System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Building

A free-form build tool, craftable early rather than handed to you. For a long stretch of this game's history, everything it built was pure scenery

The Build Tool isn't a late-game unlock — it's craftable from just 5 Plank and 1 Iron Bar, on the TOOLS & MATS tab of the crafting panel [C], well within reach in a new character's first few minutes — but as of this writing it's no longer something a fresh character starts holding for free. A brand-new character's hotbar now carries only a Pickaxe and an Axe; earlier builds granted the Build Tool and the Landscaper (below) automatically and unconditionally on top of those two, and that free grant has been removed specifically so that build mode is something a player makes rather than something they're issued. Equip the Build Tool to place pieces on a grid: walls, floors, windows, ramps, doors, roofs, ceilings, houses, and a town treasury, each costing raw materials and each buildable in one of five material tiers.

Nine piece types

Wall, floor, window, ramp, door, roof, and ceiling are the general-purpose pieces available anywhere; house and treasury are special-purpose pieces that can only be placed inside a town you own — see the Charter Stake for what those actually do once placed. Everything snaps to a shared build grid, and rotation only ever moves in exact quarter turns, so a piece's collision box always lines up cleanly with the piece itself.

Stairs aren't currently on that list. They were pulled from the placeable menu after a report that building pieces were still bugged, with a window piece added in their place — a wall built as a real hole rather than a picture of one, four solids around a centred opening the same way the door works, sized differently enough from a doorway that the two don't read as the same thing at a glance. Nothing about any stair already standing in an existing build changed: only the name was pulled from the menu, not the geometry, so every stair placed before this is exactly as climbable as it always was.

Five material tiers

Every material tier above Stone reuses materials the game already has elsewhere, rather than introducing anything new to go and gather specifically for building.

The fix that took the longest: real collision

For a long stretch of this game's history, placing a build piece added nothing but a visible mesh — no collision of any kind was ever registered for it. A wall you'd paid for and placed was scenery: you could walk straight through it, you couldn't stand on your own floor, and a staircase was a picture of stairs rather than something you could climb. This was tracked, by the game's own account, as the single oldest unfixed bug on record.

The fix treats each piece type on its own terms rather than giving everything one uniform box, because a uniform box is wrong for almost all of them:

• Walls genuinely block movement, full stop.
• Doors are two solid posts with open space between them — not one box with a notch cut out — so the doorway itself is a real gap you walk through, with the lintel set comfortably above head height.
• Floors need no sideways blocking at all; they're a standing surface you simply land on.
• Stairs are a standing surface per step and nothing more — giving each step a solid wall on its face would turn a staircase into something you can't actually climb. (Stairs can't currently be newly placed — see above — but this is still exactly how every stair already standing behaves.)
• Windows collide the same way a door does — solids around a real opening rather than a single box — snapped through the same shared "wall-shaped" grouping a wall and a door already belong to, so a future piece that should behave the same way is one addition to that group rather than a new rule of its own.
• Ramps are one continuous sloped surface, so you walk up the slope rather than stepping onto a high ledge.
• Roofs ended up as both a blocking box and a standing surface at once, after an early version that gave them neither let players walk straight through their own roof.

A standing surface only catches you from a narrow band just above it — close enough that a staircase stays climbable, not so generous that standing underneath your own first floor would launch you through it.

Walls as cover: neither gunfire nor melee reaches through one, in either direction

A solid piece doesn't just block movement — it genuinely stops both gunfire and melee attacks as well, in both directions, for every kind of attacker in the game. Getting there was a long-running, multi-part fix rather than one change.

Gunfire, first. A bullet moves a meaningful distance every single frame, and a monster's own hit detection reached out far enough to catch an incoming shot a full step before it actually arrived at a wall standing behind that monster — so a creature pressed right up against the far side of your wall could still be shot clean through solid stone, because the bullet was being consumed by the monster one step too early to ever reach the wall at all. Fixed by refusing an enemy hit whenever the creature's own centre is behind a structure, paired with checking for a wall before the enemy hit detection runs at all — neither half alone was enough; shots still leaked through with only one of the two fixes in place. A second, worse gap turned up right afterward: once a wall genuinely stopped the player's own gunfire, it turned out enemy gunfire had no concept of a wall at all, and would freely damage a player through solid stone, wood, or an entire town's worth of walls as if none of it were there — cover that looks solid but silently isn't is worse than no cover at all. Enemy shots, a raider's included, now stop at exactly the same structures a player's own shots do.

Then melee, the same story told twice more. A sword swing only ever checked distance and aim toward a target, with no idea whether a wall stood in between, so a blade reached through your own house's wall exactly as far as it reached across open ground — fixed using the same wall-check gunfire already respects, so a creature genuinely behind a solid piece can't be hit through it, including at an angle through your own doorway. The reverse gap mattered more: a monster standing on the far side of a wall you'd built could still reach through it and bite you, which defeats the entire point of building a wall in the first place — fixed the same way, so "if you cannot reach it, it cannot reach you" now genuinely holds for melee too. The rule was finally extended to your own pets and summons as well, judged from wherever the companion itself is standing rather than from the player's position, since a companion often fights somewhere else entirely. A permanent watchdog now fires a test line through the centre of your own walls (which must report being blocked) and through open, unbuilt ground well clear of anything (which must report nothing) specifically so this protection can never silently break again without anyone noticing — the same shape of failure that let hired guards quietly stop appearing on reload while still billing for themselves.

