Recipe: Seamless tiles

Designing a tile that repeats without visible seams. The editor's Tile preview mode replicates the canvas in a 3×3 grid so you can see the seams as you paint.

![Screenshot: tile preview showing a 16×16 grass tile repeated nine times, with visible seams highlighted on the edges — placeholder]

Goal

A 16×16 (or 32×32, 64×64 — any size) tile where the right edge connects cleanly to the left edge, top to bottom. Useful for backgrounds, terrain, walls.

Steps

1. Start a square canvas

Ctrl+K → "New project" → 16×16 (or any other power-of-two size your engine prefers).

Pick a small palette. Tiles work best with 6–12 colours — too many colours makes seams harder to hide because every variation needs three more variations to feel intentional.

2. Turn on tile preview

Hotkey T or click the ⊞ icon in the top bar.

The canvas now shows your work in a 3×3 grid. The centre cell is interactive (paint there); the 8 surrounding cells are display-only and update live as you paint.

3. Block in the base colour

Fill (G) with your base — for grass, a mid-saturation green. The 9 cells should look identical at this point.

4. Add detail

Paint with the pencil (B). Crucially:

• The seam runs along the canvas edges. Whatever you paint on the right edge has to match what's on the left edge — they're the same edge in the tiled grid.
• The tile preview reveals this immediately: a bright pixel on the right edge appears as a bright pixel on the left edge of the next tile.

A common workflow: start in the centre, work outwards, and let the tile preview tell you when an element is "spilling" across the seam.

5. Use symmetry where it helps

For tiles with a clear horizontal flow (water ripples, rocky ground bands), turn on horizontal symmetry (Symmetry section, axis = horizontal, centre = canvas vertical-centre). Strokes mirror across the axis, which makes the tile naturally periodic.

6. Test by exporting

When the seams look invisible, open the export dialog (Ctrl+K → "Export PNG") and grab the PNG. Drop it into your engine's tile painter and lay down a 4×4 area — any visible repeat is a sign to come back and break it up.

Tips

• Avoid centre-pieces. A single dramatic feature in the centre of the tile will be a "Where's Waldo" giveaway after one repeat. Keep variation small and distributed.
• Three layers helps. Base → mid-tone variation → small specks. Each on its own layer so you can adjust the contrast without redoing the painting.
• Auto-tile 47 (in the Frames timeline header) is the next step: design a single "filled" tile, generate 47 neighbour variants, hand-clean the awkward ones.

See also

• Tile preview — full reference for the 3×3 grid mode.
• Auto-tile 47 — generate a 47-tile sheet from one source tile.
• Symmetry — mirror strokes across axes.