🧱 Making buildings: the Blender kit

A model pack replaces how a building looks, never what it does: same plot, same footprint, same five stages, same output, same job colour on the paint. A kit covers at least five buildings, so a colony changes as a set rather than one odd block standing among the standard ones. Choose a pack when a universe begins — the buildings it covers become yours for that run, and everything it does not cover stays standard. The numbers stay where they live, in the game's own tables, where no pack can reach them.

• Built with the art kit (palette, parts, finish_model()) or by hand in Blender to the style guide.
• Materials: only the palette's names — ind_paint takes the livery, plus ind_steel, ind_con and the glow set. An unknown name is refused, and that is what keeps the job colours and the wear shader working on someone else's mesh.
• Scale: one plot = 1 unit; the model fills 84% of its footprint; a person is 0.07. Geometry outside the plot is refused.
• Budget: up to 40,000 triangles and 384 KB a stage — the ceiling the game's own buildings sit under, measured across all 755 of them. Five stages (levels 1–2, 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 9–10), no textures — the shader does the ageing from three baked vertex values.
• Export: glTF through the kit's exporter, compressed with gltfpack, one file a stage.
• Review: the file is checked the moment it is uploaded — material names against the palette, footprint measured through the node transforms, triangle and size budgets, and above all that it points at no file outside itself. Then a person reads it in the queue with its measurements beside it. A rejection says why.
• The block is yours. Inside its plot you may build whatever machine you like — Peekay's Photon Collector is not the standard one re-painted, it is a different machine doing the same job. What is fixed is the plot it stands on and the numbers it produces. A new kind of building, with new stats, stays a studio decision, because that is balance. Twenty-four buildings are open, up to eighteen in one pack; the two Legacy Wonders are not among them, because a wonder is a story beat.
• Troops and ships are paint for now: armour, the livery stripe, hull colours, squad names and callsigns. A rigged model is far harder to validate, so buildings come first.
• The Lantern Accord is the pack this is being designed around — a Core, Collector, Forge, Battery and Hangar of the creator's own. Today it paints the standard kit like the Ashfall Compact does.