# World Building

A world that builds itself.

From greybox to grasslands: spatial queries, procedural geometry, terrain sculpting and
foliage — 310+ actions that let your AI build and populate whole levels on its own.

## Meshes & Level Design (259 actions)

*The biggest toolbox in the plugin.*

Full actor CRUD and scene manipulation, physics-based spatial queries (raycasts, sweeps,
overlaps) that work in-editor without needing PIE, level blockout with atomic replacement,
GeometryScript operations, procedural furniture, structures, mazes and terrain, town
generation, prop scatter, decals, lighting and acoustics analysis, accessibility grading and
performance budgeting — 22 capability tiers, one namespace, no exaggeration.

Covers: Spatial queries, Blockout → production, GeometryScript, Procedural geometry, Town
generation, Prop scatter, Nanite toggle.

## Landscapes (34 actions)

*Terrain, sculpted by prompt.*

Describe the terrain you want — "eroded desert mesas with a dry riverbed" — and it
generates the heightmap and writes it straight onto the edit layer. From there: import and
export heightmaps, sculpt with soft-brush smooth / flatten / erode, paint weight layers, and
drive splines, grass types and Nanite displacement. Landmass patches stamp terrain
non-destructively, so you can drag the stamp afterwards and the ground follows, and runtime
virtual texture blending lets grass grow over the rock you just dropped in. Long imports run
as async jobs your AI polls while it gets on with other work.

Covers: Heightmap from a prompt, Sculpt & erode, Weight layers, Landmass patches, RVT
blending, Splines & grass, Nanite displacement.

## Mesh Terrain (UE 5.8) (13 actions)

*Caves and overhangs, not just hills.*

UE 5.8's Mesh Partition terrain is real 3D geometry rather than a heightfield, so caves,
overhangs and arches are finally on the table. Your AI spawns a terrain, imports a heightmap
or converts an existing static mesh into one, then sculpts it non-destructively through a
modifier stack — remesh, tessellate, noise, boolean carves, mesh projection, texture
patches, splines — reordering or retuning any layer without losing the ones under it.
Experimental, and UE 5.8 only: the classic landscape isn't going anywhere.

Covers: UE 5.8 Mesh Partition, True 3D terrain, Caves & overhangs, Modifier stack, Boolean
carving, Mesh → terrain.

## Foliage (10 actions)

*A forest in one sentence.*

Creates foliage types from any static mesh and scatters instanced foliage by radius,
rectangle or landscape weight layer — Poisson-disk spaced, floor-traced, slope-gated.
Dry-run first and you see the instance count before a single tree lands; the same seed then
reproduces it exactly. Tunes density, culling, alignment and slope limits, clears overgrowth
by radius, and knows which tool the job wants: material-driven landscape grass for cheap
wall-to-wall clutter, real instanced foliage for trees that need collision at distance.

Covers: Instanced foliage, Layer-weighted scatter, Dry-run preview, Density & culling, Slope
limits, Grass vs foliage.

## Character Placement

*No more floating corpses.*

Places and poses characters so they actually rest on furniture and terrain instead of
hovering above it — measuring bone-to-surface contact, fixing floating, sinking and
clipping bodies, carving navmesh so AI pawns route around them, and double-checking every
placement with PIE screenshots and cold-load tests.

Covers: Bone-to-surface measuring, Clipping fixes, Navmesh carving, PIE verification.

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One of 7 skill categories in Shovel, an Unreal Engine editor plugin and MCP server. HTML
version: https://shovel.to/world-building/. Site index for agents:
https://shovel.to/llms.txt.