I said I would show you how. MapForge Pack Creator, Beta 1. (Patreon)

1. So... it was kinda insane to be honest

One of the last MapForge updates gave it animated objects, with a place of their own in the module. I remember how you reacted when that landed. You loved it, and a lot of you came to ask me the same thing: how did you make the animated pack that shipped with it?

I told you I would show you. This is me showing you.

Four files are attached to this post.

MPC, NVIDIA installer. About 1.1 GB. For a machine with a reasonably modern NVIDIA card. Much faster on the steps that use an AI model.

MPC, CPU installer. About 75 MB. Does everything the other one does, just slower on those same steps. Runs anywhere.

The MPC Handbook. The manual. Every feature, how to install, how to use it.

The Prompt Cookbook. 51 pages. Not a manual, and I will get to why.

Windows only for now, and both installers are unsigned, which means Windows will put a warning in front of you when you run them. There is a section near the bottom about that, about which installer to pick, and about how to check that the file you downloaded is the file I built. If that is all you came for, skip ahead.

Everyone else, here is what it is and how it got here.

The truth is that the tool existed before MPC did, in a much uglier form, on my computer. Most of what I do is code, and it is my machine, so I can install anything and nobody else has to live with the mess. For the packs I made for this community before, I spent months building the thing that let me make them, one piece stacked on another, trial and error. It worked. It worked for exactly one person, the lunatic who built it.

When you started asking, the question landed somewhere older than the animated update. The reason I started MapForge at all was that I wanted to build my maps inside Foundry, and I wanted to build them for real. That first asset pack was not only there to give MapForge something exclusive so people would try it. I wanted to make it. I wanted my own pack, in the art style I had in my head for my game, with the assets that mattered to my scene.

MapForge is very good at building battle maps, and I am proud of what it does. But I have come to feel it is incomplete without the other layer, the one that is not arranging the assets you already own but making the ones you do not have.

Handing you my version of that tool was never an option, because it only worked for me. So I started over, and I had no idea how big the job was. It could not stay a pile of scripts, and installing it had to be clean for people who are not me. Every model in it had to come with a licence you can actually use, so choosing which ones ship was about the terms as much as the results, because I am not putting anyone in a bad position. I wanted you to have GPU speed, so I built a CUDA version, and that fight alone cost me weeks and is why there are two installers today instead of one.

I am not sure I was ready for the size of it. Since I got back from my trip I have been a bit depressed about it, waking up certain that today was the day and going to bed with it still not done, and not having the heart to come here and say so.

Then the problems stopped being problems and started being me. I looked at it one morning and thought, I could ship this today. But there were still shortcuts in it, things that could be clearer, or prettier, or easier to move through, and I decided not to take them.

And when I finally thought MPC was done, I realised it was not. A big, complicated program that nobody knows how to use is not a gift, so I stopped and wrote it a manual.

And when the manual was done, I realised I still was not done. A tool and a manual together still leave out the part that is not the tool, and nobody taught me that part either. I learned it by getting it wrong for months. So I wrote a second book, and that one is personal.

It was only when that book was finished that I looked at the pile and thought, alright. This is good enough for this community.

And when I say good enough for this community, here is what I actually mean. I want you to sit down with your friends, tell them a story that is yours, and watch them lose it when the world you have all been living in is suddenly right there on the table, on a map you built, that came out of your imagination before it came from anywhere else. You saw it first. And then you had what you needed to turn that mad thing in your head into something real, for your game, for your friends, for the story you are telling.

Wand & Widgets has one thing at the bottom of it: cinematic modules, made with a stupid amount of love, from one storyteller to another. When I finished my first pack I felt like I had pulled off a dream I had as a storyteller. I want you to pull it off too.

2. What MPC is

MPC makes asset packs that MapForge can use. It takes what you made, cleans it up, lets you name and tag every piece, and closes it into the format MapForge accepts, organised the way you want it.

That is the boring description. Here is the real one.

I am not an artist. I do not have that talent, and for a long time that meant this particular dream was closed to me. I could see the pack I wanted in my head and I could not draw a line of it. AI changed that, and I want to be careful about what I am claiming, because it did not make me an artist. It gave me a way to get an image out of my head. What it did not give me is any of the work that comes after, and that work is most of the job. A generated image is not an asset. It has a background that has to come off, edges that have to tile, a loop that has to loop, and a format Foundry will take.

