netfishing/world/README-WORLD-AUTHORING.md

World authoring

The active test world uses the human-authored starter island through world/regions/starter_island_region.tscn.

Active composition

world/test_world.tscn owns the gameplay-wide environment, sun, world bounds, and below-world failsafe. StarterIslandRegion owns the placed island content:

StarterIslandRegion
├── Terrain
│   ├── Visual
│   └── Collision
├── WaterBodies
│   ├── Pond
│   │   ├── VisualWater
│   │   ├── FishingRegion
│   │   └── RecoveryRegion
│   └── Ocean
│       ├── VisualWater
│       ├── FishingRegions
│       └── RecoveryRegions
├── PlayerSpawn
├── SafeRespawns
└── Interactables
    ├── FishingShopWorld
    └── PelicanCoolerPerch

Move the meaningful feature root rather than one of its implementation children. Child transforms are local offsets owned by that feature.

Water bodies

Select WaterBodies/Pond to move or resize the pond. Its transform is the authoritative surface position. The surface_size, fishing padding, recovery padding, and recovery depth properties update the visible water and gameplay coverage together. Fishing and recovery derive the surface height from the owned surface transform.

Select WaterBodies/Ocean to move the surrounding water as one feature. Its visual, fishing lobes, and recovery lobes use local transforms beneath the ocean root. The existing multi-lobe footprint remains intentionally explicit; changing that footprint still requires editing its owned lobe children.

Placed features

• PlayerSpawn is the authoritative initial player transform. Its rotation controls initial facing.
• Each marker under SafeRespawns is an authoritative recovery destination. Recovery preserves the player's current facing; marker rotation is intentionally not applied.
• Interactables/FishingShopWorld owns the shop visual, collision, interaction area, prompt, and entrance marker.
• Interactables/PelicanCoolerPerch owns the complete Pelican landmark visual. Pelican selling remains a Cooler action and has no world interaction area.
• Terrain owns both the imported visual and generated terrain collision.
• BelowWorldFailsafe/Coverage exposes the below-world recovery coverage as a saved collision shape in world/test_world.tscn.

The active Environment, Sun, and external starter-island grass material remain directly editable through the Inspector. Their tuning is not recreated by runtime scripts.

Reusable world props

Use a single placed WorldProp root for trees, rocks, buildings, benches, signs, vegetation, and similar landmarks:

WorldProp
├── Visual
└── Collision
    └── CollisionShape3D

Add optional interaction areas, labels, and markers beneath the same root. Instance imported GLB visuals beneath Visual; keep gameplay collision Godot-owned beneath Collision. Place and duplicate the complete prop scene, not its visual child.

Author reusable assets at scale (1, 1, 1). Uniform root scaling is acceptable for provisional props when visual and collision scale together. Avoid non-uniform root scaling because it can deform collision and imported geometry unpredictably. Make mutable per-instance shapes, meshes, and materials local to the scene so editing one prop does not change unrelated instances.