v0.5.23-dev

Playtest build v0.5.23-dev.

Every battlefield but one now stands on real ground instead of a tinted box.

Real ground tiles

Added KayKit's Medieval Builder pack (CC0, free, 98 models) — the first set
we own that ships ground tiles on a square grid. Until now every theme
either borrowed dungeon flagstone or had no ground art at all.

The four traced maps get it first: stone, grass, sand and water each become
real art, so Highspire's canals are actual water and its streets actual ground,
in place of the borrowed dungeon look v0.5.22 shipped.

Every scale was measured rather than guessed, the same way the existing packs
were. Each square tile is exactly 2.000 across, so it lands on our tile size at
0.5, and wall_straight is exactly one tile wide so a wall run meets flush.

One genuinely new mechanism came out of it. A surface is not always a flat
mat. The dungeon's flagstone is 0.15 thick and sits on its own centre, so it
lands correctly at the tile top; the Builder tiles are blocks that extend a
full unit upward from their origin, and laid at the same point would float a
whole height step above the board. Themes can now declare a surface_drop,
which sinks the block's body into the tinted column underneath — which is what
that column was always for. It defaults to zero, so no existing theme moved.

The woodland maps finally have a floor

The forest theme went its whole life with no ground art: the Forest Nature
free tier is props-only (modular ground is an EXTRA-tier item), so the tinted
box literally was the forest floor and scatter carried the entire look. All
six woodland battlefields — Sacred Grove, Forest Glade, Open Plains, Highland
Pass, Twin Peaks and River Crossing — now stand on real earth, rock, sand and
water.

The Forest props are untouched. They're what makes the theme a forest rather
than a field, and they're finer than anything the Builder set has.

Scorched Crater is dressed; Frozen Expanse deliberately isn't

Scorched Crater had no theme at all. A new wasteland theme covers the four
fifths of that map which is neither magma nor snow — caldera rim, ash flats,
stone. Lava deliberately gets no surface: no molten tile exists in any pack we
own, the tinted box already reads as a glowing pit, and dressing it with rock
would put a crust over the one hazard the map is built around.

That leaves Frozen Expanse as the only undressed battlefield, on purpose.
Nothing we own has a snow tile, and half-dressing it — rock footholds over
tinted ice — would read worse than the consistent bare board it is today.
KayKit's snow biome is a Patreon-tier extra for this same pack, which is the
fix whenever someone wants it.

Skeletons are drop-in compatible (not yet wired)

KayKit's free Skeletons pack — Warrior, Rogue, Mage, Minion — uses the same
Rig_Medium, 23 bones as our Adventurers, with handslot.l and
handslot.r present. Merging our existing animation libraries onto one
resolves 25 of 25 tracks, so they inherit the whole 65-clip library and the
weapon-mounting system with no new pipeline at all.

Downloaded and verified but deliberately not wired to anything: which units
should be skeletons is a design decision, not an art one.

Rejected after inspection

The Medieval Hexagon pack. Its tiles are hex-only, and its town buildings —
church, tavern, blacksmith — ship only in four team colours, which would read
as team-coloured buildings in a neutral town; its "neutral" folder is bridges,
fences and scaffolding. Its buildings also duplicate the Builder pack's. It was
downloaded, examined and removed rather than left sitting unused in the tree.

Also worth recording: the Forest Nature free tier is props only — 105
models, every one a rock, bush, tree or grass tuft, with no floors, walls or
buildings. Verified against the distribution zip. That's why it could never
have dressed a town by itself.

Install: download the zip, extract the whole folder, run shattered-crowns-windows.exe.
Keep the sc_engine folder next to the exe - the game will not start without it.