The vocabulary

nfty names its parts after a kitchen. Learning these eight words is most of learning the product: every screen, command and file is one of them.

The authoring chain

Word	What it is	File
CookBook	Your whole project: the canvas size, the collection's name and symbol, and its Recipes with their weights.	.cbk
Recipe	One type of character: its ordered stack of layers (bottom to top, the paint order) and its rules. A book can hold several.	.rcp
Ingredient	One layer, such as "Background" or "Hat": its kind, its colorization, and its options.	.igt
Variant	One option inside a layer: a single drawing, with a name and a weight. Never a file of its own.	inside an .igt

A CookBook holds Recipes, a Recipe stacks Ingredients in order, and an Ingredient holds Variants. The archives nest the same way: a .cbk contains .rcp files, which contain .igt files, which contain PNGs.

What you get out

Word	What it is	File
Set	A cooked collection: the images, two kinds of metadata per asset, the rarity table and the seed that made it.	folder or .set
Sealed export	A Set encrypted under a passphrase and marked view-only, for sending to a reviewer.	.tin

Cook is the verb: cooking a CookBook with a seed produces a Set. Every asset in it is rolled by picking a Recipe (by Recipe weight), then one Variant per layer (by Variant weight), then a color for each colored layer.

Outside the chain

Word	What it is	File
Kitchen	Your shelf of loose parts: Ingredients and Recipes that belong to no one CookBook, kept in a folder so any project can pull them in. Membership is found by scanning the folder, never recorded.	.ktn
Menu	A CookBook flattened for runtime: every weight, rule, colorization and all the art, so a game or server can roll and render assets with no .cbk.	.mnu
Ticket	One rolled outcome, a few hundred bytes: the Recipe, one Variant per layer, each colored layer's rolled hue and saturation, and the DNA. It names a selection, not pixels.	no file

A Kitchen is where parts wait between projects. A Menu and a Ticket are what you hand to your own program; see Embedding.

Two more words you will see everywhere

• DNA: an asset's fingerprint, a SHA-256 hash of its Recipe, its Variants and its quantized colors. No two assets in a Set share one (unless you allow repeats). See How uniqueness is decided.
• Seed: the word that drives generation. Same book plus same seed gives byte-identical output. See Why a seed reproduces a collection.

The glossary lists every other term.

Every archive is a zip file

Each nfty file is a .zip with a different extension and a manifest.json inside. Copy one, rename it to .zip, and any unzip tool shows exactly what it holds. See File formats.