glow

The entire lighting model of Nine Bells, painted rather than lit.

Sprites in Ashcross are unlit, so a lantern does not light the street; a lantern is a soft additive smear laid over the street, and that is what this draws. One quad, no texture: a hot core, an exponential falloff (not an inverse square — a physical falloff is all core and no field, and a painted light wants the opposite), an optional ring of soft spokes for a brazier's flare, a flicker and a slow breath underneath it.

Wear it on a material whose render.type is additive with depth_write: false. The quad's own scale does the stretching; leave stretch_x / stretch_y at 1 unless you want the light stretched INSIDE an already-stretched quad.

The flicker phase is a smooth ramp over world position, so two lights sharing this material do not pulse in step. It has to be smooth rather than hashed: this runs per fragment, and a hash of a quantised position draws the light as a mosaic of squares.

Materials: art.light.lantern, art.light.brazier, art.light.shaft, art.light.pool, art.light.censerlight.