Projects & render queue

Meld is built for people who do not stop at one world. A project is everything about one world in one place: the drawn selection, the settings, the planned cell grid, and the world folder the render writes into. The projects gallery and the render queue are how you keep ten of them organised and build them overnight without sitting there.

Why projects exist

A render is defined by decisions that must not drift: where the selection is, what scale it uses, which options were on. Keeping those per project means switching between “Bucharest at 1:1” and “all of Romania at 1:20” is one click, with nothing leaking from one to the other. The selection itself is saved into each project and redraws automatically when Meld restarts, per project, so a world you planned last week is exactly where you left it. Settings are per project too, which is why a preset is the tool for carrying a look between projects.

How it works

The gallery

The Projects button in the left rail opens the gallery: every project as a card, with its area drawn on a map overview so you can tell your builds apart by shape as well as by name. From the gallery you create, switch, and delete projects; the old scattered controls (project switcher, New world, show-all-areas) all live here now.

Folders and cloning

• Folders. Drag a project card onto a folder to group it. Folders collapse, rename, show counts, and delete safely (their projects fall back to Ungrouped). Click a folder to focus the map on only its areas. The grouping is saved as presentation only, it never touches your project files.
• Reorder. Drag any card by its handle to reorder the gallery.
• Clone. Cloning copies a project’s settings and pre-plans its cells, then drops the copy right next to its source. That makes clones the cheap way to experiment: clone “Alps 1:10”, change one setting, queue both, compare.

The render queue

Queue several projects and Meld renders them one after another: switch to the project, plan it, generate, wait for the merge, move to the next. While a queue runs, every queued project’s area stays drawn on the map with the current one highlighted, so a glance shows where the night went. Each queue row shows the project’s area and its estimated output size, and the combined total reacts to each project’s export format (Raw / Zip / Linear / B_Linear, see Export formats).

Three levels of stopping, because a queue you cannot interrupt is a trap:

• Pause holds between projects: the current render finishes, the next does not start.
• Stop halts the queue after the current project completes.
• Kill aborts the running render immediately.

A folder has its own queue button, so “render everything in Client builds” is one press. And because each render goes through the normal pipeline, all the usual machinery applies: retries, the missing-region check, and the merged world landing in that project’s save location.

How to use it

1. Make one project per world you care about, and name it for the place and scale (“Oslo 1:1”, “Norway 1:20”). The name is for you; the selection shape in the gallery does the rest.
2. Group with folders when the gallery grows: by client, by country, by experiment.
3. Before queueing several large projects, bake the data for their regions. A queue that never waits on a rate limit is the difference between “done by morning” and “stalled at 2am”.
4. Queue them, check the combined size estimate against your free disk, and press play. The status bar shows progress from the tray while you do something else.

Under the hood each queued render is the same parallel cell build described in Parallel generation; the queue just lines them up end to end.