When to use the manual controls

Either Flockbay does it, or you do it yourself with the builder’s tools around the 3D or 2D view. There is no third path where you ask for something and the world quietly changes without either of those happening.

Both write to the same project, and both are equally real. Switching between them mid-build is normal.

The change is about behaviour rather than appearance — how something moves, what happens when you touch it, what the rules of the game are. That is code, and code is what Flockbay writes.

Or the change is large and repetitive. Putting a player in the world and giving them something to do is that in either kind of project. On the 3D side it is also generating a landscape or setting up weather from nothing. Doing any of it by hand is slow, and the result is not better for having been slow.

You can see what is wrong but you cannot describe it. A shoreline that is nearly right, a hillside where the trees look sprayed on, a walk speed that feels heavy — these are faster to fix with a slider and your own eyes than to write a sentence about.

A flat world gives you the same kind of work in its own tools. Widening a ledge is a drag across the cells you want covered, and taking one back is a drag with erase. A crate that wants to be further left, turned slightly, and a size smaller is three drags and no sentence at all.

You also want the builder whenever the answer is "a bit more" or "not there, there". Dragging is a more precise instruction than any sentence.