We recently made a post on how to customise Fern's palette and shared some really cool palettes that users made who had discovered this feature.

Being an unplanned "feature", it is a little bit hidden. However, we felt really encouraged seeing players use it to create their own unique palettes. That's why we decided to make a small update to this feature and allow further customisation of the palette.

As you can see from the below two images, the new palette customisation gives Fern's palette a lot more areas of her sprite you can play around with.

Old palette customisation:


New palette customisation:



We also included some pre-made palettes that we had made for pride month for you to use!

Right-click on Rusted Moss in your Steam library and click on "Properties..."


Navigate to "Local Files" on the left navigation and then click on "Browse..." This should open up Rusted Moss' local files.

The previous step should have opened up Rusted Moss' local files. You should see a folder called "Fern_custom".


The information on how to change the palette is in the "read me" txt file. But to go into a little more detail...

Open up the file enable_custom.ini in notepad and set the value "enabled" to 1. Doing this tells the game to use a custom palette for Fern. When you have done so, the file should look like this:


If you save this and load up Rusted Moss, you will notice that Fern no longer uses the default palette and she is using the example palette made.


There are also a few pre-made palettes that Faxdoc made you can use if you do not want to make your own!

To use these pre-made palettes, just change the palette_file value (it is set to "palette_data_custom_example.png" as default) to use any of the pngs included in the folder:

• "Palette_pride_asexual.png"
  
• "Palette_pride_lgbt.png"
  
• "Palette_pride_trans.png"

There are also different hair settings made to match with the pre-made palettes. Check out the hair section of the guide to see how to set them or make your own.

You can use the image file palette_data_custom_example.png as a template to craft your custom palette.



Each coloured square corresponds to a part of Fern's sprite.

To help you get started, palette_data_custom_example_ref.png shows what a Fern palette generated from palette_data_custom_example.png would look like. Just to give you an idea of which squares correspond to which part of Fern's sprite.


Note that the reference image (palette_data_custom_example_ref.png) is ONLY a reference image so should not be used to change the palette. Making the notepad file refer to it will not work. Palette files need to follow the format shown in palette_data_custom_example.png

Either edit palette_data_custom_example.png or create your own image in the same format and have the notepad refer to that.

Fern's hair is actually a gradient and made up of two different colours.

It is also the enable_custom.ini file that tells the game where to look for the hair. The part highlighted in yellow in the below image indicates the file the game will reference when rendering Fern's hair.


The example inside the custom_fern folder is called: "hair_data_custom_example.ini"

You should see something like this when you open the file in notepad:


Note that the game will automatically ignore all lines that come after a double slash (//). So in the example shown, the game will only look at the lines shown in the "alternative red/blue" part as those are the only lines not commented out with the double slash.


So if you are using one of the pre-made pride palettes, you can comment out the "alternative red/blue" portion and remove the double slashes from one of the other pre-made hair sections.

As an example, if you wanted to use the hair settings of "pride-trans" (that was made to go along with Palette_pride_trans.png), you would make your Hair_data_custom_example.ini" file look like this:


The "length" value tells the game how long you want Fern's ponytail to be.

The "start_col" and "end_col" values are the colour gradient of her hair.

The numbers are GML hex format, so it doesn't use RGB but rather BGR. You can use an online tool like this[chrisanselmo.com] (Under GameMaker "color picker") to convert your colours to GML hex format. In that tool linked, the number to use is the one labelled "GML RAW".