Inkwell Crafting UI

Inkwell Crafting UI is a set of 13 crafting and recipe widgets drawn in the cel-shaded style, where a thick ink outline wraps two flat tones split by a hard diagonal terminator. It contains three ingredient slot states, an oversized result slot, a combine and a salvage arrow, an ingredient join mark, three quality meters, a known and an undiscovered recipe row and a stepped crafting progress bar.

Crafting is the one screen where a slot has to say something an inventory slot never says: not what is in it, but whether you have enough of it. Have, missing and partly-have are three states, and a set that ships one slot sprite forces the engine to answer that question in text under every slot.

The shadow is a single hard-edged shape with no falloff — the defining property of cel shading, and the thing a gradient can never imitate. The outline uses the darkest tone in the palette rather than the border tone, or it reads as a thick grey frame instead of ink.

Inside that style this is the Inkwell reading of it: a light interface on a flat poster palette with signal red accents, built around a single bordered frame, square-cornered buttons at 152x52, banded bars divided into 5 segments, and solid 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.

The ingredient slot ships in all three states with the difference carried in the border rather than in a fill: a satisfied slot is closed, a missing one is dashed, a partial one is closed on the bottom half only. That reads at 56 pixels and it reads without colour. The combine and salvage arrows are separate files rather than one arrow rotated, because both sit on the same screen and a mirrored arrow throws its shading to the wrong side. The result slot is drawn a third larger than the ingredient slot on purpose: the output of a recipe is not one more ingredient and should not sit in the same box.

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 Inkwell family, which means this kit and the Inkwell panel kit line up without either being resized. A good fit for cel-shaded and toon-rendered games.

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