paintballz actually render overtop of a ball outline ingame. if you have spots of undesirable ball lineart in places but don't wish for the ball to go entirely lineless, you can fix this with a sneaky paintball matching the colour and texture of the ball underneath.

petz has a colour palette of 0 through 255... but what if i told you there was more...
there's not. but there's a nifty little glitch you may have seen around that causes colours to randomize each time the game is started up. you can achieve this by putting 258 as your colour value.

i believe 259 also works, but it seems less reliable. it got stuck as the same colour for me for some reason. a few higher values such as 260 or 300 start out as pure black and then turn into an orange-brown colour but the majority of colours above 260 will only render as black. in my game at least!

start resizing your lines in lnz and a spreadsheet! it'll save you a lot of time, plus pet workshop can only resize linez "evenly", meaning they start and end the same exact width. but did you know petz can have "uneven" lines?

for example, you can set one end of a line to 0 and the other to 100, and that's how base-game whiskers were done. or you can do the reverse and make interesting little spike shapes?

varied line width can also help with more defined shapes. to give this star head a rounder appearance, i changed the line thickness from 100, 100 to 150, 110 -- thicker on the end connecting it to the center. it is subtle, but can add a lot to a hex!

original cosmonaut hex courtesy of mortis @ bad death; edited with permission!

putting this one here since i've been asked about it every now and then. very niche case use but sometimes it's fun? these sections do not come in breed files by default, but you can add [Circle Render Mode] and [Line Render Mode] anywhere in your file. all these sections need is a single number underneath them.

0 will render ballz or linez as you know them.
1 will render them in a flat, untextured "full outlined" look.
2 will render only their outline, leaving the ball blank - wireframes.

any number aside from these, like -1 or 3 for example, will not render the ballz or linez at all and make them invisible, including paintballz. not reccommended...!


you can mix and match these effects, but the most important knowledge i want to pass onto you is that when ballz are rendered as wireframe, paintballz still appear because as mentioned above they are actually rendered after the ball and outline.

have you ever had a line between two ballz you wanted to have a different texture from the 2 ballz it is connecting? this is a simple workaround! you can recolour an entire ball by using paintballz of size 200. 200 means the entire ball is covered, but this is sometimes not quite enough -- in my experience, covering a ball with 3 or 4 size 200 paintballz from multiple angles will ensure they won't occasionally glitch to the ball colour underneath. you know, unless that's what you want of course!

this is what i used for the render mode shenanigans on my carbonated drinkitty file.

when using this method on a pet in regular render modes, keep in mind that recolouring a ball with paintballz like this will cover up its outline.

the way child stages in breedfiles work is that they only append the data from the adult file. most child lnz will have altered [Default Scales], or some enlargement / extension sections listed and nothing else. but we can do more than that!

sections such as [Move], [Add Ball] or [Paint Ballz] for example can shift as a pet ages if you paste it into the child lnz and make alterations.

the only section i can for sure say you should not mess with is [Linez]! having an uneven amount of linez between child and adult lnz will cause the game to hard crash (bluescreen in my case) when trying to age the pet up. and to save you the trouble, growing linez (as in getting thicker for example) aren't possible either -- this caused the pet to become invisible for me.

but to get back to the point, growing paintballz and addballz are very easy: paste the section from the adult lnz to the child lnz, and change the "size" value to 0. and boom! your pet is gonna grow some weird addballz on it!


you can alter the x, y and z coordinates in the same way as well. that's what i did for this file -- all of the mushroom addballz are set to a y value of 0, meaning they start out "inside" of their base ball.

additionally, the outer rims of the mushroom caps have their x and y values set to 0 because they are actually simple pastylabz-generated rings whose base ballz are previous addballz, the centers of each cap. this way, with multiple "moving pieces" overlapping, you can end up with a more dynamic growing process.