Verdant 02 — Elevation Tileset [16x16]

Height that actually reads as height, from directly above.

Top-down elevation is hard for one specific reason: a grey band drawn between two identical lawns is not a cliff, it is a path. We know because Verdant 01 built a 19-tile cliff set and cut it — six iterations, each fixing a real defect, each still reading as a trench.

This pack is what that diagnosis turned into. Three cues carry elevation at 16px, and each one was A/B tested against a control before a single tile was drawn — ten arms over two rounds:

• A lighter plateau surface. Necessary and, on its own, not sufficient.
• A crest-to-foot falloff across four separated ramp steps down the cliff face.
• A cast shadow on the ground, offset away from the light and with a broken lower edge.

Two complete elevation systems

The plateau step — a 47-mask autotile. Paint any region and the set supplies every edge, every outer corner and every inner corner. Unlike an ordinary blob set these edges are directional: a lit rim to the north and west, a shadowed face to the east, a real drop with a cast shadow to the south. That is what makes a plateau read as a landform instead of as a lighter rectangle of grass.

The tall cliff — a four-band stack. lip → face_upper → face_lower → foot, then a cast-shadow row on the ground. Six variants of every band plus left and right end caps, so a long run does not visibly repeat.

Plus a second 47-mask set for rocky ground and shelves on top of the plateau, 11 fill tiles and 5 rock props. 149 tiles in total, 94 of them complete autotile transitions.

What is proven, and what is not

Every tile ships three ways — one PNG each, grouped atlases, and a tiles.json documenting every tile's role, tiling mode, sheet slot, autotile mask and cliff band.

Machine-checked before release, and you can re-run all of it:

• Every cell exactly 16×16; every sheet an exact multiple of the cell.
• Every opaque pixel inside the declared 17-colour palette — 485,082 checked.
• Alpha strictly binary — 750,848 pixels. No halos, no soft edges, no upscaling artefacts.
• 94 of 94 autotile mask slots filled. No missing inner corner waiting to break your map.
• Every tile carries a declared role and lands inside its sheet slot — 298 records checked.

Measured, and deliberately not called proof: seams. Every tile's wrap boundary is measured against its own interior, and every 4×4 repetition is rendered and reviewed by eye. We ship all 11 of those renders inside the pack in proof/ so you can look too. We will not write "mechanically proven seamless", because the automated check catches the commonest real defect only rarely — the rendered fields are the control that actually works. That check earned its place on this pack: the rock texture passed every automated test and showed an obvious diagonal weave in the 4×4, so it was re-tuned before release.

Engine imports

• RPG Maker MZ — a tileset image at the exact engine dimensions, all 149 tiles placed.
• Tiled — .tsx files covering all 149 tiles across 5 tilesets, each with its sheet beside it.
• Godot 4 — a TileSet .tres with all 149 tiles across 5 atlas sources. Written to spec and not yet opened in the Godot editor, so we do not claim it is Godot-verified.

Scoped limitations, stated up front

1. A drop taller than four tiles repeats face_upper and loses some of the falloff. Four tiles is the height this set is designed for.
2. The flowered grass tiles are accents, not fills — they tile seamlessly but carry their blooms in the same place in every copy, so place them sparsely.
3. No stairs or ramps. The pack draws the drop, not the route through it.
4. Foliage lives in Verdant 01. This pack ships rock props only.

Part of the Verdant series

Verdant 01 — Overworld — 228 tiles, five ground materials, four complete 47-mask autotile sets, 17 props including trees, bushes and flower clumps.

Verdant 00 — Sample (free) — 120 tiles, no cost and no account. The way to check the grid, palette and autotile masks against your own engine before you spend anything.

Verdant Forge — the generator behind the series. One HTML file: pick a palette, export a complete pack in it, for when your game’s colours are not ours.

Verdant 02's palette is Verdant 01's, extended by ten colours with none of 01's changed — checked by regenerating all 228 of 01's tiles and comparing them against the live pack, 228/228 byte-identical. The two packs sit on one map without a visible join.

Licence

Commercial use permitted, including in paid games. No attribution required. Full terms in LICENSE.txt.

AI disclosure

Graphics: yes. Every tile is generated programmatically by a procedural pixel engine written for this series — it places each pixel on an integer lattice and refuses any colour outside the declared palette at write time. There is no diffusion model, no image generator and no upscaler anywhere in the pipeline, which is exactly why the grid, palette and anti-aliasing claims above are measurements rather than hopes.