That gap is where MPC lives. It is the piece that was missing for me, and it is why something that was closed to me once is not closed to anybody now.

There is a workspace for each kind of asset, because they are not the same problem. Objects, floors, paths, walls, animated, each one with its own numbered steps and its own tools. Objects get real background removal, a model that works out what the thing is instead of keying out a colour, and one generated sheet can be cut into several separate PNGs. Floors are forced square and cross blended on both edges every time, because a floor that does not tile is not a floor. Paths and walls hand you the blending as a choice, because sometimes softening the seam is the fix and sometimes it is what ruins it. Animated gets all of that plus a Motion Test, so you can watch the movement before you commit to the full processing, and it comes out as a looping WebM with alpha that the app checks decoded before it lets you keep it.

All of it happens on your computer. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

And then the part I love most, which is how it talks to MapForge.

I hate working for two hours and only finding out at import time that it is wrong. The seam is bad, the scale is off, the thing that looked fine on its own looks like repeating wallpaper on an actual map. So MPC publishes a test build next to your project, you import that into MapForge once as a linked pack, and from then on every time you publish you choose update in MapForge and the pack changes in place. You never close Foundry. You finish an asset, you want to see it on a real map, you publish, you hit update, it is there.

You never work in the dark. That is the whole point of it.

I have built packs the old way and I have built them this way, and this way is a pleasure.

3. The Handbook

Let me say the uncomfortable part first, because it came from you.

The modules I have made that got big, the ones people use every week, I have not supported well. There was no easy path into them. What you needed to know was in a video somewhere, or in a post from eight months ago, and if you did not already know it existed you never found it. I have heard that from you more than once and it was fair every time.

MPC is not launching that way.

The handbook is 24 chapters in six parts. Installing it. Reading a workspace. What each of the five kinds of asset needs, a chapter each. How to read a model card and decide whether you want that model before anything downloads. Choosing a licence for your pack. Testing it in MapForge. And the whole last part is for when something goes wrong: the cutout ate part of my object, the background survived around the edges, the render is very slow, progress seemed to stop. Written as the thing that happens to you rather than as an error code.

The line at the top of that part is the one I care about most. Nothing here is your fault.

You are not meant to read it front to back. Every chapter starts where you are, and tells you when it genuinely needs something from an earlier one. Every screenshot in it came out of the same build you are installing, from a small example project, so nothing in there is from a real folder, a real credential or anybody's real work.

The knowledge is in one place, written down properly, and it belongs to anybody who wants it.

4. The Prompt Cookbook

The second book is not a manual, and I do not want it sold to you as one. The manual is already in this post.

This one runs to 51 pages and it is the most personal thing I have ever put out. It teaches the part MPC cannot do for you: deciding on a style, writing the prompt, and working out what went wrong when the picture comes back close but not right.

Here is how it ends.

Almost everything in this book went wrong before it went right. The bank took sixteen tries. The wall would not join until I asked for it differently. The dirt came back with no ink in it and I did not understand why for two days.

That is not me being modest at the end. It is how the whole book is built. Every technique in there is a mistake with its fix tied to it, because that is the only form any of this knowledge ever came in. I did not learn a single one of these things by getting it right.

A few things in it I would rather you heard from me than found out later.

It opens with ethics, before a word of technique. Four rules I hold myself to: tell your players how the maps at your table get made, say how a pack was made if you put one out, do not put a living artist's name in your prompt, and do not make slop. On that last one the book puts it plainly: the only thing keeping any of this from being one more pile of AI slop, smothering a hobby we love, is that somebody cared.

There is a page where I criticise my own program and tell you to turn my own settings off, because on some surfaces they make the asset worse.

And there is a page where I went back to the animated pack I already published, measured how cleanly the loops close, and printed the numbers. Not one of them closes properly. They are on maps being played on right now and nobody has ever said a word about it. Better you see that than sit there assuming mine come out perfect and yours do not.

The last page says the part I mean most.

