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Painting the merchant's town (floors)

Let's open the new scenario. Click on File > Open Scenario:

You might find yourself in the Blades of Avernum\Data directory. You need to go to the Blades of Avernum\Blades of Avernum Scenarios directory.

Double-click on the pesky folder, then open pesky.bas, which is the main scenario file. Once you open it, you'll find yourself editing your outdoors section. Let's work on the town instead. Click on Scenario > Edit Town to edit the last town you've worked on (since the scenario only has one town right now, you'll start editing that town).

Now you're editing the town. By the way, how can you tell what town you're editing at the moment, or if you're editing one of your outdoor sections? Take a look at the lower left part of Editor. It tells you what you are currently editing (right now, we're editing Town 0, which is the 48 x 48 town that is automatically created when you make a new scenario). It also gives the name of the current town, which you'll change to something more appropriate in a later section.

You've probably realized that the Editor is only displaying a portion of the entire town. There are several different ways to move around the town with the Windows version of the 3D Editor (I'm not sure how many of these apply to the Macintosh version). Just like the game, you can move around with the number pad. By holding down Ctrl and using the number pad, you can immediately move to one corner of the town. Second, you can right-click on any square in the town to centre the Editor's view on it. The lower right section of the Editor will tell you the coordinates of the currently centred square. Finally, you can use the buttons located on the corners of the view section.

Now that you know more about the Editor, you can begin placing floors in the town. Begin by picking a floor from the choices at the upper right of the Editor (it doesn't matter which one, you're just playing around right now). You'll notice that the info section at the lower right of the screen tells you what floor is currently selected. Then pick one of the five brush tools and start painting:

Use the Pencil to change the floor one square at a time.
Use the Large and Small Paintbrushes to change groups of squares at a time.
Use the Large and Small Spraycans to randomly change squares.

Once you've figured out how each of the five brushes work, it's time to stop painting floors at random, and to start making the town look like a cave tunnel that the merchant will have set up camp in. For the most part, you want to leave the floors the way they are now; you'll get to adding things like stalagmites and walls in the next section. For now, let's add several pools of water throughout the town. Additionally, put some sections of 'Solid Stone' at the north (upper right) and south (lower left) edges of town. This will make the town into a tunnel going from east (lower right) to west (upper left). Again, you'll add walls in the next section. To make the job of placing the stone floor easier, use the 'Fill Rectangle' tools. The one on the left makes a hollow rectangle of the selected floor, while the one on the right makes a filled rectangle. When using the tool, you first need to click on the square that will be the upper left corner, then on the square that will be the lower right corner.

In case you're wondering, the arrow points out where the party appears if they enter the town from a certain direction. The red line is for the town's boundary: if the party moves past that line, they end up in an outdoors section. We'll talk about this stuff in detail in a later section. Right now, there's still one more thing you can do about the town's floors. Notice how every square in the town uses the same cave floor, while there are four different cave floors, each looking slightly different. For variety, you want to use all four. You could use the Spraycan to randomly put down different floors, but there's an easier way. Click on Town > Frill Up Terrain to randomly swap out some of the basic cave floor for other floors like it. If you were making a town on the surface, it would do the same for the grass floor.

Next up: Adding terrains to the town.