Development covered 28 Sep 2026 to 28 Sep 2026 (commit dates).
This window replaced 82 pieces of map art in Myriad Immortal Sect and drew 14 things that had never had art at all. The replacements came from an image model running on a machine in my office. That part was quick. What took the time, and what I think is worth writing about, is everything on either side of the generation step.
What needed redrawing, and how I knew
The list came from surveys rather than taste. The grey town set of Azuresun City looked flat next to everything around it. Several Azure Cloud peaks and compound pieces, and some of Grand Void's halls and trees, had been drawn in an earlier style. A few frames still carried a faint fringe from an old background-removal pass, visible as a halo on a ginseng tree, a broadleaf, a spirit field.
The 14 new ones were a different kind of problem. Four frost-country species had no art, and the fallback meant to cover that never ran. Instead the engine quietly handed back the first frame of the sprite sheet, which happens to be a protective artifact. So a frost demon spawn appeared in the snow as a shield standing upright. The fix was partly code, so that a missing frame really uses its fallback, and partly art, so the fallback is rarely needed. The new frames went into free, fully transparent cells of the existing sheets, and the 78 repaints kept exactly the same rectangles, so nothing that refers to a frame had to change. The biggest beneficiary is the walled trading town of Azuresun, whose whole grey set was redone.
Prompts that taught me something
A few prompt lessons from this round, because they are not specific to any one model.
Words leak across subjects. Each sect has a palette described in words like tiled roofs and lanterns, which is right for its buildings. Applied to a pond or a waterfall in the same sect, the model grew a little pavilion on it. Palette words now go on buildings only.
"Sparse" does not mean thin. Asking for a sparse plant produced a plant with fewer, thicker parts. What I wanted was fine, delicate stems, and that is what the prompt now says.
A style reference copies content, not just style. Feeding a sibling frame as a reference got me the sibling's shape back. When a reference is used, the prompt must say what has to differ. For repainting an existing frame, though, referencing the old frame is exactly what you want, because it keeps the original orientation and footprint. The canvas size follows the frame too, roughly three times its long side, because at the packed size a smaller render is indistinguishable from a bigger one.
The picking page is the real pipeline
Every generation now ends on one page. Each row shows the old frame and several new candidates side by side, with two buttons, satisfied or redo, and a box for the reason. You can pick which candidate wins. Verdicts turn directly into the next step: picked candidates are fitted into the sheet, and redo notes become the specification for the next batch.
That page exists because a sprite is judged against its neighbours, not on its own. A peak that looks great alone can be the wrong value next to the peaks it sits among. The first round left 19 rows where a different candidate was better than my first pick, and 6 that needed a full redo: a banner, a bench, a mountain range, a wall, a cloud pine and a peak arch. A second round confirmed those. One technical note: after installing a rework, the "before" side of the page has to keep showing the art from before it, or the comparison quietly compares the new art with itself.
Art that is right in the wrong place
The same surveys found art that was fine but placed absurdly. Koi were swimming across meadows and forest floor in about twenty tiles, because the ambient creature roll had no idea what ground it was on. A water creature away from water now becomes a land creature. Beasts and herbs on rocky ridges were sliding off to the same nearest spot and stacking on top of each other, name plates and all, and on open ground a beast could be drawn straight over a herb. Each node now looks for its own free spot. And raiders from an encampment just outside Azure Cloud Sect were spawning inside the sect's shield, because their area reached over the wall. Inside a compound, only that compound's own areas decide what appears. The Grand Void scripture library is one of the halls repainted in this round.
Where the effort goes now
If you generate art for a game, budget for the choosing, not the making. The model will hand you four plausible candidates in seconds. Whether any of them belongs next to the 500 frames already on your map is a human decision, and the tool worth building is the one that makes that decision quick and leaves a record of why.
The repainted town is on the map today: explore it free in your browser.
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