And what you make will not look like mine. A third of every prompt in here never moves, and two thirds that does is entirely yours: your references, your style, your taste, the picture that is already in your head. If your pack ends up looking like my pack, then I have written this badly.

5. Before you download

Which one to take. If your computer has a reasonably modern NVIDIA card, take the NVIDIA installer. It is about 1.1 GB because it carries the CUDA runtime, and that runtime is what makes the model steps quick. If it does not, take the CPU one at about 75 MB. It does everything the NVIDIA build does. The steps that use a model simply take longer, and on a long animated clip with a heavy model that can mean hours rather than minutes. That is the model doing the work rather than a fault, and the handbook says so too.

Both installers are unsigned, and Windows will stop you. You will get the blue SmartScreen panel telling you the publisher is unknown. You choose More info, then Run anyway.

I would rather explain that here than let you meet it cold. Code signing costs money every year, and this community is still small enough that I do not think that spend is the right call today. This is a beta, and it is the first one. If MPC grows into something where this genuinely matters to you, I will sign it. Right now it honestly is not the moment.

What I can do instead is let you check the file yourself, which is worth more than a certificate anyway. Open PowerShell in the folder you downloaded to and run this, with the name of the file you took:

Get-FileHash .\MPC-Setup-0.1.0-beta1-windows-cpu.exe -Algorithm SHA256

If what comes back matches the line below, you have the exact file that left my machine. If it does not, do not run it, and come and tell me.

MPC-Setup-0.1.0-beta1.1-windows-nvidia.exe 1.236.314.099 bytes

C2ACC327E737C437933266B04B03B454DEB3719189AF5E30672E390FA951E325

MPC-Setup-0.1.0-beta1.1-windows-cpu.exe 78.720.406 bytes

3D2F03A119E4773A6DE41DA62BB7AADAF9A227D471649CA373DCB212C5FBB3C3

And take it from here and nowhere else. If you find MPC on some other site, it did not come from me. Delete it.

There is no updater. MPC does not check for new versions, does not phone home, and will not update itself. It sends no telemetry. When there is a next version it will arrive the way this one did, as a post here.

And it is a beta. Beta 1, version 0.1.0.dev11, Windows only. It has been tested hard, on one machine, by one person. Yours is going to find something mine did not.

6. What I would like back

Tell me what breaks. That is the whole ask.

When something goes wrong, open Settings, press Export diagnostics, and bring the file to the Wand and Widgets Discord. It carries component versions and redacted logs. It does not carry your token, your artwork or your projects, and nothing goes anywhere unless you take it there yourself.

And tell me what is confusing, not only what is broken. If you had to read a paragraph twice, that paragraph is my fault, and I would rather fix it while this is still Beta 1.

One thing that is already on the list: a Portuguese version of the application. It is not in this release. It is the next thing I am working on.

7. And it all leads to here

That is the four files, and it is the promise I made when you asked me how the animated pack was made.

Take the installer that matches your machine. Open the handbook when you get stuck. Open the other one when you want to know why I did something the way I did.

The Cookbook ends on one line. It will do for this post too.

Now go and make something I could not.

Update: Beta 1.1 replaces Beta 1. If you have an RTX 50 series card, you want this one.

A member with an RTX 5070 told me his animated renders were taking absurd amounts of time and sent me a diagnostics bundle. He was right, and it was my fault.

Beta 1 shipped a graphics library from April 2024. The RTX 50 series arrived in 2025, and that library has no code for it at all. So on those cards MPC could not use the graphics card, fell back to the processor without saying so clearly, and BiRefNet on a processor takes hours. The silence is the part that annoys me most.

Beta 1.1 ships a current library and makes sure MPC can load all of it. The testers with 50 series cards are reporting the speed jump you would expect. It also adds a guard: if MPC ever fails to use your GPU again, it now stops and tells you instead of grinding away all evening.

Who should re-download. If you have an RTX 50 series card, this is the fix and you want it. Anyone else on the NVIDIA build should take it too. If you are on the CPU build nothing changes for you, but it is here so the whole release carries one version number.

Everything below is Beta 1.1. The files, the sizes and the hashes are all the new ones.