Niello — Generated Arms & Armour Plates for RPG Maker MZ

Every weapon and every piece of armour in your game draws its own engraved plate.

Niello reads your Weapons and Armors database and generates the object itself as vector metalwork — blade, fuller, quillons, grip and pommel for arms; helm, cuirass, boss and greave profiles for armour — composed from that item's own type, tier, parameters, traits and element, and set in blackened silver inlay.

Nothing ships as an image file. No icon sheet, no atlas, no PNG. 77 hand-authored motifs across six axes, combined into 230,620 forms and rendered in 9 alloys.

And the plate is not static

Most generated-art plugins compute their artwork once, from data that never changes. Niello's plate is a function of play. It records what the item has done — strikes made, enemies felled, criticals landed, damage borne — and redraws itself as those accumulate. The metal darkens. The edge takes notches. The tally marks fill in.

The same sword looks different at hour 2 and hour 40.

---

⚠️ 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. NielloForms.js — the form corpus, 77 hand-authored metalwork motifs
2. NielloArms.js — the reader, database row to plate description
3. NielloPlate.js — the renderer
4. Niello.js — the product: parameters, commands, the Armoury scene

All four are required. Niello.js checks the other three when it loads and, if one is missing, prints exactly which file is absent to the console (F8) and stops — rather than half-working. The reader and the renderer each look the corpus up when they are called, never at load time, so nothing here depends on where your other plugins sit.

Core methods extended — all 4 by saved-original prototype extension, none replaced: Game_System.prototype.initialize, Game_Action.prototype.apply, Window_MenuCommand.prototype.addOriginalCommands, Scene_Menu.prototype.createCommandWindow.

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

What it does not do

Niello does not implement equipping, upgrading, stat maths or crafting. It reads the stock MZ database and draws. Keep the equipment plugin you already use — this is the part that draws it.

What ships

• Four raw, readable JavaScript files. No dependencies, no other plugin required.
• An Armoury scene, on the menu by default or opened from an event.
• 3 plugin commands, 10 parameters, and 13 notetags for per-item overrides.
• Works in a brand-new project with no configuration at all.

Verified

• 0 stock windows, 0 stock buttons, 0 img/system art in the Armoury — measured in the real engine against a detector first proven to report 53 leaks on a stock MZ menu.
• 4 core methods extended, every original saved and called, 0 replaced.
• 2 draw calls per frame against a 60 budget; zero allocation in the per-frame path, enforced by a static scan proven to fire against a deliberately broken copy.
• Lossless, versioned save round-trip, through both makeSaveContents and JsonEx.makeDeepCopy.
• 213 automated checks, 37 of them running inside RPG Maker MZ.

One honest limitation

RPG Maker MZ has no item instances — $gameParty stores a count of $dataWeapons[7], not seven individually-tracked swords. So history is kept per item ID: three Iron Swords share one record. That is a limit of the engine, not a shortcut here, and it is stated up front so you can decide before you buy.

Also from Core Systems Asset Factory

Generated-art systems for MZ, each drawing its own artwork from your own data:

• Sigil Core — every spell draws its own animated seal
• Asterism — a constellation skill tree where every node draws its own star
• Formulary — every recipe draws its own alchemical plate
• Hallmark — every item struck with its own guild mark
• Herbarium — every reagent mounted as a botanical plate
• Armorial — a coat of arms generated from what the playthrough actually did
• Lineage — a branching evolution atlas of generated specimen marks