Environments & layers
The sound of the place, built from layers that never loop the same way twice.
The app has three screens: Session is where you play, Environments is where you build and organise environments, Boards is where you build boards. On the Session screen the environment card shows what's loaded (one chip per layer), a picker and Play; press Edit environments to open the builder.
An environment is a list of layers playing at once. New environments start with four; add as many as the scene needs (up to twelve — most sound best with fewer than eight). Every layer is named after the sound it plays — so you can always tell what is making what — and has an on/off switch, a ▾ that collapses it to one line, and a ✕ to remove it.
Every layer is one sound plus the dials
Pick any sound from the library. What it is decides how it behaves — the picker groups them:
| Group | What it does | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Loops | One long recording that plays the whole time. Frequency and randomness don't apply; everything else does. | Cave wind, dungeon drone, rain, a crowd, a sunny meadow |
| Random sounds | A set of short recordings that drop in now and then, each at a random pitch and position, on a cadence you set. Full set of dials. | Drips, footsteps, distant thunder, a scream every minute, a bell, a wolf |
Use + Add a layer on the card at the end of the list. Edits to one of your environments save as you make them; tweaks to a built-in play live until you press Save a copy as… to keep them under your own name. Rename by editing the name at the top, and use the ▲▼ on a row to reorder your list.
Picking the sound
Each layer has two pickers. The first is the family — where the sound comes from: Cave, Dungeon, Castle, Weather, Tavern… The second is the sound itself. Mix freely: castle footsteps in a cave, thunder over a tavern.
The dials
| Dial | What it does |
|---|---|
| Frequency | How often it fires. Left is rare (every couple of minutes), right is constant. The readout shows the average gap. |
| Randomness | How much the timing wanders around that average. 0% is a metronome; 100% is anything goes. |
| Volume | Level of this layer. |
| Distance | Pushes the sound away: farther is quieter, duller and wider, like it's down the hall instead of at your feet. |
| Reverb | The size of the room, from a tight cell to a cathedral. |
| Echo | How many repeats bounce back. |
| Echo delay | The gap between the repeats. |
Beds have only a volume. The Environment volume at the bottom of the card scales the whole environment; the Master in the top bar scales everything including boards.
Saving
Tweaking a scene on the fly
On the Session screen, tap any layer chip under the environment name to open its dials right there — volume, distance, reverb, echo, and how often a random-sound layer fires. Those changes are for the moment you are in: they are not saved. Reload the environment, or pick another, and it comes back as built. To keep a change, make it on the Environments screen instead.
Editing a built-in
You can change a built-in environment and it plays that way immediately, but built-ins cannot be saved over. As soon as you change one the editor says so and offers Save a copy as… (keep your version under its own name) or Discard changes (back to the way it ships).
On the Environments screen: + New environment starts an empty one; Save a copy as… stores the current layers and dials under a new name in "My environments"; Rename (or just edit the name field) renames one of yours; Delete removes a saved one (built-ins can't be deleted — tweak one and save a copy to make your own). Export downloads your saved environments as a file; Import loads such a file — handy for sharing with another GM.
Next: Boards →