Race Skins

Race Skins let you choose a faction that transforms the entire game world — buildings, hero characters, worker models, terrain textures, and animated portraits.

Available Races

More races are planned for future releases.

Selecting a Skin

1. Open Settings (gear icon in the top bar)
2. Go to the Visual tab
3. Click a race card under Race Skin
4. The page reloads to apply the new skin

A page reload is required because the 3D models, textures, and terrain need to be re-initialized.

What Changes

Each race affects every visual layer of the game:

• Buildings — All 8 structures (throne, banner, mine, engineering, archives, recon, analysis, settings) use race-specific 3D models
• Heroes — 5 unique character models per race, deterministically assigned by session ID
• Workers — Race-themed worker units
• Portraits — Animated WebP avatars with idle, casting, and thinking states
• Terrain — Grass/dirt textures, tree palettes, and water colors change per race

Hero Models

Each race has 5 hero slots. Heroes are deterministically mapped to a slot based on session ID, so the same session always gets the same character.

Persistence

Your race skin selection is saved in three places for reliability:

• Browser localStorage
• Server settings file (~/.claude-rts/settings.json)
• In-memory for hero spawning