows fall, 0°–359°. 0° = east (right), 45° = south-east (down and to the right — the default), 90° = south (straight down), and so on around the compass. Ignored in Rotating mode. |
| Strength | How dark a shadow reads, 0–1. 0 is invisible, 0.5 is the default, 1 is solid. |
| Length | Multiplier on shadow length, 0–4×. 1× is tuned for the tile size; higher stretches everything out for a permanent late-afternoon feel. |
| Softness | How blurred the edges are, 0–1. 0 gives hard-edged shadows. Only players on High or Ultra lighting quality see softness at all. |
| Color | The shadow color. Keep it dark — the world casts it toward the ambient light of the moment, so shadows read cool blue at dusk instead of dead black. |
Reset shadows puts just this section back to defaults. Reset all to defaults at the top of the tab clears every atmosphere override, shadows included.
Per-object shadows
Objects work their shadow out for themselves: anything two tiles tall or more projects a silhouette of its own artwork, and small props get a simple ellipse underneath. When that guess is wrong for a particular piece of art, override it on the object itself: open the object from the Objects palette to edit it, then set Shadow at the top of the Lighting & Shadow tab.
| Shadow mode | Use it for |
|---|---|
| Automatic (projected silhouette) | The default. Tall objects project a silhouette of their sprite, short props get a blob. Leave it here unless something looks wrong. |
| Simple blob | A plain ellipse on the ground under the object. Good for rocks, bushes, crates and barrels — anything whose exact silhouette adds nothing. |
| None | No shadow at all. Use it for art that already has a shadow painted into it, and for overhead canopy pieces — the leafy top half of a tree that sits above its trunk. In both cases the engine would be adding a second shadow to one object. |
Set None on anything whose artwork draws its own shadow. Plenty of tilesets ship props that way, and the engine has no way to know: it sees opaque pixels and grounds them, so you end up with the painted shadow plus a live one that disagrees with it about where the sun is.
The same rule applies to any art split across two objects that stack on the same tile: the piece on the ground casts the shadow, the piece above it should be None.
What players actually see
Shadows scale with each player's Settings → Graphics → Lighting Quality, so a player on a laptop still gets a playable frame rate. Players on lower tiers see less than you authored — that is expected, not a bug.
| Lighting Quality | What that player sees |
|---|---|
| Ultra | Everything below, plus extra shadows cast by nearby torches, campfires and other lights. |
| High | Character and object shadows with soft edges (your Softness setting applies). |
| Medium | Character and object shadows, hard-edged — Softness is ignored. |
| Low | Character shadows only — still the real projected shape, just no object shadows and no soft edges. |
| Off | No shadows. |
| Auto | Picks one of the above from the player's actual frame rate and adjusts as they play. |
Every lit tier casts real character shadows. Only Off takes them away — a character silhouette is cheap enough that dropping it would not rescue a struggling machine, and it is the cue that keeps everyone standing on the ground rather than floating above it.
Auto is the only setting that changes itself, and it moves in both directions: it steps down when the frame rate stays low and gives the tier back once it recovers. Players on Auto can see which tier is actually running underneath it in Settings → Lighting & Shadows. If a player picks a specific tier instead, it stays where they put it no matter how the frame rate behaves — the client helps a struggling machine by lowering render resolution, which never overrides what they chose. Phones and tablets start on Auto by default; desktops start on Medium.
Shadows also thin out on their own as a player zooms the camera out, since a silhouette a few pixels across reads no better than a plain shadow underneath.
Gotchas
- Time of day changes shadow length and strength, not direction. With the default Fixed
- Rotating sun mode is discouraged. It swings shadows across the world through the day,
- Hosted worlds need a publish and a server roll. Your shadow settings reach players only
- Character art with a shadow already painted into the sheet is handled for you. Sprite
- Top-down view mode uses simple blob shadows only. Projected silhouettes are an isometric
- There is no feature flag for shadows. You will not find a row for them on the Features
- Softness costs the most. If you are tuning for lower-end players, note that Strength,