Custom palette overrides

The Foundry ships seven baked styles, but the Custom palette card in the Build tool lets you tweak individual colour channels without forking the style.

Every override is independent and nullable — an empty input restores the style’s baked default for that field.

Hillshade strength

A 0–2 slider that multiplies the style’s hillshade intensity.

• 0 — flat shading, no shadows.
• 1 — the style default (the slider’s labelled value).
• 2 — double-strength shadows, dramatic contrast.

The slider has a Reset affordance next to it that returns the field to the palette default.

Ocean shallow / Ocean deep

Hex colour pickers for the two ends of the ocean depth ramp. The renderer linearly interpolates the middle two stops between whichever end you override.

• Set just Ocean shallow — the deep end stays as the style default.
• Set just Ocean deep — the shallow end stays as the style default.
• Set both — the whole ramp is your custom gradient.

Tip

A warm-orange shallow combined with a deep navy gives a sunset / fjord feel. Two greens give an alien / shallow-marsh look.

Land tint

A hex blended into every biome at about 30%. Strong enough to read as a unified colour cast, gentle enough that forests still look greener than deserts.

Use this for an overall mood shift — a warm amber for “ancient parchment”, a cool blue for “moonlit”, a violet for “fey realm”.

Forest

Directly overwrites the forest and rainforest biome colours. The forest stipple dots get pulled toward a 40%-darker version of your override so they stay readable on the new fill.

Mountain

Directly overwrites the mountain biome colour.

Coast / border ink

Overwrites the outline ink used for:

• The coastline stroke (default + cove segments — cliffs use a darker version automatically).
• Kingdom borders.

Useful for matching kingdom dashes to a custom palette or making the shoreline pop against a stylised landmass.

How to enter colours

Every colour row has a swatch picker on the left and a free-form hex input on the right. The picker fires on each commit; the text input accepts standard six-digit hex (#aabbcc). Typing an invalid string holds the current value — the override only updates once the input matches the hex pattern. Clearing the text input restores the palette default.

Where overrides apply

The same overrides flow through:

• The CPU painter that produces the saved PNG.
• The GPU painter that drives the live preview.
• The SVG vector overlay (coastlines, kingdom borders, rivers).

So what you see in the live preview matches what gets saved exactly.

Related

• Terrain & detail — the parent section.
• Build tab — pick a base style; overrides layer on top of it.
• Kingdoms — the Coast / border ink override is what drives the single-colour kingdom border mode.