Handbook page 2.18: Toxin Scrubber, blueprint over the flooded city

About this game

Developer: Free Lives, Clockwork Acorn · Publisher: Devolver Digital · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Painterly illustration · Screen type: Encyclopedia / Codex

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What to study

A building's documentation in Terra Nil is one page of a restoration handbook, and the page is mostly a drawing. The text does exactly one job, what the Toxin Scrubber is for, and the single placement principle that makes it efficient, while the blueprint, the soil cross-sections and the little in/out diagrams carry the detail, in the visual language of an engineer's notebook rather than a tooltip. That the page floats over the flooded city it describes, monorail pylons still wired and glowing behind it, makes the handbook feel consulted in the field instead of opened in a menu. Frame at about 0:37 in A Beginner's Guide to Ecosystem Restoration (Steam; scene-change survivor v0_0001).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

detail-panel blueprint-diagram overlay-panel

Components

Parts on screen.

Chart Map

Screen inventory

• a single handbook page is pinned over the live map at right: a numbered header, '2.18 TOXIN SCRUBBER', and one short paragraph of plain advice, 'Cleans wasteland to create fertile soil. This must be done before anything can be grown. For maximum effectiveness, try to build toxin scrubbers to cover the largest possible area with the fewest scrubbers.'
• the top-right corner is a specimen plate: the scrubber painted in colour above a little landscape vignette of the city it belongs to, the way a field guide pairs a species with its habitat
• the lower two-thirds of the page are given to drawing, not text: a large blueprint of the plant on graph paper with lettered part callouts, 'fig 001' and 'fig 002' details, cross-section swatches of soil and water layers, and tiny flow diagrams showing what goes in and what comes out
• behind the page is the thing itself: the flooded ruined city the scrubber serves, a broken tower block, a drowned monorail line whose pylons glow at their nodes, and a scrubber buoy floating in the brown water at centre

Top 3 colors

#51433f 28%#2d201e 21%#523725 18%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Free Lives, Clockwork Acorn / Devolver Digital, Terra Nil screenshot: Steam trailers (Vita Nova / A Beginner's Guide to Ecosystem Restoration / Heatwave), Devolver Digital, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Devolver Digital.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-27. verified 2026-10-27: scene-change survivor candidates/v0_0001.png @ 36.7s in A Beginner's Guide to Ecosystem Restoration, MD5 26dee22e52a98c06fa9333cbc1169a93, from the verified-clean curl-shim download (113245052 B, MD5 fb35ad4b8582f05caa7a73d961050cdc; full decode to null with -xerror exit 0, zero error lines, decode-steam-1593030-A-Beginner-s-Guide-to-Ecosystem-Restoration.err), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); the 2.18 header, the full body paragraph, the specimen plate and the blueprint callouts legible; no trailer text, caption or watermark in frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-27); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.