Presets

A finished Meld world is the product of a lot of settings: the scale, the terrain options, the tree mix, the climate, the caves, the farmland texture, the props. A preset captures all of that as one file, so a look you spent an evening tuning can be applied to the next project in one click, or sent to someone else and applied to theirs.

Why presets are careful about what they carry

The obvious design, “save all settings to a file”, is a trap. Your settings include things that describe your machine, not the world: worker counts sized to your cores, folder paths on your disk, maybe a private Overpass mirror URL. A preset that carried those would break on the next computer, or quietly leak your infrastructure to whoever you shared it with.

So a Meld preset carries only the render-defining settings, scale, terrain, trees, climate, caves, props, textures, and none of the machine-specific ones. A recipe from a 24-core desktop is safe on a laptop, and never contains a private endpoint. Even observed statistics are filtered: a machine-measured number like the observed megabytes per region describes the sender’s renders, not the world, so it is stripped on export. Your drawn map selection travels only when both sides opt in, sharing a look does not have to mean sharing a location.

How it works

A preset is a single JSON file. Save one from your current project’s settings, export it, send it over Discord, import someone else’s; the importing side sees what the preset sets and applies it over their project. Because it is plain JSON, you can also open it in a text editor and read exactly what it does, there is nothing opaque inside.

The three bundled starters

Meld 1.9.0 ships three presets, tuned by Teddy563 as the recommended starting points:

• Default: the tuned look at real 1:1 scale. Life-sized streets and buildings; best for a city block or a landmark.
• Scaled 1:10: city-sized builds. Compact roads and props off, because fixed-size props do not survive a 1:10 world (see Props & structures).
• Extended height: the same tuned look with the extended build height enabled and no vertical stretch, for terrain that genuinely goes past vanilla’s ceiling (see Build height).

The starters are ordinary editable files in the presets folder: tune them, share them, and if you break one, delete it and it is restored to pristine on the next start. The presets folder itself exists from first launch, so there is no setup step.

Presets keep up with the settings

The preset system is maintained against the settings it snapshots. Two recent examples from the changelog: the Overture-buildings and offline-elevation toggles used to be silently dropped when a preset was applied (fixed in 1.9.0, they now travel), and the old 1.5x terrain exaggeration was removed from the Extended height starter when the tuned look landed. If a preset from an older Meld carries a value the current version bounds differently, the value is clamped to something usable rather than failing the render.

How to use it

1. Open Presets from the left rail (it sits under Projects).
2. Apply a starter, Scaled 1:10 is the right first choice for most people, then adjust anything you like in Settings.
3. When a look is worth keeping, save it as your own preset. Export it to share; import a file to use someone else’s.
4. Presets set the look, not the place: draw your selection and generate as usual. A preset pairs naturally with a project per area.

Two boundaries worth knowing. A preset changes settings for future generation, applying one does not retroactively rebuild an existing world, so re-render the cells you want in the new look. And because scale is part of the preset, applying one to a project changes what that project will cost; the readout and estimates update immediately, and Choosing a scale explains what to expect.