Aetherlab Cursors

Aetherlab Cursors is a set of 12 mouse cursors drawn in the magitech style, where pointed corners and a circuit trace carry arcane colour — fantasy with wiring under it. It contains an arrow and an arrow with a wait ring, a pointing hand and a move cursor, a crosshair and a target lock, attack, talk and loot cursors, busy, blocked and text cursors and a resize cursor.

A game that draws its own interface and then leaves the operating system cursor on top of it has a hole in the middle of the screen, and it is the part the player looks at constantly. Cursors are also the one sprite that has no control over its background: it passes over sky, stone, fire and inventory in the same second.

The pointed corners come from the shape vocabulary rather than from a fantasy frame, and that is deliberate: this style is the tech half of magitech, not the carved half. Gradients and outlined compositions alternate through the set so a spell panel and an instrument panel can share one screen.

Inside that style this is the Aetherlab reading of it: a dark interface on a lab navy palette with aether cyan accents, built around a single bordered frame, chamfered buttons at 144x36, hollow-cored bars divided into 22 segments, and two-tone icons on a 24px grid. Those measurements are why two families can share an art style without being interchangeable: the style decides how an edge is drawn, the numbers decide what the interface is for.

Every cursor carries an outline in the opposite end of the palette from its body, which is what keeps it readable over a background the kit knows nothing about — a dark cursor over a dark cave disappears, and no amount of styling fixes that. The hotspot is named in the file title of each sprite rather than left for you to guess: the arrow clicks at 0,0 and the crosshair at its centre, and a hotspot that is off by three pixels is a game where the player misses what they aimed at.

Every sprite ships as an editable SVG and as transparent PNG at 1x, 2x and 4x, so you can drop the PNGs straight into an engine or open the vector and change a colour. Built to the same measurements as the rest of the Aetherlab family, which means this kit and the Aetherlab panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for magitech, alchemy and arcane-science interfaces.

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