Stonehearth

Stonehearth

173 ratings
How to Paint: Roads with Depth
By GenBOOM
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Process
1) How wide do you want the road to be?
2) Pick the lightest and darkest colors you would like for the road.
3) Pick a few transition colors between those two light and dark colors.
3) Create a ruleset for how you want those colors to be painted so that the transition between colors looks correct. Mainly you need to focus on what colors you want painted directly next to another color, and colors that bleed into diagonal squares. You can also add a bit of randomness to the roads using the same method to get potholes or grass tufts. Or you can use the patterns to make the road look like it is interacting with the things on top of and around it, to make it look more used near buildings, darker and more wet near water, and more grassy near a forest, etc. This may require a bit of fiddling and color hunting until you get the look you want.
4) Pick a starting location for the darkest color and put it in the center of the road to give it a worn down or wet road look. Do the opposite to make it look shiny, new and curved upwards.
5) Add a random end piece to your road so that it can vanish into the surrounding landscape.



can do this with more or less colors with different lengths of color variation and color contrast to have one color stand out more or less to get the look you want

8 Comments
Belaaron 27 Jul, 2023 @ 11:27pm 
For those mentioning how long this takes...

Premake them. Use the stockpile zone tool to mark out a 16x16 interior area, and build a road module inside that area. Make sure the connecting points of the road always align at the center of each side, and then you should be able to place them down and connect no matter the orientation.

I use fence posts in the corners of the space of the template as alignment markers. They can always be removed and sold later.

I do the same with walls and buildings, with larger ones being 32x32.
crafter004 12 Dec, 2022 @ 9:46am 
Great! now I just have to figure out how to use the paint brush!
AlexTheRedScout 24 Oct, 2022 @ 3:49pm 
its a nice helpful guide but main problem is most would need to take hours to get right considering stone hearth isn't getting updates anymore and most would be taking the time on finishing the game i think adding a mod that automates coloring/patterned roads might be helpful in the long run as a mod
Jockles 15 Aug, 2020 @ 2:06am 
Super Helpful. I've generally really struggled with my builds looking super flat, and this is so simple and yet I never thought of it. Using a similar theory to make the base/walls of my buildings has made a WORLD of difference - even if it is a bit fiddly it's worth the extra time.
Impregnator of Marble 30 Mar, 2020 @ 12:39am 
i think it's enough to just have a pattern of some kind
GenBOOM  [author] 16 Feb, 2020 @ 4:05am 
oh just realized I already linked to that in the top. somehow missed that I did that already. hope it makes your games have a better feel to them :)
GenBOOM  [author] 16 Feb, 2020 @ 4:03am 
no prob. I made templates for these roads if you want to download them they are on the forums, I never uploaded them to steam yet https://discourse.stonehearth.net/t/roads-with-depth-road-templates/32702
PhreshBoyLlama 15 Feb, 2020 @ 12:07pm 
thanks for the tip!