The floor the rules would not cast

A rule with a reason

The board's ground is painted in code, not cast, and that was decided on evidence: a generated texture is mostly fine detail, and fine detail is the first thing a phone throws away. A field seen from above at that size reads as its colour and nothing else, so the ground stayed paint and the generator made only things that stand on it.

A dungeon is different in the one way that matters. Its floor is not a field seen from far away; it is a room seen from close up, and what makes it a dungeon is exactly the detail the rule threw away: the joints between flagstones, the courses of a wall, a drain in the floor. The owner overruled the rule for the dungeon's floor and walls, and only for those. The board's own ground stays painted.

A wall is a tile

A modular dungeon kit is usually thin walls that stand on the edges of floor squares. The first take here was not that. The level the units walk is the game's own grid, and in it a wall is a whole square that nothing can enter, and drawing a wall on the edge between two squares would draw the wall square itself as open floor that cannot be walked on.

So the first kit was seven pieces, each a whole square: three floor slabs, a plain wall block, a wall block with a burial niche, a pier for wherever the wall turns, and an arch for wherever a passage enters a room. Every square of the level picks its piece from what is around it, and every piece is stretched to fill its square exactly, so blocks that came back a little narrow or a little tall still meet without a gap. Rock with no floor beside it is left dark.

Choosing the picture

The generator works from a picture: it paints a reference image of what was asked for and then builds the model from it. Every earlier wave let it take its first picture, because those waves were testing whether a model could be built at all, not which of several looked best.

This wave was about looks, so each item asked for three pictures and stopped until someone chose. 63 pictures were offered and 21 were chosen, one for every model built. Some choices were not about style at all: one arch stood on a threshold step nobody asked for, and one wall block carried a second burial niche on its side, which on the board would have opened into solid rock. The picture is the cheapest place to refuse those, before a model has been built from it.

The picture was grey

21 casts were made for 11 items. Every re-cast was ordered by someone looking at the model it replaced, for two kinds of reason, and some models had both. Of them, six came back painted a colour their chosen picture did not have: a saturated jade, a mossy green, once nearly black. Painting is a second step that reads the written description as well as the picture, and the first description asked for stone with a faint green cast. It took the hint much further than anyone meant. The re-casts ask for the grey of old gravestones and name the greens they must not use.

And six came back standing on a thin flat sheet wider than their own foot: a disc under a wall, a skirt around a pier. It is the ground every prompt in this programme has told the generator not to draw, arriving anyway. On a prop that is a cosmetic flaw. On a kit piece fitted to its square by its outline it decides the size: the block shrinks inside its sheet and a slit of darkness opens between neighbours. The pier was cast three times. A check now measures the foot of every kit piece against its body and fails the build when one stands on a sheet.

Walls that are thin

The owner looked at screenshots of a real crypt level on a phone and a laptop, said it was much better, and asked whether the walls could be thin instead of filling the whole square. A block that fills its square reads as a solid cube and not as a wall. Nothing about the game changed: a wall square is still a square nothing can enter, and the rules do not know the walls got thinner. Only what is drawn changed.

Each wall square now draws a slab 30 percent of a square thick, standing inside its own square against the edge that faces the floor, so a unit on the floor never overlaps it. A wall between two floors gets a slab on each side. Wherever two slabs meet at a corner, or one runs out, a slim square pier covers the join, and the arch where a passage enters a room is as thin as the walls it joins. Every piece is fitted to a depth as well as a width now, and a test walks every corner of real floors from all three tiers to check that a pier stands exactly where a wall turns and nowhere else.

The four wall pieces were cast again with three reference pictures each and a person choosing every one: 7 choices. The floors and the props stayed as they were, because a thin wall is not something a block can be squashed into without smearing its painted stones.

seven of the eleven casts died on the generator's own machine before producing anything to look at, some killed by its watchdog for an idle graphics card and some with no reason given at all, and every one was cast again under a new seed. The doorway needed four tries. The slim pier cast first time, but the three pieces that died were the thin ones, so the wall, the niche wall and the doorway that finally lived were cast about half a square thick and are fitted down to about 30 percent of a square when they are drawn. Nobody has shown that thinness was the cause; it is what changed.

One more slip belongs here. The prompts for these four were rebuilt from the first wave's by a script that quietly dropped their exclusion, material and geometry paragraphs, so they were cast without being told to leave out a ground plane. The ledger records the prompts as they were sent, so it cannot be repaired afterwards. The pieces were checked as finished models instead: none stands on a sheet, each is one mesh with one material, and they were looked at on the board. The pack's own check now names these four as the exception, with the reason, and fails if that exception stops being true.

What was remade

Three of the items were not new pieces but old ones remade: the stairs, which read as a flat slab from the board's camera; the forge, which read as a broken chimney; and the sarcophagus, whose carved lid had been lost. A fourth replaced a skull on an iron stake, a thin pin no one could see at phone size, with a block of melted candles.

Whether this is the look the dungeons keep is not this chapter's to say. The owner judges it from screenshots of a real crypt level, on a phone and on a laptop, before the other three dungeons get kits of their own.