The design of divertor targets and baffles for optimal heat and particle exhaust from magnetically confined fusion plasmas requires a combination of fast, low-fidelity models (such as EMC3-Lite (Feng 2022 Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion64 125012)) for scoping studies and high-fidelity ones (such as EMC3-EIRENE (Feng et al 2014 Contrib. Plasma Phys.54 426–31)) for verification. Both of those approaches benefit from a magnetic flux tube mesh for fast interpolation and mapping of field line segments (Feng et al 2005 Phys. Plasmas12 052505). A new automated mesh generator for unstructured quadrilateral flux tubes with adaptive refinement is presented and integrated into FLARE (Frerichs 2024 Nucl. Fusion64 106034). For HSX with an extended first wall, it is found that several layers of flux tubes can span the entire half field period before splitting is required. This is an advantage over the traditional setup of the EMC3-EIRENE mesh where careful construction of several sub- domains is required already for the much tighter present first wall. In particular, there is no longer the need to manually construct a suitable outer boundary for the mesh. The divide and conquer paradigm with unstructured mesh layout offers a powerful alternative for fast head load approximation that is suitable for integration into optimization workflows. Further examples for W7-X and CTH demonstrate the versatile application range.