FW Paint v2.1.0-beta.1

Patterns + Face Perpendicular. Draw a 2D block grid by hand and paint it as a plane — plus a new 1-block-wide placement mode with 45° diagonals, and a rebuilt variation system shared by every paint. Design doc: docs/v2.1-patterns-spec.md.

Targets (unchanged): Minecraft 26.2 · Fabric Loader 0.19.3+ · Fabric API for 26.2 (Fabric jar only) · Java 25.

Patterns

• A second kind of palette item: press + Pattern on the Palette tab (the gradient button is now + Gradient) to open the pattern editor and draw a grid up to 32×32. Empty cells are holes that place nothing; a live iso-wall preview (expandable full screen) shows the drawing — variance included.
• Editor tools: pick a block from the colour-sorted list (its sprite rides the cursor; pressing a same-block cell erases it), a pinned Eraser, Shift-drag straight/45° lines with live preview, right-click flood fill (bounded by other blocks), middle-click eyedropper, Ctrl-click to set the placement-origin plus, a Clear button with confirmation, and a Start: Top/Bottom flip so painting up from the ground keeps the drawing upright.
• Pattern is its own paint type — V cycles Gradient → Noise → Solid → Pattern, and the cycle keybind (B) steps through patterns while Pattern paint is active and gradients otherwise; each kind keeps its own active selection, HUD row, and Paint-tab display.
• Placement: the pattern starts at its start edge (or the marked origin cell) and advances out of the clicked face; its width runs across a plane derived from your facing, snapped to 45°/90°. Painting a box yields the pattern on the plane-parallel faces and edge streaks on the perpendicular sides — and adjacent strokes continue the drawing (placed cells cache their position in the pattern) instead of restarting.
• Tiling: none / sides / start–end / both. Honest placement: missing blocks refuse with the block named; running out mid-paint stops with "out of X".

Unified variation (all paints)

• Gradient/noise variation drops the old colour-threshold band model for the pattern-pioneered one: a window (Off/±1/±2/±3 positions in the Oklab colour ordering of your inventory) and a chance slider (0–100%) — on a successful roll a cell swaps to a random other block within the window, otherwise it places exactly what the ramp/drawing says. Both default off.
• Variance never restarts in-progress paint — it's excluded from the cache keys, so you can toggle it mid-build and keep the repeating pattern/gradient going.

Face Perpendicular

• A new placement mode between Face and 3D Fill: a 1-block-wide run through the clicked block, crossing your view (perpendicular to where you look), snapped to 45° or 90° — diagonal stair-stepped runs included.
• End markers stop it; with a start marker behind the click only the marked blocks along the run are selected. Works with every paint type. The snapping is the new Perp snap Settings toggle, shared with the pattern plane.

Everything else

• The gradient-memory setting is now Paint memory — it times out all the free-hand caches (gradient columns, 3D fills, pattern placements) — with a 10-minute default and a 30-minute max.
• Palette list rows show pattern thumbnails (large grids downsample cleanly, on the HUD too) and per-kind "in use" markers; Edit opens the right editor for the item's kind.
• The in-game Help gains Patterns (with an editor sub-topic) and Face perpendicular.
• v2.0 palettes files load unchanged (items without a kind stay gradients); the old gradient variation percentage is retired and starts Off.