Appearance

Appearance changes never move the layout. Theme changes are instant.

Theme

Click a theme button to swap all materials: Basic, Desert, Ice, Jungle or Lava. Only themes installed in your project are listed.

Every theme has four texture sets:

• Walls A – passage walls and ceilings
• Chambers – rooms; a passage fades into it over its last 4 m before a room
• Alternative – patches that break up the walls and chambers, also mixed into the floor
• Floor – walking surfaces

Lava is its own system. Its texture sets are temperature bands instead of cave roles (see Lava > Heat Zones): the hottest liquid lava in the Floor set, warm lava streams in Alternative and cold rock in Walls A and Chambers. A lava cave is never wet, so the Wetness section is hidden for it, and the Alternative patch settings in Rock Look and Advanced Mix are hidden too.

Outside Light

Cave walls are single-sided, so on their own they would let the sun shine into the cave. Block Outside Light (on by default) adds an invisible, low-poly shadow shell around every passage, room, entrance, cap and plug. It only casts shadows: no colliders, no extra material, not visible in the game. Shell Offset (m) sets how far outside the cave it sits (raise it if you see shadow acne inside). The shell has its own triangle count in Statistics and is included in baked prefabs.

Cave material options

Select the theme material (Advanced Mix > Select Theme Material). Its inspector is grouped:

• Walls A / Chambers / Alternative / Floor – colour, normal, tint, Scale and Rotation per texture set (different scales and rotations hide tiling)
• Blending – Height Blend (sets meet along the stone cracks), Macro Variation (large brightness changes), Crack Occlusion
• Top Cover – moss, snow, sand or ash on upward-facing surfaces; it settles in the cracks first
• Wetness (Cave Surface shader: every theme except Lava) – damp walls, Puddles in the floor cracks, Drip Streaks on walls
• Emission – strength and a travelling Pulse (Lava)
• Heat Zones and Lava (Cave Lava shader only) – the theme-wide defaults of the Appearance Lava section
• Color Adjust – hue, saturation, brightness for quick re-colours
• Quality & Debug – Low Quality (Mobile / VR) and Debug View (texture sets, height, wet/cover masks, mesh channels, projections)

Rock Look

• Rock Variation – how many Alternative patches break up Walls A, Chambers and the Floor
• Shape Irregularity – smooth bulges in passage walls (not near openings)
• Texture Scale (m) – metres of surface per texture repeat (default 4)
• Seed / New Variation – reshuffles material patches and decorations, never the layout

Lava

Shown when the theme uses the Cave Lava shader (the Lava theme). Sets how much of the rock glows, and adds lava pools, leaks and heat to this cave without changing other caves that use the same theme. Everything is procedural in cave space, so it also breaks up the texture repetition.

• Black Rock / Cooling / Balanced / Molten – one-click looks: cold basalt with no lava; mostly dark rock with dim red cracks and crusted pools; a glowing crack network broken into hot and cold zones; mostly lava with a few rocks.
• Custom Lava – off: the cave uses the theme material’s lava settings. On: the values below apply to this cave only (it gets its own copy of the theme material, saved with the scene and with the baked prefab). Turn it on as well when the cave’s Floor Blend Height is not 0.6 m, so the heights below are in real metres.
• Heat Zones – where the three lava texture bands go. The hottest lava (Floor set) lies mostly on the floor, warm lava (Alternative) always surrounds it, and cold rock (Walls A / Chambers) fills everything else, so hot lava never touches cold rock directly. Lava runs along the cracks of the colder rock instead of meeting it in straight lines.
• Hot Floor / Hot Pool Size – how much of the floor is the hottest lava, and the size of its pools.
• Hot Leaks with Leak Spacing, Leak Width and Leak Source Height – hottest lava running down the walls.
• Hot Spots – occasional hot patches on walls and ceilings.
• Warm Spread – how far the warm lava reaches out from the hot areas (about 1.5–2 m up the walls above a hot pool at the default 0.35).
• Warm Patches / Warm Patch Size – loose warm lava streams in otherwise cold walls and ceilings.
• Glowing Cracks – Crack Glow (how much of the textures’ crack network glows; 0 = cold cracks turn to dark basalt), Crack Width (hot cracks widen into molten lava that floods the rock), Hot / Cold Zones and Zone Size (break the glow up so the pattern never repeats).
• Floor Lava – procedural molten pools on top of the textures: Floor Lava (pools that fill cracks and low spots first; 1 = almost the whole floor), Pool Size, Crust (cooled plates drifting on the lava, their seams stay molten) and Flow Speed. Visual only: the floor collider stays. With Heat Zones the Floor set already is the floor lava, so the Lava theme starts at 0 here.
• Lava Leaks – glowing, flowing lava coming out of the walls and running down to the floor: Leaks (how many), Spacing, Width and Source Height (highest point a leak starts from).
• Heat Gradient – Heat From Floor (cracks near the floor glow even in cold zones) with Heat Height, and Rock Glow (red heat on the rock itself near the floor and around pools).
• Colour & Glow – Lava Colour (HDR) and Glow Intensity.

