Elytra — Every Insect Your Game Declares, Drawn at Runtime, for RPG Maker MZ

Your bestiary already has beetles in it. Elytra draws them — a distinct specimen for every creature your project declares, built from a row you already wrote and rendered at run time.

There is no PNG in this package. No sprite sheet, no atlas, no icon set. The insect on screen is geometry: a body plan, an elytra sculpture, a hindwing, a pair of antennae and a material, solved from your own database and drawn by code.

You do not have to author anything. Install it, and every enemy resolves. A note tag is there when you want to decide a particular specimen, and it is never required.

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What a project actually gets

Measured over synthetic projects on the unauthored case — plain creature names, no tags, no insect words, which is the project most people actually have:

60 species resolve to 60 visibly different specimens (53 distinct in body, sculpture and antenna alone).

That residual is the birthday problem rather than a defect, and it is stated honestly for that reason: a uniform spread over 224 reachable specimens cannot do better, and more corpus makes it smaller rather than zero. At 24 rows it is 24 of 24.

The corpus

• 12 body plans — ground, stag, rhino, weevil, leaf, longhorn, click, tiger, scarab, firefly, diving, rove
• 8 elytra sculptures — smooth, striate, ribbed, punctate, granular, costate, reticulate, sulcate, cut into the wing cases as a height field the shell is lit through
• 7 antennae — filiform, clubbed, lamellate, serrate, pectinate, geniculate, moniliform
• 7 materials — matte, satin, lacquer, metallic, iridescent, pruinose, velvet
• 4 hindwing states — folded, ajar, fanned, full: the one axis that changes the outline

An antenna is not chosen freely. Each body wears only the two or three forms that body entomologically carries, which is 28 body-and-antenna pairs rather than 84 — so a lamellate club never lands on a longhorn. That constraint is why the automatic reading reaches 224 specimens rather than a bigger number it could not honestly draw. With explicit tags the reachable set is 672; across all five axes, 18,816.

The cabinet

A specimen drawer scene: your creatures down one side, the selected one pinned on a card with its five axes named beneath it. Custom type, custom furniture, custom layout — no RPG Maker windowskin, no default font, and zero stock engine windows on screen, which is asserted by the engine gate rather than claimed.

Discovery is yours to drive. Elytra does not hook combat and does not patch BattleManager or Game_Troop, because guessing when a species counts as "found" is exactly the decision a plugin should not make for you — and hooking the battle flow is where conflicts come from. Turn on Reveal everything to show the whole cabinet, or call Discover a species where your game decides the player has properly seen one.

Declaring specimens

Do nothing, and every row resolves from its own name and note text, falling back to its identity — deterministic, so the same project always draws the same insects, and order-independent, so reordering your database changes nothing.

<elytra body:stag sculpture:ribbed antenna:geniculate lustre:metallic venation:fanned hue:#3B6E2A>

Every field is optional. An unknown id is dropped and reported, never guessed and never thrown — a typo in a note tag will not crash a battle, and the valid fields beside it still apply.

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⚠️ Compatibility — the question you actually have

Tested against RPG Maker MZ with the stock scripts unmodified, verified by running the plugin in the real engine rather than only in tests.

Plugin Manager order:

1. ElytraCorpus.js — [Elytra] The authored corpus - body plans, elytra sculptures, wing venations, antennae, iridescences and the orders they belong to.
2. ElytraInk.js — [Elytra] Colour solving - relief, contrast and hue travel. Every colour in this product is SOLVED against what it sits on, never authored.
3. ElytraForms.js — [Elytra] The body silhouettes - one outline per body plan, traced as ONE path, plus the legs, head features and antennae that are part of that outline.
4. ElytraSculpt.js — [Elytra] The elytral sculpture - striae, ribs, punctures, granules, keels and reticulation, as a HEIGHT FIELD the shell is lit through.
5. ElytraVenation.js — [Elytra] The hindwing - membrane, venation and spread. The one axis that changes the specimen's outline.
6. ElytraShell.js — [Elytra] The lit specimen - shell colour, lustre, iridescence, seam and rim. Turns a body outline into a chitinous object.
7. ElytraReading.js — [Elytra] Turns a row of the buyer's own database into a specimen. The classifier - and the place a generator's range dies.
8. ElytraScene.js — [Elytra] The cabinet - the specimen drawer scene, the discovery record, the save seam and the plugin commands.

It extends exactly one core method, by saved-original prototype extension, not replaced: Game_System.prototype.initialize.

Because nothing is clobbered, Elytra co-exists with other plugins that patch the same seams, including large suites.

Tested, because nobody else is going to be

• 161 assertions across 14 gates, every gate exit 0.
• A fresh-install test that extracts this exact zip into a blank RPG Maker MZ project, registers all eight files in the worst order a person can create by dragging them in, tags two stock enemies the way the Readme says, and drives the cabinet.
• 33 adversarial attacks — malformed tags, a 200 KB note, an empty database, null rows, NaN weights, 2000 rows, negative radii, a save from a future version, a corrupt save record, repeated re-entry, and the uninstall path. All survived, with zero page errors.
• Every claim in the Readme is checked against the shipped source by a program, so a number in the documentation cannot drift from the code.

What is in the download

Eight plugin files as raw, readable, uncompressed JavaScript — nothing minified, nothing obfuscated — plus the Readme and the licence. Read it, change it, keep it. Ship as many games with it as you like, commercial or free, and keep 100% of your revenue.

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More generated-specimen tooling from Core Systems Asset Factory: Creel draws the fish your game can catch, Herbarium draws its plants, and Augury generates a 78-card oracle deck.