← All Guides

Paint & Recolour

Paint is the quickest way to change how a structure looks without touching its geometry. Rather than tearing down and rebuilding with new materials, you simply switch to Paint and drag across whatever you want to retheme. This guide covers how Paint differs from Build, how to use it efficiently, and how to apply colour tints on top.

Switching to Paint Mode

Click the Paint tool in the sidebar (or press P) to switch from Build. The active tool is always highlighted in the sidebar, so it's easy to confirm Paint is active before you start. Once active, your cursor over the viewport will show a preview of what a click would do.

How Paint Differs From Build

The key distinction is that Paint only changes the material of what's already there — it never changes the shape:

If a block's existing shape can't accept your chosen material, Paint silently skips it rather than removing it. This is a safety feature: you can drag Paint across a mixed structure and only the compatible blocks will update.

Retheming Efficiently

Paint's real power comes from drag-painting — clicking and holding while moving over the grid to update multiple blocks in one continuous stroke. This is much faster than clicking cell by cell, especially on large surfaces like walls or floors.

Because Paint skips incompatible shapes automatically, you can drag freely across an entire section — walls, windows, and doors together — and only the compatible blocks will change. You don't need to carefully avoid blocks you don't want to affect, as long as they use a shape that can't take your chosen material.

For large flat sections, combine Paint with Placement Size: set a wide placement size (for example, Width 20, Height 1, Length 1) and a single click will repaint an entire row at once.

Tinting Materials

Some materials support colour tinting, which lets you pick from 18 preset colour variants for that material. This is separate from switching to a different material entirely — you're recolouring the same material in a different shade.

To open the Colour picker:

1. Make sure Paint is your active tool (or Build — you can tint with either).
2. Find an eligible material in the palette.
3. Double-click (desktop) or double-tap (mobile) the swatch.
4. The Colour picker opens with 18 preset swatches. Click one to select it.
5. Anything you then paint with that material will use the chosen colour.

If double-clicking a swatch does nothing, that material has no tint variants. Not all materials support it — most Nature and Liquid materials, for example, have no tint options. Materials that support tinting show a small colour dot on their swatch once a tint is selected, so you can always tell at a glance which colour you're painting with.

Materials Picker

The Materials Picker is an eyedropper button that sits in the search bar row at the top of the Material section in the sidebar. It gives you a fast way to select a material directly from a block already in your scene, instead of hunting for it in the palette.

To use it:

1. Click the Pick button (eyedropper icon) in the Material section to activate picker mode. The button highlights to show it's active.
2. Click any block in the 3D viewport. The material from that block is immediately selected in the palette — the correct category tab is activated, the right swatch is highlighted, and if the block's material belongs to a different shape, the shape is switched automatically.
3. Picker mode deactivates as soon as you pick, so you're straight back to your normal tool ready to build or paint with the picked material.

Clicking empty space while picker mode is active cancels it without changing your current selection. You can also press Escape to cancel.

Paint with Placement Size

Placement Size applies to Paint just as it does to Build and Erase — setting a large size means each tap of Paint covers a whole rectangle of cells at once. This is the fastest way to repaint large areas. See the Placement Size guide for details on configuring it.