Advanced Info
"Collect plants and make gardens" is 99% of the program, but there's some advanced stuff to play with if you like...you probably don't need to read all of this, but if you want to, feel free to claim any seed you find in it!
Adding plant bases
TL;DR: Sprites are 32x32, use this base and the 12 colors in it (the orange and purple are for advanced features), test here. Ping me with any questions. Thank you!!!
This tool's a community effort, and many of our loveliest bases are donated. If you're considering contributing, thank you, and read on!
As with dragons, there's three swappable colors to each base. Instead of [primary, secondary, tertiary], it's [foliage, feature, accent]. Each has a palette consisting of four shades. When a plant is generated, those palettes (the green, pink, and yellow above, respectively) are swapped for new palettes.
You can use colors outside those palettes of course, they just won't be swapped. Great for stuff like a mossy rock where you want the rock to stay the same color.
The three each draw from a slightly different palette pool. Foliage has more greens, feature has more browns and greys, and accent has more bright colors.
There's also a "randomization" system--most bases don't need to use it, but it can be fun to mess with! The code checks for special marker pixels and replaces them with "components" like flowers or small crystals. There are "complex" components (shown above, orange marker) and "simple" ones (not shown as they work the exact same way, but they're much smaller and simpler, like a single berry, and use a purple marker). Those will then have their colors swapped as usual.
The max size of any sprite is 32x32. They're scaled up x2 for a final max size of 64x64 to get that nice chunky pixel look. For the easiest time, use
this base, which includes the palettes and marker pixels. And thank you! <3
You can test any new sprite with the
sprite tester. If it all looks alright, I'll validate the seeds and add the base and a credit to the tool. Let me know what name you want credited under! For example, this seed comes from a beautiful base by Xaotician: CVCpTB-XV5 (go ahead and claim it!).
Quality control: I do need to make sure submitted bases match what we already have. Here's some examples of things that very, very nearly made it in:
I needed to communicate the cylindrical-ness of a tree trunk without losing the jaggedness, and the jaggedness without making it look a little goofy and flat, but it just wasn't quite working. The solution here was easy--playing with the shape until this one became the stump-with-leaves base! :)
The poor little dude looks fine on their own, but when put in the context of other plants, the leaves look a bit weird, more like plastic knives with chunks out of them...in retrospect, dithering might work? This was an attempted redesign of an existing base, so I just went back to the old one. For now :)
If you're new, please don't be intimidated! Those plants were RIGHT on the cusp of working, which is why they're still in, just in slightly different forms. I've drawn some veeeery janky art (and some of it's in the tool anyways) (gonna fix it eventually I promise <3). There's also some amazing people on the thread who can help, and I'm happy to help with refinements too. Give it a go!
Using with Brave Browser
TL;DR: turn the shield off, it glitches out on this tool. Read on for security thonks!
The main symptom of the "bug"--you'll see patches of the default colors showing through,
visible as bright green and beet pink (especially on the mushroom)
Big thanks to Necralisk for helping me hunt this down! So, Brave browser comes with a "shields up" mode that alters how web pages behave. Without getting too far into how the garden tools work (more on that below), rather than having a .png of every possible color for each plant (how FR works, I believe), I replace colors from a base image by dynamically swapping palettes. This helps me run the tool without needing true hosting (otherwise each plant would require me uploading some 140 files to imgur). So I'm looking for a pixel to have the EXACT color that says "swap me!" While Brave has its shield up, pixels at random...don't!
My guess is that this is caused by a feature intended to foil something called
canvas fingerprinting by mucking with how an image is rendered in a way that's invisible to the human eye. This is a great way to deal with canvas fingerprinting! But it
does break things, especially things like this tool.
