Chroma empowers Conan Exiles players to tint buildings and decorations, such as walls, doorways, planters and fences. It began its life as a feature introduced in a 2019 Emberlight update; I learned so much while developing it, however, that I knew by the time I was finished that I wanted to overhaul it and spin it off into its own mod.

In February of 2025, I finally committed to developing Chroma 2, which improves on Chroma in every way. It adds a host of user permission settings for admins, massively improves usability and expands the variety of in-game objects players can tint. Chroma 2 even allows players to tweak the surface properties of objects, such as roughness, metallic intensity, and normal strength!

In order to offer the depth of visual customization players wanted, Chroma 2 needed to overcome limitations on replicating complex data structures in Unreal Engine 4. To do this, it converts player-created color themes into String variables before saving them to the game’s SQL database or replicating them to the server in a multiplayer game. Upon receiving these strings on a player client, Chroma converts them back into struct form so it can apply the theme to an object’s mesh components via blueprint script. These iteration-heavy conversion operations do not take place on dedicated servers, ensuring that Chroma is as performant as possible.

Chroma 2 also includes a Scenery Mode checkbox that allows players to exempt certain objects in their game world from being culled by game client render distance or becoming disabled by changes in its AILOD (AI Level of Detail), effectively making any decoration object a permanent part of the landscape.