The ocean in Final Fantasy IX is made of Wang tiles
made a fun little website with AI to explain how the Oceans in FFIX are authored after days of slamming my head against the keyboard trying to deconstruct it
The ocean in Final Fantasy IX is made of Wang tiles launched on July 6, 2026 with 5 votes, #4,557 of 24,623 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
What it does
FF9's sea, decoded byte-by-byte: 3 shades, a 12-tile Wang set, and one marching-band algorithm. Paint your own ocean and watch the tile language answer.
The sea surface is a flat mesh cut into a grid of 4-unit squares . Every square is painted with exactly one of a handful of caustic textures — the shading you read as depth is not a gradient and not lighting: it is which texture each tile got . Slide from the water to its shade map to see the assignment. The game ships six sea shades, laddered by luminance. But a survey of every disc-1 open-ocean block (3,583 tiles) found the open sea uses only three : Sea3 (light), Sea5 (transition), Sea4 (deep) — split 94% deep / 3% / 3% . The two brightest shades never appear: they are coast-only , and painting them in open water reads instantly as river tiles dropped into the sea. And one more measured…from jawnston.com
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