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Icon layering allows for substantially more powerful icon creation (many mods make use of icon layering to create recipes dynamically, for example), but for entities placed in-world, there are negative performance impacts, and the current behavior is not-ideal with each layer casting a shadow on the layer below it:




If icons were instead baked after they've all been created during data phase, these pain points could be entirely avoided.

See: viewtopic.php?f=58&t=84888

Interessting news in that link. I think such graphic painting qualities in the startup would make things a lot easier. Think to mods for compressed items: They need a palette as "griund" and paint some items slightly smaller over that to generate one item-graphics. But they need to do that dozens of times (for mods eventually some hundreds).