No salt on the Brave devs--it's a great security choice more often than not! But yeah, I am one of the things it breaks, and as far as I can tell, this is an inherent conflict, with nothing I can do on my end (besides buying a server and autogenerating plant components). So I'm afraid you do have to turn the shield off to use the tool normally. On the bright side, this is completely open source! You can verify I don't send data anywhere. Of course, you can also leave the shield on for the spicy glitch effect. It looks pretty cool with cyan plants :) Try it out (and keep the seed!): CQcdLCHTDo
Advanced garden generator use
WARNING: This was written before I overhauled the garden maker! It's pretty out of date. Hoping to freshen it up once the new version has settled a little.
Pasting in plant/catalog seeds is only the start! There's plenty of ways to further control and tweak your garden.
Layering
The first (leftmost) seed in the list is the first to be placed down, then second-leftmost, etc. That means that if you paste in a tree seed, then 20 seeds for grass after (to the right) of it, all that grass will be "in front of" the tree (just like when you layer apparel on a dragon).
Overlays
Overlays are exactly what they sound like, layers of color that go over things in your garden. Easier shown than said:
All those cacti share a seed (CJMfbCEQbf, claim away!), but some are beneath an overlay. Using overlays is pretty simple, just add a #hexcode in between seeds, and it'll overlay anything beneath it (to its left in the seed list). You can add a %opacity after it to control how opaque it is. In addition to hex codes, there's a few named colors (default, black, white, red, ocean, murk, midday, etc). Try it out:
Code:
#default%100,CJMfbCEQbf,CJMfbCEQbf,CJMfbCEQbf,CJMfbCEQbf,#default%50, CJMfbCEQbf,CJMfbCEQbf,CJMfbCEQbf,#default%30, CJMfbCEQbf,CJMfbCEQbf,CJMfbCEQbf,CJMfbCEQbf, CJMfbCEQbf,#default%50,CJMfbCEQbf
One special note: if an overlay is the last thing in the list of seeds, it'll apply to the groundcover as well! Super useful for underwater scenes. Also, overlays only apply to things in the garden, not the background, to make editing easier. Unless it's the first thing in the list! Try removing that #default%100 above to see.
Wildcards
These let you create your own temporary catalog item! They're mostly used for adding an image of your dragon(s) to a garden.
Any image provided will be sized down to 32x32, then up to 64x64, meaning it should fit alright with the garden aesthetic. To use, just preface the "name" for your temporary item with *, just like catalog items start with !. For example, *my_dragon. When you hit generate, a dialog will pop up to paste in a URL. Now, anyplace the garden sees *my_dragon, it'll insert that picture.
NOTE: Due to FR's CORS settings (something I can't touch), you'll need to use an intermediary host like Imgur for dragon pictures. Of course, you could also use pixel-style adopts (if the artist's OK with it), or try posting the picture to Discord (Discord is
finicky though).
Positioning Plants
You can precisely position your plants by adding a %ofwidth after the seed. So %50 would put the plant at 50% of your garden's with (that is to say, at the halfway point). Like this:
Try it out (and grab CWLnnCFYuB, C7XwKBxK+m, and CBkTrCLgWF for your own use):
Code:
#default%100,CWLnnCFYuB, CBkTrCLgWF%40, !nigel%50, CBkTrCLgWF%65, CWLnnCFYuB, CWLnnCFYuB, CWLnnCFYuB, CWLnnCFYuB, C7XwKBxK+m
Obviously you can't move overlays left or right, which is why they can both use %. I don't love that it's context-sensitive, might replace that with something clearer if I can think of one.
Misc. Additional Tips
- Claim: exports the garden to a new tab so you can easily copy the image. I like to paste them into Discord or Imgur. You probably figured that one out already, though! It also outputs a garden "code" (beta) that saves the positions of all plants.
- The seed list ignores spaces. Use spaces to separate out clumps of seeds so you can easily see and edit how many plants of a type there are.
- Seeds are case sensitive and can have any letter, any number, +, and -. Honestly I recommend copy-pasting them over trying to type them.
