"Moldy" Default Texture in Fortnite Was Made for Unreal Engine in 1995

Players get laser-focused on all sorts of things that might seem bizarre, but it's always interesting to learn the backstory.

One Fortnite player, for example, was confused by the "mold" in their in-game news section, and Epic Games' founder and CEO Tim Sweeney solved the puzzle. This "mold" is actually cave pearls, "a kind of calcium carbonate deposit that forms in limestone caves," and it is Unreal Engine's default texture that appears when a programmer forgets to specify a texture. Turns out, Sweeney imported it into Unreal Engine 1 in 1995 while developing on a 90 MHz Pentium.

You might have never seen this particular image, but I'm sure you have been baffled by something similar in The Sims, Counter-Strike 2, or somewhere else.

Textures are tricky business, but nothing goes past inquisitive minds. Not so long ago, for example, a team of enthusiasts found the source of Super Mario 64's stone wall texture.

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