Something wrong? Say so.

1. Reporting a bug

A good report is one somebody can reproduce. The five things that make the difference:

• What you expected, and what happened instead. One sentence each.
• Where. The level name, or the screen you were on. "The gallery, walking up to the third painting" beats "the menu".
• The steps. Even a rough sequence. If it happens every time, say so, and if it happened once, say that too.
• Your setup. Windows, macOS or Linux, and whether you were on a keyboard, a gamepad or a Steam Deck.
• The log. Open the save folder in the table below. If there is a logs folder inside it, attach the newest file in it.

A screenshot or a short clip is worth all of the above put together, especially for anything visual. Steam's built-in recorder is fine.

The quick way

The feedback button in the game does the middle three of those for you. It takes a picture of the screen as it was the moment you pressed it, before the form opened, and sends which level, which screen and which build along with whatever you type. You see the screenshot before you send it, and you can leave it off. What goes with it is listed in section 5 of the privacy policy.

2. Where your files live

Everything Blotch remembers is plain JSON in one folder. Your progress, your settings, the levels and tile designs you have made, and your saved replays all live here:

Back it up by copying the folder. To start clean, use the Save data section on the Settings screen, which is the safe version: it has a button per kind — progress and settings, custom maps, tile designs, cached files — and each one clears only the files the game manages, leaving everything else alone. The three that lose something ask you to hold the button down.

3. Startup and display

The game will not start

Verify the files first. In your Steam library, right-click Blotch, then Properties, Installed Files, Verify integrity of game files. That fixes a download that finished badly, which is the most common cause by a distance.

If it still will not launch, update your graphics drivers. Blotch is a 2D game but it renders through Vulkan, Direct3D 12 or Metal, so a GPU driver several years old can refuse to start it while everything else on the machine looks fine. If that does not help, send us the log file from section 2 and we will read it.

It opened at the wrong size, or on the wrong screen

Blotch opens filling your whole screen, with no border. To change that, open Settings, Window mode from the main menu. Borderless Window is what you start on and covers the screen. Fullscreen gives the display over to the game alone. Windowed is a normal window you can move and resize, and it is the only one where the Resolution row below does anything.

Changing either of those asks you to keep it, and puts your old window back on its own if you do not answer. So a mode that leaves you unable to read the screen will undo itself if you wait. Nothing is written down until you press Keep it, which means closing the game and reopening it gets you back too.

If the game opens on the wrong monitor, switch to Windowed, drag it across, then switch back.

The text is too small on a Steam Deck or a small screen

The interface scales with the window, so the fullscreen native resolution is the largest the text will be. Everything is drawn to be legible at 1280 by 800.

4. Controllers and input

My controller does nothing

Blotch switches between keyboard and gamepad automatically: press a button on the pad and the on-screen prompts change to match, printing the letters that are on the pad in your hands: a DualSense shows the cross, a Switch Pro shows B where an Xbox pad shows A. If nothing happens, check that Steam sees the controller at all under Steam, Settings, Controller. Blotch ships an official Steam Input layout for Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, Steam Deck and Steam Controller pads, so one that works in Big Picture but not in the game usually means a different layout has been applied to it: open the game's controller settings from Steam and switch back to the official one, which is named for your controller.

I want different keys

Settings, Key bindings rebinds the keyboard and mouse, and the bindings are saved with the rest of your settings. When Steam is driving your controller, the pad half of that list is shown but not editable, because Steam owns those bindings: the Controller settings button on the same screen opens Steam's own binding panel, which is also where the paddles, trackpads and gyro live. On a Steam Deck that is always the case.

Painting with a trackpad or a stick

The brush follows the mouse pointer, and on a gamepad the right stick drives a virtual cursor that does the same job. If your controller has a trackpad, the official layout puts the brush there instead, because a trackpad aims where you touch it rather than pushing a cursor around: a Steam Deck's right pad, a DualSense or DualShock 4 touchpad, the Steam Controller's right pad. Whichever one you are using reaches everywhere the mouse does, menus included.

A laptop trackpad is just a mouse as far as the game is concerned, with one exception: it has no middle button, so the eyedropper sits on the keyboard there and a two-finger tap toggles the brush shape. Blotch spots a trackpad the first time you swipe or pinch, and the controls page draws one in place of the mouse. Settings, Pointing device pins it either way if you have both.

