Paint
Paint is the lowest-friction way to leave a mark on merca.earth. Open the map, click the paint button, draw. No wallet. No signing. No fee. Your strokes show up for everyone within thirty seconds.
Each level of the map — continent, country, region, city, district, block — has its own canvas. What you paint at one zoom does not leak to another. And paint sits under ownership: registered parcels block paint, and when somebody registers new land, the paint underneath becomes the parcel's visual layer.
In merca.earth, ideas compete for space. Paint is the cheapest way to put an idea on the map.
Starting a session
Click the pencil icon in the map's heads-up display. The first action of the session passes a quick bot check — that is the entire gate. No wallet prompt, no email, no account.
A session lasts twenty minutes and carries a fixed ink budget for the level you are painting at. When the timer runs out or your ink is spent, the session closes and a cooldown begins. Start another whenever you want.
Paint at the zoom that fits your idea. Continent paint reads from space; block paint reads when somebody walks the block.
Painting tools
The bottom toolbar gives you everything you need: brush, eraser, color picker, brush size, pixel mode, and a magnifier. Below the canvas, the heads-up display tracks ink spent, ink left, and undo state.
- Brush — freehand strokes. Brush size goes from 1 to 64 pixels.
- Eraser — removes pixels you placed. Erasing reclaims ink at the level's cost.
- Color — full RGB picker. Defaults to red.
- Pixel mode — snaps strokes to the underlying paint grid. Use this for pixel art; turn it off for smooth lines.
- Magnifier — a 2.5× lens that follows your cursor. Helpful at fine zooms when one pixel matters.
- Undo / Redo —
Cmd+Z/Ctrl+Zreverts the last stroke. Limited to the current session.
Pan the map without painting by holding the Pan key. Brush strokes resume as soon as you release.
Ink and Cooldown
Every session opens with an ink budget calibrated to the level. Paint costs ink; erasing reclaims a portion of it. When ink hits zero, the session is exhausted and a cooldown begins.
| Level | Ink per session | What it buys, roughly |
|---|---|---|
| Continent | 500 | broad gestures across hemispheres |
| Country | 2,000 | shapes that read at world scale |
| Region | 8,000 | detail at country scale |
| City | 8,000 | filling a city neighborhood |
| District | 12,000 | block-by-block detail in a district |
| Block | 16,000 | dense pixel work on a single block |
Pixels are smaller at finer levels, so finer levels get more ink. Numbers are calibrated so that one full session covers a comparable share of your viewport at every zoom.
Cooldown after a spent session is twenty minutes per level. Other levels remain open during cooldown — exhaust your block budget and you can still paint at the country level immediately.
Painting around parcels
You cannot paint over registered parcels. The map enforces this for you: every commit is stamped against current parcel boundaries, and pixels covered by an existing parcel are dropped before they touch the canvas.
For the painter, this means owned land looks like a hole in the canvas — strokes flow around it. For the owner, it means your visual layer stays under your control. Nobody can graffiti your parcel from the public side.
If you paint near a boundary and the result looks clipped, that is the mask working. Move slightly further out and your strokes land.
Saving your work
Click Complete when you are done. The app submits your strokes, the budget and occupied mask are checked, and the canvas updates. Other viewers see your work within thirty seconds.
If the session expires while you are still painting, the strokes you have already committed stay. Anything mid-stroke is lost. There is no draft state across sessions.
Painting is anonymous and unmoderated. Pixels on the public canvas are visible to everyone. The mechanical limits — bot check, ink budgets, the occupied mask — are the only constraints.
From paint to ownership
Painting and parcel registration are linked through one rule: registering land carries paint with it.
When you register a new parcel, the paint inside your shape is cropped to the parcel boundary and pre-filled into the visual layer editor as your starting image. The public canvas loses those pixels — they live now as the parcel's image, controlled only by you.
This makes a two-step path possible:
- Paint anywhere, anonymously, free.
- If you painted something worth keeping, register the area. The paint becomes yours.
You can edit, replace, or delete the visual layer afterward like any owner-controlled parcel image. See Name & Visual Layer for the editor.
Activity dots
When you zoom out far enough that the paint canvas itself disappears, colored dots take over. Each dot marks a level where painting is happening: size scales with the seven-day commit count, color encodes recency — red within an hour, orange around a day, gray near the end of the week.
Activity dots are how you discover the action before you can see the pixels. Zoom in toward a bright dot and the paint appears.
See also: Key Concepts → Paint · Name & Visual Layer · Register Land · FAQ · Glossary