Meshy builds the noun you lead with

The subscription was cancelled and a thousand credits were going to expire with it. So the question for the afternoon was simple: what does the game not have yet that a text-to-3D model can make?

The answer turned out to be embarrassing. Eleven decorations had been sitting in the data file since August — a lamppost, a bench, a bandstand, each with a level and a coin price — and not one had any art, a footprint, or a way to buy or place it. That is the entire cosmetic layer of a game whose whole pitch is that money makes the cove prettier and never stronger. It was missing.

Thirty models later it isn't. Every decoration has a picture and sits on the Build sheet under its own heading. Cottage Row has six houses instead of three. The map editor's palette gained a rowboat, a net rack, a tide pool, a well, a boathouse, an orchard gate. The permanent credits — the ones that don't expire — are untouched, because a watcher killed each batch the moment the monthly balance ran low.

About one model in four came back wrong, and every one of them was wrong the same way.

The lamppost was described as "a harbour lamppost with a rope wrapped around the post." Meshy made a boat. Harbour, rope — of course it did. The wind chime, "hanging from a wooden post," came back twice hanging from nothing: the chime was the subject and the post was a detail, so the post was the thing that got dropped. "A stack of lobster pots with rope netting" was a single brown mass; pots and netting had merged into each other.

The fix was identical each time. Lead with the noun you actually want, and name the failure. "A tall slim vertical lamppost… NOT a boat." "A wooden garden post, planted in the ground, with a chime hanging from its hook" — post first. "Three separate wooden boxes, clearly apart, NOT a pile." All three came back right on the next try.

This is the same lesson the item icons taught back in August, when asking for "wheat" produced a plant and asking for "a sheaf" produced the thing you harvest. The model builds what you say first and treats the rest as flavour. If the flavour contains a stronger noun than the subject, you get the flavour.

Two smaller things worth writing down. The prompt limit is 800 characters and it includes the style prefix that gets prepended to every request, which is how two perfectly good prompts got rejected with nothing charged. And anything that runs along a tile edge — a fence, a string of pennants, a drying rack — has to be rotated forty-five degrees before baking, or it sits on the map as a diamond.

The credits are gone now. The cove has a bandstand.