Themes in Hedgewars are always used together with maps to set a “mood” and ambience. They significantly change the appearance of the terrain for random maps.

Themes are mostly cosmetic, but some thems may affect the gameplay rules a bit.

What a theme does

• Gives random maps a style
• Sets: Environment style: background, water, clouds and all that
• Adds flakes, cosmetic small objects which float with the wind
• Defines theme objects such as pillars in Olympics theme
• May overwrite the appearance of land girders, and even construction girders and rubber
• Sets the background music (also for image maps)
• May enable slippery girders
• May enable snow flakes

Rule changes of themes

Most themes do not change the gameplay rules.

This section is concerned about the exceptions.

Ice Mode

In themes with Ice Mode enabled, all land girders as well as all girders placed with Construction will be made of slippery terrain.

The themes Snow and Christmas use Ice Mode.

Snow Flakes

Normally, the flakes (background objects which float around with the wind) have no impact on the gameplay whatsoever and are purely cosmetic. However, in a theme with snow flakes enabled, the flakes will actually pile up on the terrain and become an actual part of the terrain. As the game drags on, hedgehogs and objects may even get snowed in!

Snow flakes can also pile up on rubber, which defeats its bounciness because snow flakes are normal terrain.

The themes Snow and Christmas have snow flakes.

Snow flakes won't pile up if indestructible terrain is enabled (→Game modifiers).

Instant drowning / 100% opaque water

In themes in which the water is 100% opaque, everything will drown instantly in the water, causing no delay. Normally, this has no actual impact on gameplay, especially without the infinite attacks mode.

In Highlander, this change is more relevant because you only win the ammo after the hedgehog has completely disappeared after drowning. Thus, you will instantly win ammo in these themes after drowning a hedgehog.

The themes Compost and Underwater have 100% opaque water.

Special terrain theme objects

In theory, theme objects may be entirely or partially be made out of special terrain, such as slippery, bouncy or fully indestructible. The Beach, Cheese, Cave, Earthrise and Fruit themes use this for defining all or part of an object as being of the same type of terrain as the land so that a land back texture is applied. It can also be used to make a portion of an object as background that a hog can pass through. A few community themes use this. The same rules apply for masking apply as in the map mask defined in PresetMaps.

Creating themes

If you have your artistic day today , you can create your own themes. See this HWKB page: Themes