Draw a terrain

Generate Terrain builds a whole terrain from two tiles by rotating one edge around every side. It’s the fast path. Draw a Terrain is the control path: you hand-draw each piece - the fill, each edge, each corner - so the top of a patch can look different from the bottom, and corners are art you drew rather than a computed bend.

Both produce the same kind of thing: a terrain, an autotile material whose edges and corners resolve themselves as you paint. The only difference is who draws the pieces.

Draw a Terrain is a Pro feature. Painting with the result is free, so a hand-drawn terrain that arrives in a shared pack keeps working on any plan.

Generate or draw?

Generate when one edge treatment, repeated on every side, is the look you want - a quick, consistent terrain in two tiles.
Draw when you want per-side art (a lit top, a shadowed bottom) or hand-drawn corners, and you don’t mind drawing more pieces to get there.

You can always start with Generate to see the workflow, then draw a terrain when you want tighter control.

Starting one

Pick Tile → Draw a Terrain… (or open the Tile Shelf header’s + menu and choose Draw a terrain). The dialog asks for:

Type - Solid terrain fills areas (grass, stone, water), with edges and corners on every side. Paths & roads draws thin connected lines (roads, fences, rivers, wires).
Terrain name - names the terrain’s tab in the shelf.
Tile size - the pixel size of each piece. To paint a map with the terrain, this must match the map’s tile size.
Fill (or Path material for paths) - pick a tile to seed every piece, so you start from a working surface and carve the edges in rather than facing a wall of blank cells. Choose Blank to draw each piece from scratch instead. A chosen fill has to match the tile size you set.

Click Create and the terrain lands in the shelf as a new tab (brush icon), with its first piece open on the canvas, ready to draw.

Drawing a solid terrain

A solid terrain is an area fill - grass over dirt, a stone plateau, a pool of water. You draw 13 key pieces, laid out in the panel the way artists already picture them:

An Outline block (3x3): the four edges, the four outer corners (where the terrain turns a convex corner), and the center fill in the middle.
A row of four inner corners - the concave notch where the terrain wraps around a hole. They get their own row because they’re the easiest case to forget.

Click any cell to open that piece on the canvas and draw it. From those 13, Hexcalibur assembles every other situation a filled area can be in.

The panel’s preview assembles live from your 13 pieces as you draw, so you always see the real terrain in context. Cells using the piece you’re editing are highlighted.
When you’re happy, click Rebuild terrain to bake your edits into the pieces the map paints with. The button reads Rebuild terrain (edits pending) while your latest changes haven’t been baked yet. (The live preview is always current; Rebuild is what updates already-painted maps.)

Drawing a path terrain

A path terrain covers thin connected lines - roads, fences, rivers, wires. You draw the connection pieces - straights, corners, T-junctions, the cross, and end caps - grouped and labeled in the panel, each with a small glyph showing which sides connect. Seed them from a path material and they arrive shaped into their path as a starting draft; refine any piece by hand. The panel’s preview assembles live from the pieces, the same as for solid terrain.

Painting with it

A drawn terrain paints exactly like a generated one. Arm it from the swatch in the panel header, then paint on a tilemap’s tile layer:

Drag and every cell picks the right edge, corner, or fill piece to match its neighbors - and the neighbors re-fix themselves as the patch grows.
Right-click erases, and the surrounding terrain heals its edges.

This is Autotile. While the terrain is armed on a tile layer, an Autotile toggle appears in the tool options bar; turn it off to place the exact piece you armed, or hold Shift to flip it for a single stroke. Half-drawn pieces simply show as half-drawn until you carve them - the terrain autotiles from the first stroke, no “finish authoring” step.

Editing a terrain

The terrain’s header in the shelf carries its actions:

Rename - renames the terrain everywhere.
Delete - removes the terrain’s pieces from the pack (after confirm; any map cells painted with it become empty).

To change the art, open a piece from the panel, redraw it, and - for a solid terrain - hit Rebuild so the change flows into painted maps. Every map using the terrain updates live.

Good to know

A drawn terrain’s pieces are normal assets: they export, sync, and travel in .hexc pack files like anything else, and the terrain stays grouped on every device.
The assets panel groups a terrain’s pieces under a collapsible header, same as tilesets.
Tile size follows what you chose when you created it - any square size works.
Drawn and generated terrains of the same shape can swap on a map - see Replacing tiles.