Terrafex
— shape the land. flood it. break it.
DustEra is a pixel-art world sandbox. You get a tile world with seven elevation bands, from deep sea to mountain peak, and a set of powers to do whatever you want to it: raise ground, carve trenches, grow mountains, pour water, drop meteors, erupt volcanoes, shake the whole thing with an earthquake.
The name is coined from terra + -fex (as in artifex, pontifex) — world-maker. It's built in Flutter with the Flame engine, and it runs on a real per-tile simulation rather than scripted effects: water finds the lowest point it can reach and pools there, basins fill bottom-up to a waterline, and once a basin is full the next drop spills over the rim and runs downhill. Every drop of water is worth exactly one unit — it never thins out, never multiplies. Only the map edges create or destroy it.
DustEra is in development. The Windows build is playable and being worked on daily; the Android build comes next. No public release yet.
Screenshots
What's already in
Seven elevation bands, edited live
Raise, lower and mountain brushes reshape the world tile by tile, from the sea floor at z=-3 up to peaks at z=3. The z=0 band is deliberately kept dry — that's the beach.
Water that behaves like water
Each poured unit is a real particle. It searches for the lowest tile it can actually reach — travelling freely through existing water, never uphill — and settles there. Slopes drain, basins fill bottom-up, waterlines rise a tile at a time, and full basins overflow at their lowest rim.
Infinite sea, finite ponds
The sea floods in from the map borders and is genuinely infinite. A pond you pour yourself is not — it's tracked separately, so digging a channel to it can never turn it into a spawner.
Sprite waves that seek the shore
Animated foam crests spawn out at sea, aim at the nearest real shoreline, and get denser closer to the coast. Some run up onto the beach tile and fade out at its far edge. Edit the terrain under one and it vanishes instantly.
Ground that gets wet, then dries
Water soaking into dry ground darkens the tile and fades back to normal over time — separate from actual standing water.
Meteor, volcano, earthquake
The meteor is a real falling sprite with a growing ground shadow and an ember trail before it lands, then digs a wide crater that bottoms out at the world floor. Water flows back into the hole afterwards instead of snapping into place.
Pixel-realist rendering
Nearest-neighbour filtering, no anti-aliasing, square pixels everywhere — hand-made sprites for effects and flora, batched so thousands of them stay cheap to draw.
Planned
Android build
Touch controls and a UI that works on a phone screen.
More powers
Additional terrain and disaster tools, with better brush feedback.
Life on the map
Things that grow, spread and react to the world you've built instead of just sitting on it.
Save & share worlds
Keep a world between sessions and hand it to someone else.
Send feedback
Come back when there's something to break.