Neither one is as fine as a mouse, and the strokes that matter most are the short ones on your own body. So the cursor slows down as it nears your blob: push the stick all the way, or sweep the pad, and it still crawls while it is over you, then picks back up as you leave. Both are damped the same, because both move the cursor by a step. How much it slows is yours to set: Settings, Fine aim strength runs from untouched to a crawl, Settings, Fine aim near your blob turns it off outright, and Cursor speed above them sets the pace everywhere else.

5. Saves, stars and replays

My progress did not follow me to another machine

Progress roams through Steam Cloud. Check it is enabled for Blotch (right-click the game, Properties, General, Steam Cloud), and let Steam finish syncing before you close it, which it does in the bottom-right of the library window. Scores merge rather than overwrite: the better of the two results for each level wins, so playing on two machines cannot lose you a star.

My replays did not come with me

That one is by design. A replay is far larger than a score, and cloud storage is not, so replays stay on the machine that recorded them.

Where do I watch a replay?

Every run records itself and the best clear is kept. For campaign levels, walk up to the level's painting in the gallery and the placard offers to play it back. For custom and Workshop maps, the entry on the Custom Maps screen carries a Watch your best run button. You can pause, rewind, scrub, zoom and lock the camera to any body.

A star target looks impossible

Every level's star thresholds are derived from a real clear of that level rather than guessed, so three stars is always achievable. If one feels wrong, tell us which level and what you were scoring, because that is exactly the kind of thing that gets retuned.

6. Multiplayer

I cannot join my friend

First, check the game is not full. Every lobby has a size its host picked, up to eight players, and the browser prints it beside each game as "6 / 6" with the Join button greyed out. The host can raise it at the console in the lobby room.

Otherwise: matches are found through the in-game browser or a Steam invite, and they run over Steam's networking. If a lobby will not open or will not accept you, make sure Steam is not in offline mode, restart Steam rather than the game, and check that a firewall or a VPN is not blocking it. Both of you also need the same version of the game, so let Steam finish updating first.

Nobody can hear me

Voice chat defaults to push to talk, so you have to hold the key. In Settings you can switch it to open mic or turn it off, set the voice volume, and the microphone Steam uses is the one picked in Steam, Settings, Voice. Voice is proximity-based during a match and flat in the lobby, so a distant player really is quieter.

Someone is being abusive

Matches are peer to peer, so we cannot see or moderate what is said in them. Use Steam's report and block tools: blocking someone on Steam keeps you out of lobbies together.

7. Accessibility options

Blotch is a colour-matching game, and about one man in twelve cannot separate red from green, so the alert arcs around your blob step in shape as well as colour. Broken, then solid, then double-rimmed, so you can read them without seeing the difference. There is no setting to go and find for that one: it is how the arcs are drawn.

In Settings you can also turn on:

• High contrast alerts, which pushes the detection arcs further apart still.
• Camouflage tone, which reads your match out loud as a pitch: it climbs as your coat closes on the ground, wobbles while you are short, and steadies the moment you are not. It has its own volume, on its own channel, so muting the game's sound effects cannot mute it.
• Vibration, with a strength slider, or off entirely.
• Full rebinding of every action, on either device.

The game ships translated into twelve languages - English, Simplified Chinese, Czech, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish - picked automatically from your Steam language and changeable in Settings.

If an option you need is missing, tell us. This list has grown because people asked.

8. The editor and Workshop

My level uploaded but nobody can see it

Steam hides a Workshop item until its creator has accepted the Workshop legal agreement, once, at steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/workshoplegalagreement. The editor says so when it happens. The upload itself worked; accept the agreement and the item appears.

Published levels are public and attached to your Steam account until you remove them, which you can do from My Uploads in the in-game Workshop browser.

A subscribed level will not load

Let Steam finish downloading it, then restart the game so the Custom Maps screen re-reads what is installed. A level made in a newer version of the game than yours may also refuse to load, so update first.

I lost a level I was building

Levels are saved as individual files in the folder in section 2, under levels, and each save keeps the previous good version beside it as a .bak. If a file is damaged the game falls back to that copy by itself, so a level usually comes back on its own. If it does not, send us the pair and we will look.

9. System requirements

Blotch is light. The floor is a GPU that supports Vulkan, Direct3D 12 or Metal rather than raw speed:

The Steam store page carries the authoritative list, including the recommended column.

10. Refunds

Refunds are handled by Valve, not by us, through Steam Support. The standard policy is a refund for any reason within 14 days of purchase and under two hours of playtime, and Valve considers requests outside that too.

If you are refunding because something is broken, we would genuinely like to know what before you go. It is usually fixable.