Place, fill, erase, pan. The palette is sorted into terrain, nature, props, water and buildings, and it is a specific palette rather than a general one: grass, path, sand, stone, sea wall, stairs. You are not building anything in particular. You are building a Greek island.
The time of day slider is the part that turns it from an editor into a toy. Move it and the shadows swing across everything you have placed, and a set of blocks that looked flat at noon reads as a hillside town at six in the evening. It saves, it resets, and there is no goal, no counter and no failure state anywhere in it.