Reused frames — one sprite, many animations

Extra · Sprites module. Skip unless you're editing sprite animations and want to know what else an edit will touch. Prerequisite: Section A, and you should already be comfortable finding and replacing a sprite.

You'll be able to: tell, before you repaint a frame, every other frame and animation that will change with it — and recognise when an edit is safely isolated.

The one fact that matters

Stitchwork replaces a sprite by identity — a single PNG named for one sprite (collection/material/spriteName). The game's animations don't each carry their own copy of that art; many animation frames point at the same sprite. So when you replace one sprite, every frame in every animation that points at it changes too.

That's not a bug — it's how the game saves memory. Hornet's run, idle, and turn might all reuse the same cloak frame. One PNG, many uses. The thing to internalise: you're not editing "a frame," you're editing a sprite that some number of frames borrow.

A real example: airborne frame 2 is also a hop frame

Open the Dev Hub's Animation tab (Graphics → Animation), select Hornet, and step to frame 2 of the airborne animation. Under the sprite preview you'll see a line like:

Reused: 6 frames across 2 clips (1 in this clip)

Click it, and the Sources list shows you exactly where — and one of them is hop. That second airborne frame is a hop frame; the game reuses it. So if you repaint it for your airborne pose, your hop changes to match.

Maybe that's what you want (a consistent cloak everywhere). Maybe it isn't (you wanted a different airborne silhouette). Either way, now you know before you paint — not after a player notices their hop looks off.

[image: the reuse readout on airborne frame 2, Sources foldout open showing "hop"]

What's needed for this image: Dev Hub Animation tab, Hornet selected on airborne frame 2, the reuse readout expanded so "hop" appears in the Sources list.

How to read your own blast radius

You don't need a memorised list of every reused frame in the game — you have the tool that finds them, live:

1. Open Graphics → Animation and select the character.
2. Land on the frame you're about to edit (step frames with the inspector, or pause the game on the pose).
3. Read the line under the sprite preview:
   • "Reused: N frames across M clips" → editing this sprite changes all of them. Expand Sources to see which animations, and which frames.
   • "Only used here — safe to edit in isolation" → no blast radius. Paint freely; nothing else moves.

Because the readout is computed from the game's loaded data, it's always current — including after a game content update, when the same tool will simply report the new reality. That's why this page teaches you to find reuse rather than handing you a table that would go stale the next patch.

What to do about a shared frame

• You want the uses to match (a recoloured cloak, consistent everywhere): perfect — one PNG covers every use, and that's less art to make, not more. Reuse is working for you.
• You want one use to differ from another: you can't, today. A replacement is keyed to the sprite, not to "this animation's copy of it," so every use gets the same PNG. Per-animation overrides are a possible future direction, but the ceiling is art-on-rails (the same motion, different pixels), not new motion.
• Dumping a whole animation: the inspector's Ready All Animation Sprite for Edit button already collapses to distinct sprites — it won't hand you the same shared frame five times.

You can now check the blast radius of any sprite edit before you make it, and tell a safe isolated edit from one that ripples across animations.

Related: Finding Any Sprite · Bigger Art: Anchors