Changes show instantly; no rebuild is needed. Flowing lava animates in Play Mode (or in the Scene view with Always Refresh on). Warm orange cave lights (Lights > Colour) match the glow best. Debug View > Lava on the material shows heat (red), molten lava (yellow) and cold cracks (blue).

Wetness

Makes this cave wet without changing other caves that use the same theme.

• Dry / Damp / Wet / Dripping – one-click looks.
• Custom Wetness – off: the cave uses the theme material’s wetness. On: the values below apply to this cave only (it gets its own copy of the theme material, saved with the scene and with the baked prefab).
• Wet Walls – darker, glossier rock, strongest near the floor. Wet Height – how far up from the floor the walls are wettest.
• Water Streaks – how strong the water running down the walls is. Under it: Spacing (distance between streaks – smaller means more), Width and Randomness (0 = even rows of identical streaks; higher = uneven placement and widths, dry gaps, streaks that start, stop and wander). Streak Style buttons: Few Thin, Even Rows, Natural, Many Wide.
• Puddles / Puddle Size – still water that fills floor cracks and low spots first.

Changes show instantly; no rebuild is needed. Requires the Cave Surface shader (every shipped theme except Lava; lava caves are never wet).

Advanced Mix

• Alternative (Large Patches) / Alternative (Small Patches) – rough share of the surface covered by Alternative patches
• Ceiling Bias – extra small patches on ceilings
• Blend Softness – how soft the borders between materials are
• Floor Blend Height (m) – how far the Floor material creeps up the walls
• Shape Seed – pattern of the wall bulges
• Reset Mix to Defaults / Select Theme Material

Distortion

Distortion bends the whole finished cave – passages, rooms, entrances, caps, plugs, decorations, lights and all colliders together – so it stops looking regular.

• Strength – 0 is off. 1 is the strongest distortion that is still guaranteed to be safe for the chosen Size.
• Size (m) – the distance over which the cave swings one way and back. Larger sizes allow larger offsets. Below the sliders, the window shows how far walls and floors move.
• Vertical – 0 keeps floors at their height (only the walls bend). 1 makes floors and ceilings as uneven as the walls.
• Seed / New Pattern – a different pattern with the same settings.

Why it is safe: every point of the cave moves by an amount that depends only on where it is. Pieces that touch before (a passage and a room, two parts of a passage, a cap) still touch exactly afterwards, so there are never gaps to fall through, and colliders always match what you see. The strength is limited so walls can never fold through each other.

Good starting values: Strength 1, Size 12–20 m, Vertical 0.3. For big, slow bends raise Size; for small lumps add Shape Irregularity.

Lights

• Place Lights – point lights along passages and one per room. They follow every change.
• Spacing (m) – distance between passage lights
• Mount Height – height as a part of the passage height; lights always stay inside the cave, also in shafts
• Colour, Intensity, Range – light look. Room lights grow to fill the room.
• Room Lights / Room Colour – the extra light in every room
• Shadows – None suits most caves; shadow-casting point lights are expensive
• Light Mode – Realtime, Mixed or Baked for lightmapped scenes
• Detach Lights – copies the lights into a normal object you can edit one by one, and turns automatic lights off (Undo brings them back)

Decorations

• Generate Decorations – rocks, boulders, stalagmites and stalactites from the cave’s theme. Every theme has its own textured set (three LODs, colliders: convex on the solid pieces, the rock cluster keeps its real shape)
• Density – how many. Low values place a few pieces here and there; the full value is really dense (a piece about every 0.8 m along a passage and up to 21 floor + 18 ceiling pieces in a room).
• Size – size of every piece (1 = as modelled)
• Size Variation – how different the pieces are in size: 0 = all the same, 0.5 = from half to one and a half times the Size
• Turn Variation – how differently the pieces are turned: 0 = all face the same way, 1 = any direction
• Tilt (°) – random lean, so pieces don’t all stand perfectly upright; the base (or the top of a stalactite) stays in place
• Clusters – groups pieces naturally: smaller stalagmites, stalactites and rocks next to the big ones, rocks scattered around boulders. It only adds pieces; the ones already placed stay where they are.
• Reset Look to Defaults – back to Size 1, Size Variation 0.2, Turn Variation 1, Tilt 0, Clusters 0

Decorations always come from the cave’s own theme and switch with it. A theme without its own decoration pieces uses the Basic ones; the section then names the borrowed pieces. Decorations stay out of the walking strip and away from openings. Seed / New Variation reshuffle them.