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Getting Started

Recipes are named project or ruleset assets. Consumers resolve them through a shared recipe catalog, so the same Material or shape can be selected by Tiles, Avatar equipment, and future Creator tools.

Choose an authoring surface​

  • Eldiron Creator: Recipes will appear as editable project assets with visual controls, live consumer previews, and an advanced text view. Until that integration is complete, use the canonical text workflow below.
  • Canonical text: Save .recipe documents in a project's recipe catalog. Import recipe documents into Creator’s recipe catalog.
  • Command line: Use procedural-recipes to validate and render previews from the same documents without building or running a game.

The examples in this chapter use canonical text because it is copyable, versionable, and independent of the authoring surface.

Create a material​

Create recipes/cloth.recipe:

Material cloth
  name = "Red Woven Cloth"
  wrap = Repeat
  seed = 41

  Noise Weave
    type = Gradient
    fractal = FBm
    scale = F2(12.0, 16.0)
    octaves = 2
    persistence = 0.45

  Value Bands
    source = Smoothstep(0.35, 0.65, Abs(Sin(U * 6.0 + V * 2.0)))

  Color Shadow
    exact = #542c35

  Color Highlight
    exact = #b85d58

  Color Cloth
    source = Mix(Shadow, Highlight, Clamp(Bands * 0.8 + Weave * 0.2, 0.0, 1.0))

  Surface
    color = Cloth
    palette = BaseOnly
    roughness = 0.85
    metallic = 0.0
    opacity = 1.0
    emission = 0.0
    normal = Weave
    normal_strength = 0.18

A catalog entry containing one material uses its path without .recipe as its short alias. The example above is cloth. An entry at wardrobe/cloth.recipe is wardrobe/cloth. In a text project those paths are normally below the project's recipes/ directory; Creator will manage the same aliases as project assets.

Use it from a tile​

Create recipes/cloth-panel.recipe:

Tile
  name = "Cloth Panel"
  size = I2(64, 64)
  coverage = I2(1, 1)
  wrap = Repeat
  seed = 7
  material = cloth

  Noise Relief
    type = Gradient
    fractal = FBm
    scale = F2(5.0, 5.0)
    octaves = 3

  Height Surface
    source = Relief

  Output
    height = Surface

The tile owns geometric height. The material owns color and renderer surface channels. Keeping those responsibilities separate makes cloth reusable on a Tile, Avatar wearable, or future consumer.

Validate and preview from the CLI​

With the procedural-recipes command available:

procedural-recipes validate recipes/cloth.recipe
procedural-recipes render recipes/cloth.recipe \
  --palette palette.hex \
  --output previews/cloth.png

Use --watch while editing to rerender after each saved change. A palette can be a local .hex file or a Lospec slug such as lospec:resurrect-64.

CLI rendering is useful even when a recipe is normally edited in Creator: it provides reproducible previews for documentation, automated checks, and comparing palette or seed variants.

Use recipes in a project​

Import recipe documents into Creator and edit them in the recipe dock. Tile recipes provide baked textures; Material and SDF documents remain in the project for runtime consumers such as avatar equipment.

Alias rules​

  • Aliases identify entries in the project recipe catalog.
  • The .recipe extension is omitted.
  • Alias matching is case-insensitive at runtime; lowercase aliases are recommended.
  • A file with one Material or Sdf declaration receives the file alias.
  • Grouped declarations use <file-alias>/<declaration-id>.
  • Duplicate aliases are errors.

For example, a catalog entry dungeon.recipe containing Material stone and Material mortar exports dungeon/stone and dungeon/mortar.

Next steps​