The diffusion route generates at SDXL's native 1024px, so a 32px icon is a
32x downscale. Detail that survives the generator does not survive that
reduction -- a coin's struck emblem, a shield's radial pattern and a
lantern's glass panes all mush at 32px and read clearly at 64px.
max_colors is deliberately NOT scaled with the canvas. Measured over the 300
genuine 48x48 icons in ~/opengameart-downloads: p50=9 p90=13 max=14. A cap of
32 rejects 0.00% of that art and so does every larger cap, so hand-made art
does not spend more colours on a bigger canvas. Raising it would only admit
more un-quantized generator output.
Gates 18/18: the 12 original bake-off subjects re-finished at 64px, plus six
subjects the route had never seen (lantern, axe, boots, helmet, torch,
mushroom).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01T9rQ12yZ7sJxiPQTCS5dUF
