“All My Armour Looks the Same” — Fixing 26 Tiers of Colour
A player wrote in this week to say that all his armour looked the same, even though it wasn't.
The temptation with a report like that is to check the code, find it working, and reply "working as intended". The code was working — the server sends the right set for every slot, the client applies it live, everything matched. And he was still completely right.
Why he was right
Gear in Wanderer is seen in two places: as an inventory icon at about 30 to 44 pixels, and as a suit of armour on a character about 40 pixels tall on a busy map.
At that size, the two things that make armour distinctive in concept art — silhouette and surface texture — are gone. There are not enough pixels left to carry them. What survives is hue. Colour isn't part of the signal at 40 pixels; colour is very nearly the whole signal.
So I measured the actual colour distance between every pair of tiers, in a colour space built to match how human eyes judge difference. The results were not flattering: 28 pairs of tiers were closer together than the threshold where people reliably tell two colours apart. The worst offenders — Shadow and Ashen — were about a fifth of that threshold. They were, for practical purposes, the same grey.
Nobody had drawn them wrong. The ladder had simply grown one tier at a time over months, each new colour picked next to its neighbours and never against the whole set.
What changed
All 26 tier colours have been retuned so that no two tiers sit closer than a fixed perceptual floor — the closest pair in the game now (Iron and Shadow) is comfortably above the "you can tell these apart" line.
Two constraints kept it honest:
- Every tier keeps its identity. Frost is still icy, Ember is still orange, Mystic still has its gold trim. The search that picked the new colours was only allowed to move each tier inside its own theme's range of hue, saturation and brightness — it wasn't free to make Frost brown because that happened to be a gap.
- Every tier stays legible on the inventory tile. There's a minimum contrast against the dark green-black background, so no tier disappears into the panel it's sitting on.
The top two rows are the inventory icons, before and after. The bottom two are the same sets worn on the map. It's most obvious in the middle of the ladder, where a run of similar greys and greens is now a run of clearly different armours.
Two hundred and ten item icons were redrawn for this. The avatars needed no new art at all — worn gear is drawn as greyscale shapes and tinted at runtime, so changing the palette changes the armour on your character for free.
What's still wrong
Honesty compels: colour was the biggest problem, not the only one.
Twenty-six tiers share only eighteen distinct sets of shapes between them — five sets use the same crown-and-ornate silhouette, three use the same crystal one, three the same cowl-and-robe. Those are still identical outlines that differ only in colour. And the character avatar tints each layer a single flat hue, which throws away the internal shading the icons have.
Two-tone avatar tinting and new silhouettes for the duplicated families are the next steps. This pass was the one that could ship today and be felt immediately.
There's now an automated check that fails the build if any two tiers drift back together, so this particular problem can't quietly return.
Also: everyone is a unicorn
For the next 24 hours, every wanderer on the road is a pink unicorn, and while it runs, drop chances are up 25% — on everything you kill, including the kills that happen while you're offline. Guaranteed boss drops are unaffected; they were already guaranteed.
A 🦄 badge sits in the corner of the screen while the event is live. Tap it if you want to know what's going on.
It ends tomorrow afternoon, at which point everyone turns back into a person and loot goes back to normal. Go and hit something.
Happy wandering.