Damage, ruin, rebuilding, and repair

Every placed piece carries real HP by its material tier (see the table above) and can be reduced to a ruin rather than being indestructible. Rebuilding on a ruined piece's exact footprint costs only half the material of whatever originally stood there — not the currently selected material — restoring it fully rather than stacking a fresh piece on top of the wreckage.

A piece under full health but not yet destroyed shows it: a health bar appears once it drops below 100%, and visible cracks — not just a colour tint — grow across its surface in two stages as it takes more damage. You don't need to open a menu to know a wall is worth repairing before it breaks.

And a damaged piece that hasn't been reduced all the way to a ruin can be repaired in place, rather than only ever being torn down and rebuilt: hold [E] on any damaged piece belonging to your own faction to restore it at 55 HP per second, paid for continuously in whatever material it was originally built from — looking away interrupts the repair, and it can never push a piece above its own maximum HP. A full repair costs the same one unit of material a half-price ruin rebuild does; a partial repair, stopped early, costs proportionally less. This only ever applies to a piece that's damaged but still standing — a piece reduced all the way to a ruin still has to be rebuilt from the ground up, which is what keeps destroying something all the way down meaningfully worse than just chipping it.

Placement itself also refuses to let two pieces occupy the same point at once — earlier, aiming at one spot and pressing the place key repeatedly could stack several ramps directly on top of each other for the material cost of one working ramp, without the extras adding anything except an exploit. A refusal now costs no material at all.

City buildings block by mass, not by one box around the whole thing

The collision fix described above covers pieces you place yourself. The game's own pre-built city buildings needed a related but separate fix: for a long stretch, each unique building (Penjamin City's chapel, the bank, and similar one-off structures) registered exactly one collision box, sized to its main body. A building shaped like a single block was fine. A building shaped like a main body with a separate tower or wing standing apart from it wasn't — walking toward the tower meant walking straight through visible stone, because nothing was actually there to stop you until you reached the body several metres further on. The fix registers a solid for every physical mass a building's model actually draws, not just the one box its data record happened to specify, so a kit that later gains a wing or a porch is automatically covered without anyone having to remember to add a number for it.

A second, related fix corrected the shape of those new solids. A round column's bounding box is a square across its full diameter, so a straight box collider around a pillar stuck out past the actual stone on the diagonal — you could be blocked by empty air next to a column that looked perfectly clear. Pillars and other round masses now collide as circles instead, the same shape trees and rocks already use, which has a second effect beyond just being more accurate: walking past a pillar at a glancing angle now deflects you around it, sliding past the curve, rather than stopping you dead the way a flat wall does.

A third fix closed the remaining gap: a building's visible base plinth is drawn wider than its data record's own collision box, and while the game's main city buildings had already been corrected for this, buildings using the fallback path — the Rival City among them, along with any building whose model kit is missing — kept the narrower, uncorrected box. The result was a real, walkable gap: standing at a Rival City building measured over a metre inside its own visible stone, waist-deep in a plate you should never have been able to enter at all. The fallback collider is now sized to match its own plinth exactly, closing the gap to nothing.

The Rival City's buildings still look visually different from Penjamin City's — plain, unrecolored boxes rather than the newer kit models — and according to the development log that's a deliberate choice, not an overlooked one, even though it looks like a small fix from the outside. The kit models bake their color palette into hardcoded values scattered throughout each building's own geometry rather than reading it from one shared source, so there's no single hook a "make it red for a captured settlement" fix could attach to. A closer look at one building found only about half its colors even come from anything overridable — the other half, including things like a spire's own trim, are hardcoded regardless, so a naive recolor would leave a red building with a bright green roof rather than a coherent rival look. Doing this properly would mean hand-deciding, building by building, which specific details should change color — a genuine art task with real visual judgment in it, not a code change.

The Landscaper: a second craftable tool for shaping the ground itself

Alongside the Build Tool, the Landscaper is a separate tool for reshaping terrain rather than placing pieces on top of it, craftable for 2 Iron Bar and 5 Stone (or again, if you ever lose one). Like the Build Tool, this used to be handed to every new character automatically — see below — and as of this writing it isn't any more, though it costs little enough that reaching it is still one of a new character's first crafting jobs. Aim at the ground and press [F] to apply the current brush; [B] cycles between three modes (Flatten, Raise, Lower) and [V] adjusts the brush's size. Every edit is permanent and shared the same way a build piece is — it's baked directly into the terrain's own height data rather than sitting as a decoration on top of it.

Flatten specifically levels the ground to the height you're currently standing on — useful for clearing a building pad on a slope without digging a pit first. This didn't always work correctly: for a stretch, Flatten actually lowered the ground to a height roughly three metres below your feet, because the code that read "the ground level under the player" was accidentally subtracting the camera's own eye height a second time. Aiming it at level ground you were already standing on dug a dish under your feet instead of doing nothing, which is what a correct flatten should do there.

