Question 1

Is the in-game canvas actually a pixel grid?

Accepted Answer

Not natively. Reports put the canvas at 256 × 256 and you paint freehand with brushes. There are two brush shapes (round and square) and three stroke modes — smooth, fine, and pixel-perfect. The UI shows six brush-size icons, but the real cell size depends on the stroke mode: smooth gives six distinct sizes (1, 3, 7, 13, 19, 27 px), while pixel-perfect collapses to four snap-to-grid cell sizes (4, 8, 16, 32 px). Pick one brush, set it to square + pixel-perfect, untick Smooth, and the canvas behaves exactly like a pixel grid — where each cell is one brush stamp.

Question 2

When should I turn Dither on?

Accepted Answer

Photos, skin tones, skies — anything with gradients. The speckled pattern hides the fact that your palette is shorter than the rainbow. Turn it off for logos and icons.

Question 3

What's the Game palette?

Accepted Answer

The exact 77 swatches in the in-game grid (11 columns × 7 rows), plus the 7 pure saturated extras on the right-hand strip — 84 total. Every cell gets a row · column label so you can recreate it without eyeballing.

Question 4

Why are the brush sizes fixed?

Accepted Answer

The game ships with a fixed set of brush sizes (six in smooth mode, four in pixel-perfect), and no way to paste a hex value. Snapping your design to one brush keeps the grid consistent — every cell is the same size, every stroke lands cleanly, and the Recipe card tells you exactly which brush and mode to select.

Question 5

Easy or Pro/Artist mode?

Accepted Answer

Pro, always — Easy mode hides the full palette and half the tools. Tap the gear icon top-right of the toolbar to switch. You can bounce between modes without losing progress, but the Recipe assumes Pro is on.

Question 6

How do I unlock Palette House?

Accepted Answer

Get to six Mii residents on your island. Someone will eventually have a Yellow Pondering about wanting something handmade — accept it and the workshop unlocks. The tutorial covers food; every other category unlocks later by wishing at the Wishing Fountain.

Question 7

Does the game have a mirror / symmetry brush?

Accepted Answer

No. There's no live mirror brush in Palette House — the Symmetry toggle here is a preview-only planning aid. In-game, the workflow is: paint half, select, duplicate (+), then ZL to flip horizontally and slot it next to the original.

Question 8

Round brush or square brush?

Accepted Answer

Square. Always square. Round brush on a pixel grid gives you cells that blur at the corners and adjacent cells overlap. Square + pixel-perfect snaps one stroke to one cell.

Question 9

How do I match the colours from the app in-game? Where do I see H/S/B values in Tomodachi Life?

Accepted Answer

The in-game Colour picker doesn't display any H/S/B numbers and doesn't let you type a hex code. The only way to land an exact colour is to count button presses from the picker's default cursor position. Living the Grid's H/S/B numbers under each swatch are exactly those press counts: H is the number of ZR presses on the hue strip from the leftmost default, S is the number of D-pad right presses on the saturation/brightness pad, and B is the number of D-pad up presses, both from the bottom-left default. The picker is also non-linear — it applies a perceptual curve to all three axes — so naive counting against a standard HSV value won't line up; the app does the curve maths so the values it gives you land where you expect.

Living the Grid

Frequently asked questions

Something missing? Caught a bug?