System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Item Icons

142 items get fully hand-drawn art, and a later rule-based system extended that same sheet's style to another 1,836 by matching shapes and materials — leaving only 226 items, mostly cosmetics, on the plain procedural generator that's also why a few items look confusingly alike

Every one of the game's roughly 2,200 items needs a small icon to sit in your hotbar and inventory, and the overwhelming majority of them were never individually drawn by anyone. A procedural generator builds an icon on the fly for any item that isn't in a much smaller hand-authored set, which is how a game with only a few hundred unique named items and well over a thousand generated Tiered Gear pieces still gives every single one a distinct-looking picture without an artist ever touching most of them.

Custom art covers 142 items, not the whole set of 261

A separate hand-drawn icon set exists alongside the generator, and it's easy to overstate its coverage at a glance: the set itself contains 261 entries, but only 142 of those are actual items. The other 119 are icons for places rather than things — biome and landmark names like meadow, savanna, shore, graveyard, backrooms, and area51 — reused by the same underlying system for a different purpose. So real item coverage from custom art is 142 of about 2,204 items, roughly 6.4%. Everything else falls straight through to the procedural generator, which is by design rather than an oversight — the generator's own comment in the game's code says explicitly that an id the custom set doesn't carry "falls straight through to the generator below."

That's no longer the whole picture. According to the development log, a pair of later updates added a third tier between the two described above, matching an item's id to a matching shape already in the hand-drawn sheet rather than generating one from scratch. Weapons went first — all 795 of them, matching compositional ids like marrow_scythe or aurora_bow to their shape (a scythe renders as a scythe, in the sheet's own style, rather than a generic generated blob), with four weapon shapes that had nothing close enough to borrow (bow, staff, whip, and bomb) drawn from scratch to cover the gap. A second update then extended the same rule to materials (matched by a compound-word suffix instead, since ids like frostwood or starmetal have no separator to key on), the full pickaxe/axe/armour gear ladders (coloured by rank instead of a hash, so a glance at the icon shows roughly how strong it is relative to its neighbours on the same ladder), and food. Colour for weapons and materials still comes from a per-item hash rather than a shared per-shape colour, so two items of the same shape don't render as identical icons. Between the two updates, real custom-art coverage — hand-drawn plus rule-drawn — rose from 142 items to 1,978 of 2,204, roughly 90%. Only 226 items remain on the plain procedural generator described below: 207 cosmetics (the sheet has no cosmetic art to map them onto at all), 17 one-off tools, and 2 vehicles.

43% of the roster has a visual look-alike — but only a quarter of that is a real problem

Measured before the rule-based sheet art described above existed, so the numbers in this section may have shifted for the roughly 1,836 items that moved onto it — they haven't been re-measured since. Because the generator has to invent an icon for well over 2,000 items from a limited visual vocabulary, some items inevitably end up looking very similar to each other. A direct pixel comparison across the entire roster found that 43% of all items — 950 of 2,204 — have at least one close visual match somewhere else in the game, across 1,245 total look-alike pairs. That's a meaningfully higher rate than an earlier measurement had recorded, though the earlier figure predates a smaller item roster and used a less exact method, so the two aren't a clean before-and-after comparison.

Not every look-alike is actually a problem, though. Splitting the 1,245 pairs by why they resemble each other tells a more useful story:

685 pairs (55%) are the same tier line — two rungs of the same Tiered Gear ladder, like two nearby Mining pickaxe tiers. This is intended: a tier ladder is supposed to look like a progression, with each rung resembling its neighbors.
253 pairs (20%) are the same broad gear family — different skills' generated gear that happens to land on a similar look. Arguably intended for the same reason.
307 pairs (25%) are genuinely cross-category — two items with nothing in common rendering as visual twins, like a letter that looks identical to a metal ingot, or a stone that looks like a flower. These are the real defects.

Of those 307 real look-alike defects, 170 — 55% of the whole problem — come from one specific and fixable pattern: a procedurally generated gear item rendering identically to a hand-named unique item. A unique is supposed to feel unique, and 69 distinct named items currently share their icon with one or more generated pieces. The worst is geiger_smg, which collides with twelve different generated items; plasma_blade, rime_lance, genie_wisp_rod, and high_roller_revolver each collide with six. Giving custom art to just those 69 named uniques — rather than trying to cover the roughly 2,000 remaining items with no custom art at all — would clear more than half of the genuine confusion in the game for a small, targeted amount of art.

It isn't a lack of variety, and it isn't the dark colors — it's the tonal range

Two obvious explanations for the collisions were checked and ruled out directly rather than assumed. First: is the generator simply repeating itself, running out of distinct combinations to draw? No — every single one of the 2,204 icons in the game renders as a pixel-unique image; there are zero exact duplicates. Second: are the colliding items specifically the darkest, lowest-contrast ones, easy to mix up because there's less to see? Also no — items involved in a cross-category collision average only about five points darker than items that aren't, with identical color saturation, which isn't enough of a gap to explain anything.

What the same check did turn up is a real, if harder to act on, observation: the entire item icon roster is dark and desaturated, averaging roughly 73 out of 255 for brightness and low saturation across the board, with no lighter, more colorful subset hiding anywhere. At a 16-by-16 pixel size, a whole roster packed into that narrow a tonal band has very little room to look distinct from itself — which is a property of the generator's whole art direction, not a bug isolated to a handful of items. Widening that range would spread every icon in the game further apart and could out-perform hand-drawing the 69 uniques above, but it would also change how the entire game looks, which is a design call rather than a code fix — it's recorded here as an open option, not something anyone has decided to do.

Trivia

The generator needs a real, visible viewport to rasterise icons for comparison — it can't be run from a hidden browser tab — but it doesn't need a character loaded; it runs fine from the title screen.
Comparing all 2,204 icons against each other for look-alikes is about 2.4 million pairwise pixel comparisons, and runs in under ten seconds.
tsar_letter shows up in two different close look-alike pairs, against both steel_ingot and block_stone — suggesting the letter itself renders as little more than a generic grey block.
The starting Butter Knife used to be a real, live example of exactly this kind of cross-category collision — its icon and the Shotgun's were the same full-width horizontal bar shape at almost the same size and angle, genuinely indistinguishable at a glance. Fixed by redrawing the knife on a diagonal instead, the same angle already used for the Throwing Knife, which nobody had ever confused for a firearm.