Hollowmere

A brassworks town at the bottom of a valley, on the night the jungle finished taking it back.

Copper pipes and riveted boilers still hold pressure. The clockwork tower still turns its great gear. The gaslamps are still lit. And every surface that can be climbed has been climbed — by glimmercaps, whose caps burn teal in the dark, and by vines strung with beads of light that have found their way up the iron.

What's here

• The square — a paved terrace with a colossal brass gear laid flat in the middle, ringed by eight gaslamps and two pipe galleries.
• The Great Cog Tower — a riveted drum with a working gear on its face, lit windows all the way up, a copper dome and a beacon.
• The Boiler House — a squat riveted tank with a valve wheel, a lit firebox and a steam main running across the valley to the tower.
• The terrace — fifteen houses with pitched roofs, lit windows and smoking stacks, ringing the square.
• The mooring mast — a lattice tower with an airship still tied to it, swinging on its cable.
• The tarn — a sunken lake at the west end, fed by the river that runs the valley floor.
• The gate — a wrought arch strung with violet lights, and a riverside bridge lit the whole way across.

The flora

Everything green here is grown rather than modelled. The glimmercaps are a procedural graph: a Bézier arc revolved around a stalk, then scattered over a disc with a seeded random turn, tilt and scale. Stands of them are placed around the town and on the machinery, and each stand carries its own soft light, so the ground under them is lit teal.

The vines are strings of beads climbing helixes around the tower, the boiler and the mast.

Poking at it

• The valley itself is the glimmerhollow graph — extent, relief, wallHeight, floorCut, lakeLevel and weather are all live knobs.
• The mushrooms are the glimmercap graph — the four control points of the cap's silhouette are inputs, so the parasol can be reshaped from the outside.
• The town is scenes/main.scene/build.luau. Every structure in it is ordinary engine code over named numbers; move one and rebuild.