Custom paint mods for 7 Days to Die have always been possible. They’ve also always required you to either already know Unity or be willing to spend an afternoon watching tutorials just to package a texture into a format the game will accept. Not exactly accessible. Not exactly welcoming to the majority of players who just want their base to look like something other than the default grey slop.
So I built KitsunePaint.
It’s a web tool. You upload a texture, see it previewed on an actual wall, download a ready-to-drop modlet zip. That’s it. No Unity. No command line. No folder structure archaeology.
Why This Exists
7D2D has a modding scene that’s been keeping this game alive for years, especially through the rougher patches (and there have been patches). The community has put in serious work building tools, frameworks, and mods that the base game doesn’t offer. Custom paints are a small thing, but they’re also one of the most visible creative outlets players have – you’re looking at your walls constantly.
The barrier was always the pipeline. Getting a custom texture into the game involves Unity bundle injection, DXT normal map formats, proper mipmap generation, slot mapping, localization files, and packaging it all into a modlet structure the game recognizes. If you don’t know what half those words mean, congratulations, you’re a normal person who just wanted to put a cool pattern on your walls.
The Fun Pimps have had a long and complicated relationship with their modding community – to put it diplomatically. Tools that make modding more accessible haven’t always been a priority when there are alphas to ship. The community filled that gap, as it always does.
KitsunePaint is my contribution to that gap-filling.
How It Works
Go to paint.kitsuneden.net.
Upload your texture. PNG works, common image formats work. If you’ve got something you made in Photoshop, Aseprite, Canva, your phone’s photo app, whatever – you’re probably fine.
You’ll see it previewed on a wall. An actual wall, not a flat 2D tile preview. This matters because textures behave differently at angles, and the preview lets you catch problems before you’re standing in your base at a weird angle wondering why your cool texture looks wrong.
If it looks good, download the zip. Drop the modlet folder into your 7 Days to Die mods directory. Launch the game. Your paint is there, in the paint menu, working correctly – thumbnails and all.
That’s the whole thing.
Under the hood it’s doing the Unity bundle injection, generating DXT normal maps, handling mipmap generation, mapping the right format to the right slot, and writing the localization file. All the stuff that used to be your problem is now not your problem.
Who This Is For
Builders. Decorators. Anyone who’s spent time in creative mode making something that actually looks like something. Server admins who want custom branding for their server’s aesthetic. Content creators who want a unique look for their content. People who are just tired of the same paints.
You don’t need to know anything about modding. You don’t need to know what UnityPy is. You don’t need to know me or anything about the KitsuneDen ecosystem this is part of.
Upload a texture. Get a modlet. That’s the whole relationship.
A Note on Dependencies
KitsunePaint’s output depends on OCBCustomTextures. Make sure you have that installed in your mods folder alongside the pack you download. It’s the framework that actually lets the game load custom paint textures – I’m generating packs that work with it, not reinventing that wheel. And yes, this is needed both server and client side.
What’s Next
This is live and working. The full pipeline runs correctly, everything renders in-game, no black-at-angles weirdness (which was a whole thing to solve, for the record).
If there’s demand for it, batch uploads, pack management, sharing packs with other players – those are all things that could happen. For now it does exactly what it says it does, and it does it without making you learn a new skill set first.
Go make something. paint.kitsuneden.net.
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