The Architecture of Rain World

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Preamble

So you want to make "a region", maybe "the region", and chances are you want to take some inspiration from the game itself instead of creating something completely alien and unrelated. It helps to know that Rain World was made alongside the very tools that made it. Rooms like the ones from Outskirts and the ones in the Wall were made with very different versions of the Level Editor and very different tilesets available. Matching the look for each region involves checking out how it was made, since there's no generic "Rain World" recipe.

Inspecting existing rooms

In order to mimic a room style, you'll have to look closely at the source material. Two important steps here are:

• Open the room in-game, or browse it at the interactive map to look at its details.
• Open the room project for the room in the level editor. That's right! All the vanilla room projects ship with the editor, and you can learn lots from them.

In the Level Editor, when inspecting existing rooms, a few important things to notice are:

• You can "sample" a tile in the Tile Editor, by hovering over it and pressing "Q". That will select the tile that is placed under your cursor, so you can easily identify it and see which tab it is on.
• You can see placed effects and where they're applied in the Effect Editor by entering "Edit" mode ("E") and then using W and S to browse through the placed effects.
• You can sample placed props in the Props Editor by pressing "B"

With these resources, you can know in fine detail how that particular room was made, and you can use that and adapt it to your needs.

Documented Designs

Note: This guide was migrated and adapted from the previous wiki, the section about shelters was removed.

This article is a collection of guides dedicated on explaining how to get certain structures seen all throughout Rain World "just right." Anything from tips and tricks, to guides of how to make complex multi-tile machines. These guides are not limited to just vanilla Rain World, and any other unique and helpful structures are welcome to be added!

Sky Islands Data Boxes

Flashing blinking lights surrounded by kinked tubes and machines are used in a few isolated rooms in sky islands.

Basic Construction:

A large rectangle of "SuperStructure" material. With ZeroG tube props between it and the nearest walls. Can optionally be covered by machines or cement, and then washed over with slime effect to make it slightly more rough and broken down. In game, a "superStructureFuses" object needs to be placed and aligned with the holes on the material to properly display the blinking lights inside the machine. Various objects and machine can be placed around it to extend the object from being a simple blinking box, into some strange machine. The rooms palette and cloud cover helps to hide the simplicity of the actual construction.

The Wall - General Style Guide

NOTICE - The Wall is a very complex and multilayered area. Experience with the editor is heavily recommended!

The wall's construction is a mix of large detail tiles from "The Wall" category. Cooling rods are assembled out of their component pieces, usually in order of large rod segments with one or two tip segments before their cap. However oddly ordered rods can spice up the look. Rods often have poles sticking out from their caps. The bases of cooling rods are always present in single or pairs. These rods are connected directly to the wall using three "Giant screw" tiles from the "machines" category, and then connected to giant pipes traveling into the wall.

The Wall itself is constructed of cement, and dense pipes. Using huge pipes and other segments of the wall as spacers. The base of cooling rods can also attach to larger dome machines. These often have multiple segments of "under cooler" beneath them.

If you need to pass between a cooling rod and the wall itself. The two segments are separated by three giant screws on each side. With huge pipes between them. Poles are used to climb between the gaps. Short cut entrances are very often wedged between wall segments, or directly attached to the tops of domes or pipes. Short cuts almost never come out from cooling rods themselves, but from the larger structures behind them.

Cooling rods along the side of the wall are used as floors and ceilings to rooms. However the Wall's cooling rods never extend for more then room in width. The only segments of the wall that stick out from the wall itself are large spherical chambers with antennas on them. These will be done in a separate architecture guide.

The far background of the Wall consists of thick pipes, cement, and rarely a "very large beam" from the "metal" category. The tips of these beams can be capped off with "pillar beam connection"s from the "underhang" category.

The wall's materials are broken up into two segments. Certain areas having large chunks of "random machines" fitted with pipes. The tunnels through the machines using "crawlspace" tiles on top of them. Other tunnels outside of the machines use "crawlhole" tiles. The upper sections are dotted with "Asian sign" tiles. Usually mixed between dense pipes or scaffolding. These can be used to break up the color of the palette and make your walls seem less uniform. Huge chains are used as props to beak up the background itself. These are anchored to beams and the Wall's side by small blocks of "random machine" material.

Plant life along the wall is very scarce. Mostly being various grasses and hanging roots. The rubble effect is also used here to create a more varied ground. However, using piles of large trash or dirt can also work to break up the straight lines that the cooling rods and domes create. Grasses often grow out of these. Food is also rare on the wall. Very few segments having hanging fruits. Slime and BlackGoo effects as always help to break up the more straight and dull segments of bare materials. The underside of cooling rods are slimier then the tops. Hanging chains can also be used to help break up the background. Just be sure none of the chains connect off the edge of the screen!

Finally. The "AboveCloudsView" room setting in the dev tools is used to draw the giant sea of clouds view near the upper half of the wall. This however, requires your room to be at a certain height above 0 in the Map Tab's "canon view." An easy method to configure this is to simply drag the first room you want this effect to appear in upwards on the map. Save, and reload the room by dying. If the effect is not far enough up the wall yet, keep going. If it is too far, move it back down until you are happy with its elevation, and then build your map off of this room's elevation.

The default palette of the wall is 19, with a very slight fade to 29. EffectA is 8 and effectB is 7. A heavy fog, a light bloom, wind sounds with the wall's own unique humming sound effects complete most of the region's ambience. Don't be afraid to explore some stranger twists to the region's structure however!