LostVale guide

Building

The build brush, building materials, tools and what they break, felling and timber grades, stations and furniture, how the game reads rooms from what you build, fire, debris and siege engines.

The build brush

Press B for build mode. You build with a brush in the world’s own voxels, from a single microvoxel (1.5 cm) to a whole metre:

• Left button places, right button removes (or takes up a station or piece of furniture), and holding the middle button paints over what is there without changing its shape.
• [ and ] set the brush from 1 to 64 microvoxels across.
• G changes the shape: cube, sphere, cylinder or wedge. T turns the wedge.
• H snaps the brush to the grid, for walls that line up.

Placing is paid for with building-block items, so you carry the stuff you build with: the volume you fill uses up the blocks. The Artisan’s building cost steps make it cheaper.

Building materials

There are 56 kinds of building block, from the humble to the grand:

• Timber: oak, pine and beech planking, oak timber frame, iron-bound oak, carved oak panelling, tarred weatherboard, palisade stakes.
• Earth and wattle: wattle and daub, cob, turf, packed earth, gravel paths.
• Stone: drystone, rubble-cored walls, granite, limestone and sandstone ashlar, slate coursing, chalk clunch, marble, knapped flint walling, cobblestones, flagstones and granite setts, gilded stone.
• Fired and finished: brickwork, terracotta floor tiles, lime plaster, whitewashed render and limewashes in ochre and pink.
• Roofs: straw, water-reed and heather thatch, slate roofing, clay tiles, oak shingles, stone slates. Roofing is laid in courses down the slope of the surface.
• Metal: iron and bronze cladding.
• Glass: clear glazing, frosted glass, leaded lights, bullseye roundels, opaline glazing, lumen glass, and stained glass in ruby, cobalt, amber, silver-stain, forest green, azure, murrey and rose. Light through coloured glass colours the room.

Tools and gathering

What a tool removes turns into items by what it was made of. A tool’s power decides what it can break, so better tools reach harder stuff. The Artisan’s gathering yield, ore yield and herb yield bring more from the same work.

Felling trees

The axe notches a standing tree at the height you strike it. Once the notch is deep enough the tree hinges over away from you, tears free of its hinge wood and crashes down as one body, shedding leaves. It lies where it fell as a trunk to buck into timber. Stand clear: what falls crushes what it lands on.

Timber

A felled tree is measured where it falls: the length of its clear stem, how thick it is at the butt and at the top, and how straight it runs. It takes the best grade it meets:

Each species has the grades its wood can reach. Oak gives every grade: spars, keels, compass timber and beams. Pine and ash give spars and beams, beech beams, and birch, holly, hawthorn and rowan only logs. A mast needs an old-growth tree because only old growth reaches the length and girth the grade asks. Trees regrow from a felled stool, and seed gathered from standing trees in their season can be sown to plant new woods. How fast they grow is set when the world is made (see Getting started).

Stations, chests and furniture

Crafting stations, chests, beds and furniture are crafted as kits and set down from the hand where you look. Build mode’s remove takes them up again. There are well over a hundred furnishings to make, buy and set down: beds, tables, benches, cupboards, barrels, counters, market stalls, weapon racks, candles, lanterns, chandeliers, lamp posts, rugs, tapestries, banners, trade signs, wells, fountains, market crosses, statues and stocks. Cupboards, barrels and chests keep things in them. Beeswax candles burn brighter and steadier than tallow.

Rooms and buildings

The game reads what you build back from the voxels:

• Air with a roof over it within a storey or two is sheltered.
• The sheltered air reached from a bed or a bench without passing under the open sky is one building.
• Its floors are where a person can stand; rooms are the open cores of the floor, divided where doorways narrow.
• A room is enclosed when little of its boundary opens on the sky: a door or two and a window are fine.
• What fills a building names it: the crafting benches in it decide its trade (a bench and a forge make a smithy; training dummies and archery butts a barracks), and beds make it a dwelling.

A wall one microvoxel thick still counts. This is what turns a house into a homestead that draws settlers and grows into a hamlet, a town or a city. See Fame, rank, home and family.

Fire

Fire is simulated in the world’s voxels. Heat from flames warms the cells around them (rising far more than sideways or down); a cell holding fuel catches once it passes its fuel’s ignition point, then burns, gives off heat of its own, chars and is eaten away, and leaves char, ash or nothing. Timber, thatch, brush, green wood, leaves, wattle, peat and coal all burn their own way. Rain cools and slows it. Burnt-through timber collapses. Keep your hearth in a chimney, and your thatch away from the forge.

Debris

What breaks comes loose as real rigid bodies: rubble from a wall, a felled trunk, shards from a siege stone. Pieces fly, tumble and crush what they land on, with the sound and dust of their stuff, and once they come to rest they are written back into the world as voxels where they lie, to be quarried or bucked like anything else.

Siege engines

The ballista, mangonel, trebuchet and battering ram are set down like any other piece and manned with E. A manned engine turns to your aim and the strike looses: the ballista flat and far, the mangonel and trebuchet in a lob whose range rises with the aim. The shot bursts where it lands, harms what it strikes and shatters the built stuff around the blow. The mangonel breaks timber, earth and rough stone; the trebuchet and the ram break dressed stone too. Masonry left without support comes down. Breaking a settlement’s walls or harming its folk is a crime there.

Settlements mend what is broken, a little each working day, from the footings up. Nothing you added is ever taken down by them.

Written from the game's source and content as of commit 02e81b2 (2026-11-01).