Interface map

A lookup for the interface. Each entry says what the surface is for and points at the page that documents its controls in depth. The shortcut table at the end is the complete set.

Three screens#

Dayside has one window and three screens. The project decides which one you land on.

The setup wizard is not a screen of its own: it opens over whatever is behind it, and the app behind it cannot be used until you leave.

Worlds picker#

The front door. Documented in Your first world.

Globe workspace#

The whole-world screen. Documented in Working on a globe.

Top bar#

Stage and tools#

Globe tools is a four-way exclusive toolbar: Rotate orbits the sphere, Box drags a longitude and latitude box, Lasso draws a freehand polygon, and Paint paints the world layers with the World brush (globe view only).

The actions row along the top of the stage holds, in order:

The stage itself takes focus and handles G, F and Escape. The globe canvas and the flat surface each have their own key set; both are in the shortcut table.

Canvas overlays#

Side panel#

The pipeline glance on a region card is always in this order: Rough terrain, Terrain detail, Section colour.

Job dock#

Bottom left, one card per long-running globe job: Rebuild globe, Re-compose globe, Colour globe, Enhance world terrain, Create region, Bake settlement scenario and Bake night lights. Cards persist through Queued, Running, Done and Failed, so a modal you closed can never read as success.

A running card shows stage and percent, a failed card shows the reason plus a Try this: fix, and a finished card shows its duration. Cards offer Cancel, a retry (Retry, or Refresh for a region creation) and a dismiss. Every card carries a scope and subject tag so a button and its job card always agree.

Footers#

The panel footer states READY n/N and the next export size, and holds Re-compose globe (enabled only when the globe is stale) and Export globe. The globe footer is one mono line: status, region count and scale.

Section editor#

Top bar#

Most of these disable each other: Generate, Deterrace, Erode and Import are unavailable while a render, a generate or a paint commit is in flight.

Left rail#

Top to bottom.

Every rail button except About & credits is disabled while a paint commit is running.

Canvas#

Pan by dragging, zoom from 0.6 to 3.0 in steps of 0.25, and a Zoom in / Zoom out / Fit cluster bottom right.

The canvas states the render's phase on itself rather than in a panel: ACQUIRING · N% with a pass and resolution readout, QUEUED with a queue position and Prioritise / Cancel, PREVIEW STALE · N CHANGED with Re-render, a failed pass with a retry, NO ACQUISITION YET, or an ACQUIRED chip. In Draw mode it instead reports LOADING HEIGHTFIELD…, CANNOT PAINT, or the coastline preview's state.

Heads-up display#

Mounted only in Draw mode with the Draw tool. There is no equivalent readout in Render mode.

Controls behind these readouts are in Painting terrain and Terrain and generation reference.

Control panel#

On the right, headed Controls. Acquire and Compare A/B are pinned to its foot in both modes.

In Draw mode it holds the paint stack:

In Render mode it holds the look stack, all of it documented in Colour and climate reference. The groups run in this order:

There is no Rivers group and no Lakes group: rivers are a switch inside Water colour, and lakes are placed in Draw mode with the Lake tool.

Every slider applies on release, and every change marks the preview stale. Groups whose inputs are inert say so: flow widening, density, width, green banks and river strength grey out when Rivers is off.

Footer bar#

One mono strip: world name, EXTENT w x h km, an engine pill and the zoom level. The engine pill reads QUEUED · POSITION n, ACQUIRING N%, PREVIEW STALE, PASS FAILED or ENGINE IDLE. The extent quoted is your own selection, without the feathered margin.

Global chrome#

Status strip#

Mounted above every screen, so a warning is never editor-only. Three rows, worst first:

1. Engine offline, with a message, a fix and a dismiss. Suppressed on the picker when the workspace takeover already owns that state.
2. Notice, one line per warning, each dismissible.
3. Reconnecting to the engine…, shown only after the connection has been down for a few seconds, with a world open, and no offline row showing.

Edit-proxy banner#

Sits under the top bar when a large section is being edited through a lower-resolution working copy. It states the working resolution, the native size and the count of edits not yet baked, and offers Bake to native and Discard. On resume it instead offers Edit at 4K and Change…

The bake is always an explicit button. It never fires on its own. See Enhancing terrain.

Modals#

The acquisitions drawer is not a modal. It slides in from the top-bar inbox button, is mounted in both the editor and the globe workspace, and lists every export with its status, its files and its Gaea handoff numbers.

Words the interface uses consistently#

Action verbs are fixed. Acquire and Re-render start a section render; Render section colour names the section colour stage; Generate terrain runs the terrain model on a section; Erode terrain is the section landscape-evolution pass; Enhance world terrain and Colour globe are the two whole-world passes; Re-compose globe and Update globe fold edits back in; Bake to native applies edits made at a working resolution to the full-resolution section.

Every action header and job card also carries a scope and subject tag, formatted WHOLE WORLD · TERRAIN or SECTION · COLOUR, so you can always tell what a running job will touch.

Keyboard shortcuts#

Every shortcut in the app. All of the Draw-mode keys are ignored while you are typing in a text field or using a dropdown.

The export, generate, deterrace and import modals have no Escape handler. Close them with their own close button. Deterrace additionally refuses both the close button and a backdrop click while a run is in flight.