Visual Style

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This article is a stub. You can help Caves of Qud Wiki by expanding it.

Caves of Qud's in-game art employs a restricted visual style that can generally be described as follows:

• The palette is limited to 18 specific colors.
• Each tile (sprite) can have up to three colors: foreground, detail, and background. (The background color is usually left as the default black; see the Palette section.)
• Each tile is 16 pixels wide by 24 pixels tall.

Additionally, composite screens, art pieces in its style, and the game itself employ:

• a vignette effect, darkening the corners of the screen slightly.
• a scanline effect, emulating the look of images on an old CRT TV by superimposing faint, horizontal lines over the image.
• a desaturation effect, moving all displayed colors slightly closer to grey.

The viginette and scanline effects can be disabled in the options menu.

Some art in the game doesn't strictly follow the limited palette, and employs a unique trick (see: Modding: Tiles#4th Color) to create a theoretically much larger palette as long as the color produced can be created by mixing two of the 18 pre-defined colors.

Palette

Caves of Qud's palette comprises 18 specific “ideal” colors (before any screen effects), given in the following table:

Code	Name	Hex
r	dark red / crimson	#a64a2e	█
R	red / scarlet	#d74200	█
o	dark orange	#f15f22	█
O	orange	#e99f10	█
w	brown	#98875f	█
W	gold / yellow	#cfc041	█
g	dark green	#009403	█
G	green	#00c420	█
b	dark blue	#0048bd	█
B	blue / azure	#0096ff	█
c	dark cyan / teal	#40a4b9	█
C	cyan	#77bfcf	█
m	dark magenta / purple	#b154cf	█
M	magenta	#da5bd6	█
k		#0f3b3a	█
K	dark grey / black	#155352	█
y	grey	#b1c9c3	█
Y	white	#ffffff	█

Palette File for Pixel Art

Copy the following text block into Notepad or another plain text editor and save the file as Caves of Qud.pal. Then you can import it into a pixel art program such as Piskel or Aseprite.

JASC-PAL
0100
18
166 74 46
215 66 0
241 95 34
233 159 16
152 135 95
207 192 65
0 148 3
0 196 32
0 72 189
0 150 255
64 164 185
119 191 207
177 84 207
218 91 214
15 59 58
21 83 82
177 201 195
255 255 255

See Also

• Modding: Text Color Codes & Object Rendering
• Modding: Tiles