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Painting the merchant's town (terrains)

If you haven't done any designing before, you might find the distinction between floors and terrains confusing. A terrain can be any number of things: a section of wall, a door, a staircase, a tree, a chest, a waterfall, or more. The two biggest differences between floors and terrains is that floors must be flat surfaces while a terrain's graphic can look like a 3D object, and terrains can have scripts attached to them while floors can not (terrain scripts will be discussed in a later section). For now, think of floors as flat surfaces and terrains as the immovable objects placed on floors.

To place terrains, you need to switch to the terrain drawing mode. There's a button that toggles between floors mode, terrain mode, and height mode (which will be covered in the next section). Another way to switch modes is to hit the space bar. The info section at the lower right section of the Editor will tell you what mode you're currently editing in. Also note that the terrain currently selected is the 'Empty' terrain. Use this terrain to erase any other terrains you put down by mistake.

Place some terrains into the town to make it look more like a cave tunnel. For example, pencil or spraypaint in some mushrooms (terrains 141-143), some cave trees (terrains 147-150), and stalagmites (terrains 166-168). Finally, place the merchant's cart with terrains 398 and 399.

That's starting to look more like Avernum. But the tunnel's still missing something important: walls. We need to add some walls beside the 'Solid Stone' floor sections. You could just place the wall terrains, one by one, or even use the Fill Rectangle tool to place the walls. However, placing walls around the 'Solid Stone' floor sections is such a common task that the Editor has a tool for it. Click on the 'Place Bounding Walls' tool, and select the upper left and lower right corners of the 'Solid Stone' section you want to wall off (this works much like the 'Fill Rectangle' tool). Do this for both sections; you might need to place some walls manually at the edges of the town.

Did you know there's a quick way to see what your town looks like in the game without you having to load up Blades of Avernum? The button below the Pencil tool will change the Editor's view to make it look like the game would.

Now you'll quickly notice that there are two problems with the walls we just made. First, if your walls have some corners, you might find they look weird in the game. In this case, you can see a crack in one corner. Some wall configurations look worse than others; page 26 of the official documentation has more information on this. The quickest way to clean up the walls is to click Scenario > Clean Up Walls. Even this, some things may look a bit weird. With practice, you'll figure out how to make corners look good. For now, keep on going with the rest of the tutorial.

The second problem you'll notice is all the walls being 'building' walls, the type you'd see for the average building in Avernum. This should be a natural tunnel, so the walls need to be changed to reflect this. If you look at the list of terrains in the Editor, you won't be able to find natural underground walls. You need to specifically swap out the 'building' walls for the natural walls for this specific town. The way to do that is through the Town Details, which you can access by clicking Town > Town Details.

Once you've opened the Town Details, you need to change Wall 1 to use Sheet 614 instead of 600 (in each town, you're allowed to use at most two different types of walls). While you're at it, change the town name to something more descriptive. Click OK, and the tunnel now has the familiar cliff walls of Avernum (you may need to move around for the change to show up).

Time for some landscaping. Let's learn about heights.