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Manual Spawn Points

Manual Spawn Points let you author exact candidate locations for a Species instead of relying only on an automatically generated pattern.

Use them when an artist needs direct control over placement, for example to place flowers along a designed path or put rocks in hand-picked positions while still using Errant Biomes masks, priorities, transforms, runtime spawning, and post-processes.

Spawn Point Sources​

Manual Points are one of the Spawn Point Sources available in Species Growth -> Spawn Points Settings.

You can use Manual Points on their own or combine them with other sources, such as Tiled Blue Noise or Grid.

Creating Manual Points​

  1. Create one or more Biomes Manual Spawn Points Tag assets. Tags define which manual points are visible to which Species.
  2. Add Biomes Manual Spawn Point Component components to actors in the level or to Blueprint actors.
  3. Assign one or more Spawn Point Tags to each component.
  4. In the Species, add Manual Points to Growth -> Spawn Points Settings.
  5. Add the same tag assets to the Manual Points -> Spawn Point Tags property.
  6. Regenerate the affected components.

You can also drag a Biomes Manual Spawn Points Tag asset from the Content Browser into the level. Errant Biomes will create an actor with a Biomes Manual Spawn Point Component and assign the dropped tag automatically.

Only manual point components that share at least one tag with the Species are used.

2D Placement​

Manual Spawn Points are 2D generation points. Their X and Y location matters, but their Z location does not.

Errant Biomes generation works in 2D first, then places generated instances on the terrain. Because of that, moving a manual point up or down will not change the spawned instance height.

We may explore 3D manual points in the future if we hear that projects need that workflow.

Visualization​

Manual point components can draw an editor visualization so you can see where authored points are placed.

The component exposes:

  • Visualization Visibility: draw always, or only while Errant Biomes mode is active.
  • Visualization Mesh: optional mesh used as the marker.
  • Visualization Sprite: optional sprite used as the marker.
  • Visualization Sprite Size: sprite display size.
  • Visualization Color: marker color.

Editing Notes​

Manual Spawn Points are editor-only components. Moving, renaming, duplicating, or retagging them invalidates only the affected areas so regeneration can reuse unchanged cached data.

If a Species uses both manual points and automatic sources, automatic points still obey their own spacing and seed settings. Manual points do not become a replacement for masks: the Growth Mask still decides whether a candidate point should spawn, and Species priority can still remove lower-priority instances around it.