Version history

• Real collision added to every build piece, the fix described in full above — the single oldest unfixed bug on record for this game, closed by giving each piece type its own physically appropriate collision shape rather than one generic box for all of them.
• Roofs corrected to block AND support, after the operator reported walking straight through one — an earlier version had deliberately given roofs neither kind of collision, on the reasoning that a single box would sit as an invisible sill and a single surface would narrow to a point at the roof's peak.
• Three tougher material tiers added above the original Wood and Stone — Brick, Iron, and Armoured — each built from materials the game already had elsewhere.
• Stairs pulled from the placeable menu, and a Window piece added in their place, after a report that building pieces were still bugged. Removed by name only — every stair already standing in an existing build kept its geometry and its collision unchanged, and putting the option back is a one-word change whenever it's ready to return.
• Fixed Flatten digging a pit instead of doing nothing. The line reading "the ground level under the player's feet" was subtracting the camera's own eye-height offset from a value that already accounted for it, aiming every flatten roughly three metres below where the player was actually standing — described above.
• City buildings fixed to collide by every mass, not one box for the whole thing — reported twice by the operator as "wall hitboxes are still bad." A single collision box sized to a building's main body could never cover a separate tower or wing standing apart from it; the fix now registers a solid for each physical mass a building's kit actually draws, closing gaps that let you walk straight through visible stone.
• Round pillars now collide as circles instead of square boxes, so the collider's shape matches the stone instead of sticking out past it on the diagonal — and, as a side effect, a glancing approach to a pillar now slides around its curve instead of stopping dead against an invisible flat face.
• Fallback-path buildings (the Rival City among them) fixed to match their own plinths. An earlier fix widened the collider for buildings using their normal model kit, but buildings that fall back to a simpler shape — a missing or broken kit — kept the old, narrower box, leaving over a metre of walkable, visibly-solid stone with nothing behind it.
• Damaged pieces show it, and stacking pieces on one spot was closed. A health bar and visible cracks now appear on any piece below full HP, and placement stopped allowing more than one piece to occupy the same point — previously nothing prevented pressing the place key repeatedly on one spot to stack several pieces (originally reported with ramps) for the cost of a single one.
• Damaged pieces can be repaired in place with [E], at 55 HP per second in the material they were originally built from, rather than only being repairable by tearing the whole piece down to a ruin first and rebuilding. Only a ruin still requires a full rebuild.
• The Build Tool and Landscaper removed from the starting hotbar. Both used to be handed to every new character automatically and unconditionally, on top of the starting Pickaxe and Axe; both are now craftable instead, at a low enough material cost that reaching either is still one of the very first things a new character can do. Existing characters who already owned either tool keep it — the change only affects what a brand-new character is issued for free.
• v1165-v1167 — walls made real cover against gunfire, in both directions, described in full above: a monster pressed against the far side of a wall could still be shot straight through it at first, then player gunfire was fixed to genuinely stop at a wall, and finally enemy gunfire — which had no concept of a wall at all until this point — was fixed to stop at the same walls too.
• v1176-v1179 — the same fix carried over to melee, in the same order: player swings first, then a monster's own bite fixed to stop at a wall too, a permanent watchdog added to confirm the wall check keeps working, and the same rule finally extended to the player's own pets and summons.
• v1356 — fixed walls being unable to form a real corner, always crossing in a plus shape instead. Reported plainly: "it looks like +." A wall's position never actually changed when rotated — only its facing did — so two walls placed a quarter-turn apart crossed straight through the centre of the same grid square rather than meeting cleanly at its edge, making a properly enclosed room effectively impossible to build. Walls (and doors, fixed the same way immediately after) now correctly snap to the boundary between two grid squares once rotated, matching where a wall visually needs to sit to form a real corner.
• v1357 — fixed a rotated staircase having no collision in two of its four orientations. A shared rotation helper swapped a piece's centre coordinates for a quarter or three-quarter turn instead of properly rotating them — invisible for every piece with its own centre at zero, but a staircase is built from four steps each offset from centre, so two of its four possible orientations climbed in the opposite direction from what was actually drawn. The fix reuses the exact rotation math already written for angled pieces, so a quarter turn is a rotation everywhere now, not a coordinate swap in disguise.
• v1358 — fixed a ramp dropping you through it partway up. Reported directly: you could climb roughly halfway up a ramp before falling straight through. Its invisible collision surface used the wrong length and the wrong height for its actual drawn slope, so the gap between what you could see and what was actually holding you up grew wider the higher you climbed — small near the bottom, a noticeable hole by the middle. A ramp's collision now matches its visible slope exactly, at every rotation.

Trivia

• The Build Tool's crafting cost — 5 Plank and 1 Iron Bar — is low enough that a player can, in principle, be building within a couple of minutes of spawning, long before ever visiting a settlement, joining a faction, or reading a word of the tutorial.
• A rebuild reads the ruin's own original material rather than whatever tier you currently have selected, so repairing a stone wall always costs half a stone wall, even if you've since switched your build tool to Armoured.