How body color indexing works

Why a custom body's colors get replaced or refuse to recolor in game, and the simple palette trick that fixes both.

If you have ever made a body, even a recolor or a rip, you have probably hit this: colors you wanted left alone get swapped by the game, colors you wanted to be changeable stay stuck, and transparency does not work. It feels random. It is not.

Graal reads the palette order, not the colors

A body is an 8 bit indexed image, which means its pixels point at a palette table instead of storing colors directly. Graal recolors a body by overwriting specific slots in that table with the player's chosen colors. What matters is the position in the table, not the color value sitting there. The first seven slots are reserved:

• 0 Outline
• 1 Belt
• 2 Transparency
• 3 Shoes
• 4 Sleeves
• 5 Skin
• 6 Coat

Anything from slot 7 onward is left alone and shown exactly as drawn.

Why colors get replaced

When you paste a body into an editor and index it, the editor fills the palette starting at slot 0 with the colors your image uses. So your colors land in the reserved slots, and Graal treats them as recolorable. That is why parts you never wanted changed suddenly follow the player's color sliders.

Transparency is slot 2

Graal does not use normal image transparency. Whatever color sits in slot 2 is treated as see through. You do not have to mark it transparent yourself, though a good tool will, so the file looks right everywhere and not just in game.

Two ways to use it

Once you know it is about slot order, you get to choose, per part:

Let Graal recolor a part

Put that part's real color in its reserved slot. Skin color in slot 5, coat color in slot 6, and so on. The player's choices now drive those parts.

Keep a part exactly as drawn

Put a filler color the body does not use anywhere into that part's reserved slot. Your real color then lands at slot 7 or later and is shown as is, untouched by recoloring.

You can mix the two

Want a fixed purple belt but a body that still recolors? Draw the belt purple, but drop a filler color into the belt slot. The belt stays purple while skin, coat, and the rest still follow the player's colors.

Why editors fight you

Most graphics programs re-sort the palette into their own order when you save, which scrambles the slot positions and breaks the body. The old fix was dragging the file through a separate palette tool. The body color maker does the slot ordering for you and writes a clean file, so you never touch a palette table by hand.