Plugins: where the manual controls live

In a lot of software, plugins are optional extras from third parties that you go shopping for. That is not the sense used here. A plugin is the panel of manual controls attached to a capability: the thing that lets you shape terrain rather than ask for terrain, or set the weather rather than describe the weather.

The reason they exist is the division of labour the whole product runs on. Flockbay writes code. It does not build your world, because placing things is a job for hands. Plugins are what hands need.

So every capability that has a spatial or aesthetic component ends up with controls, and which controls you see follows the kind of project you made — 2D or 3D, picked at creation. A 3D world hands you ground, water, sky and weather, placement and character behaviour. A flat one hands you ground you paint: drag to lay cells, drag to erase them, and the tiles, the edges and the collision resolve themselves out of the coverage. Alongside that, the band of scenery along the horizon, its own controls for how the person moves, down to walk speed, air control and jump apex, and sprites you move, turn and scale with the mouse. You use them directly, in the builder, on a Windows desktop.

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There are exactly two paths and they are both first-class. Either Flockbay does it, or you do it yourself on a plugin. There is no third path where you ask and the system quietly does something else.

That matters when the AI gets it wrong, which it will. You are not stuck waiting for a better result. You open the controls and move the thing.

It also matters for taste. Some decisions should never go through a description at all. Where the treeline stops, how heavy the fog is, whether that ridge is too steep to climb. In a flat world it is whether the gap between two ledges is a jump you can actually make. Those are judged by looking, and they are adjusted by hand while you look.

The engine is Godot, which is open source, and your project is a real Godot project on your own disk rather than a proprietary file. That is the substrate everything sits on.

It also means the plugin format is not an invention of ours. Godot has its own long-standing ecosystem of addons written in GDScript, and a Godot project is a Godot project regardless of which app you opened it with. Anything Flockbay does to your project is done in that format.

The practical consequence is that the work survives us. If you stopped using Flockbay, the project still opens in Godot, which is free to download.

Several of the controls stand on open-source Godot plugins the app ships, each with its own page: Terrain3D for the ground, Boujie Water Shader for water, Sky3D for the sky, the TCA Weather System for weather, LimboAI and Phantom Camera for characters and cameras, and godot_wry for the chat inside the editor.

There is no marketplace and no paid add-on tier. The builder and every manual control are in the free plan. Flockbay is free on your own AI: your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key. Flockbay builds from a library of ready-made objects, or with Godot's own shapes.

There is also no fixed catalogue of "supported game types" implemented as plugins, because a fixed catalogue is a ceiling with marketing on it. Controls exist for things that are continuous and spatial, and everything else is code, written to your description.

The rule we work to is that a control should stand for something continuous rather than something chosen from a list. A slider for how steep a slope can be is a control. A dropdown of five terrain types is a list pretending to be one, and it will be wrong for the sixth person who uses it.

That is why you will not find genre presets, biome menus or style packs. Each of those would work beautifully for the games we have already imagined and fail for the one you turn up with.

It also means controls get added when there is something real underneath them to control. A panel with nothing behind it is worse than no panel, because it implies a capability that does not exist. When a control appears, it is because the thing it adjusts is genuinely adjustable.

The clearest test of that rule is what happens when you pick 2D: the toolbar gets shorter. There is no terrain to sculpt, no water, no weather, no time of day, because a flat world has no answer for any of them and a panel offering one would be a request that cannot succeed with a nice icon on it. What is beyond the ground in 2D is a sky colour and one band of scenery along the horizon, and the colour above and what continues below are read from the band picture's own first and last solid rows, so replacing the picture replaces both. A short toolbar that is true is the point of the rule, not an exception to it.