- Use "Display collection" in conjunction with the garden
Custom Seeds
Now and again, you'll see me ask someone what they want as a "custom seed". Basically, if you do something that helps the tool (like having a garden showcased or finding a bug), or do something nice and I see you doing it + know you collect plants, I'll happily make you a seed to your specifications--feel free to be as specific (midnight blue birch) or broad (Ora's choice) as you like! With smaller/broader requests, you might get two seeds. Also, whatever parameters you don't specify, I do try to make them nice :)
IFAQ (InFrequently asked questions)
Why does my plant look slightly different?
If you're using Brave browser, see the top of this post. Otherwise...plants actually vary slightly within a seed. There's a flower generation system, and if a plant can support flowers, each flower it can have has a chance to
not appear. It's done to add visual interest (like if you have a whole bunch of flowering grass), so if you post a bunch of copies of a seed in a garden and they all have flowers in different places, that's what's going on.
I'm looking for a specific color and not finding it
There's a few things that could be up! We've got (at time of writing) north of 100 palettes, so odds are you won't find a specific one right away. Also, our colors work differently from FR's, because they map to foliage, "feature" (trunks, stone), and accent (flowers, crystal). While all colors can go to all three, there's weighting in play: foliage favors greens and autumns, features favors earthen and metallic tones, and accent favors bright and bold colors. Without that, the sheer number of greens we need to support would lead to a LOT of broccoli trees, hah. You can rotate the colors on a plant to get easy access to weirder shades!
Is this affiliated with anything? Dom?
Nope, just a horribly complex personal project
Why is this page so long help
Please accept this small thanks for reading my horrible text blob:
zps4g+71dN
How many plants/palettes are there?
The total number of possible plants is difficult to calculate since not all bases use all colors/features, but it's somewhere in the millions. Total number of plant bases is > 100. Total number of palettes is >70.
I don't maintain an exact list for spoilers reasons; I made this tool in part because I struggle to form habits, and a sense of delight and discovery helps me muscle through that. So I want people to be able to discover new bases and colors for quite awhile, just in case they struggle the same way. In case you want to skip round that, look around a bit...at time of writing, there's a community-maintained list that's very well put together.....
I have two plants that look identical, but the seeds are different. Did something break?
Nope! Not all plants use all parts of their seed; in fact, some (like this little guy, feel free to claim: CWK+DCE1ph) use only use one color and no features. The "unused" traits are still in play when combining plants, though, just like a basic tert dragon passes on its tert color! This is also why the grass might turn an "unexpected" color; one of your plants has an unused foliage palette, and the grass is borrowing it! :)
How "stable" are seeds?
What it would take to break the seeds is me needing to store more plant data. If that happened, I could make an old->new converter that fills the new data slot with a randomly-chosen value to keep the seed valid (think of it like the fabled quaternary dragon color/gene). You should still save images you like though. Always do backups!!!
There's also a not-really-break case wherein you might use the seed and notice the plant looks a little bit different. That's because I'm still improving my pixel art, so I might upload a "fixed" sprite. Though I do try to be good about testing stuff before I push it, and any changes should be minor, or at least in the spirit of the OG sprite. Think fixed shading, or a few pixels moved to make a leaf look less stiff.
Why
Oh neat, a soapbox I put here myself! Nah, I know this is
concerningly overengineered for a free browser-based support tool living in the forums of a pixel dragon capitalism sim. But I write/code for a living, and the nature of the work means it'll never be "finished". I do love my job, but if I don't occasionally make fun stuff with a tight but challenging scope, I'll combust. FR has an overall lovely community I feel comfortable working in, so you guys have long had to deal with the
products, for
better or
worse. This wasn't created on any sort of commission or grant or anything (I hate to think what I'd charge to make this) or even by request. It's free because I want as many folks to have a chance to use it as possible.
I have questions
Find me on the Nature Discord if you want to chat live, especially about horrible code spaghetti. Or just ping me here.
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