Hand-edit a growth stage

A stage map can only make pixels appear. When a young stage needs a pixel somewhere the mature plant does not have it, such as a root crop's sprout drawn down to the soil line, edit that stage by hand.

1. Generate the stages as usual:

   texturescript stages carrot.stages out
   

2. Open the grid of the stage to change, for example out/stage0/lower.grid. Keep its palette section and draw with its keys, choosing the shades the stage should show.
3. Regenerate with --keep:

   texturescript stages carrot.stages out --keep
   

   
   --keep renders the existing stageN/HALF.grid files as drawn instead of overwriting them. Shifts and recolours are not applied to a kept grid again. Every stage is still linted.
4. Point your scene at the output folder, not the .stages file, so it shows your edit:

   [[plot]]
   label = "carrot"
   stages = "out"
   

   
   To see both, use variants: stages = { generated = "carrot.stages", edited = "out" }.

Start over

Run without --keep to overwrite every stage with the generated version. Use a fresh output folder if you removed a half or reduced the number of stages: stages refuses to write next to stale outputs and leaves existing files alone.