Editor basics
The screen, the tools, moving around, selections and undo.
The screen
| Area | What's there |
|---|---|
| Top bar | The city name and menu, Build and Play, the command search, Publish, Share, your party and trainer card, and your account. |
| Tool rail | On the far left: Brush, Eraser, Rectangle, Fill, Picker and Select, with Undo and Redo at the bottom. |
| Side panel | Maps (outside and interiors), Layers, and the options of the selected layer. |
| Map controls | At the bottom right: zoom, center, grid, minimap and side panel toggles. |
| Minimap | Top right. Click or drag in it to jump around. |
| Status bar | At the bottom: the map you're on, the tile under the cursor, where the town is saved, and Problems. |
Hover any icon to see what it does and its shortcut. Drag the edge of the side panel to resize it, and double-click the edge to hide it.
Command search
Press ⌘ K (Ctrl K on Windows), or the magnifying glass in the top bar, and start typing. It finds any action (Play, Share, Version history, Export…), tool, layer, stamp, terrain or favorite, map, person on the current map, and current problem. Use the arrow keys and Enter to run one.
Problems
The status bar counts what looks broken in your town. Click it for the list, then click a problem to go straight to it: the editor opens the right map and layer, selects the person, door, event or story step, and centers on it. It checks:
- Doors that lead nowhere yet, or to a deleted map.
- Interiors nobody can get into, or that have no door back out, and routes or towns nobody can walk into.
- People with nothing to say, blank signs, trainers with no Pokémon, and items that hold nothing.
- Events and scripts that do nothing yet, or are about someone who left the map, a deleted story step or a deleted map.
- Visitors arriving on a blocked tile.
- Encounter zones painted on the map but with no Pokémon.
- Story steps that can never happen, because nobody completes them or whoever does waits for a step that never happens, plus gates and people left from deleted steps.
Tools
| Tool | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Brush | B | Paints the current brush or stamp. Drag to paint a line. |
| Eraser | E | Removes tiles from the current layer. |
| Rectangle | R | Drag to fill a rectangle. Multi-tile stamps repeat as a pattern. |
| Fill | F | Fills a connected area of the same tile. |
| Picker | I | Click a tile on the map to use it as the brush. |
| Select | S | Drag to select an area to copy, cut, paste or clear. |
Tools work on the selected layer. On gameplay layers like Collision and Encounters they paint that layer's value instead of tiles.
Layers
Select a layer in the side panel or with 1 to 9 (the Events layer has no number). Hover a layer to show two buttons:
- Eye: hide the layer while you edit. Visitors always see every layer.
- Lock: prevent painting on it by mistake.
See How a game works for what each layer holds.
Moving around
| Do this | With |
|---|---|
| Pan | Two-finger swipe, right-drag, or Space+drag. On a touch screen, drag with two fingers |
| Zoom | Pinch, Ctrl+scroll, + and − |
| Fit the map | 0 or the center button |
| Jump | Click or drag in the minimap |
| Toggle the grid | G |
On a tablet, one finger paints and two fingers pan and zoom. Buttons get bigger, the delete and show/hide buttons that normally appear on hover stay visible, and on small screens the side panel starts closed so the map has room.
Zoom goes from 50% to 800% and stays anchored under your cursor. The zoom label in the map controls resets it to 300%.
Selecting, copying and pasting
Press S and drag on the map. A selection takes every layer of the area: tiles, collisions, encounter zones and story gates. That makes it easy to duplicate a whole house, a fenced garden or a patch of grass.
- ⌘ C copies, ⌘ X cuts, Delete clears.
- ⌘ V enters paste mode: click to place as many copies as you like, Esc to stop.
- Use as brush turns the selection into a stamp you can paint with.
People and doors are not copied. Place them again after pasting.
Undo and redo
⌘ Z undoes, ⌘ ⇧ Z redoes. Every change is undoable: painting, people, story steps and doors, and also renaming the town or an interior, resizing a map, removing an interior, and adding or removing tilesets, sprites and music. Opening another map starts a fresh history.
For towns saved online, Version history goes back further. See Accounts and saving.
The city menu
The arrow next to the city name opens:
- City settings: map size, music and tilesets.
- Your cities: every city on this device and in your account. Open, delete, or import a
.jsonfile. - Version history: earlier copies of a town saved online, to roll back to.
- New city: start from the starter town, an empty field, or one of 60 real Hoenn maps.
- Export image: a PNG of the current map at full size.
- Export .json: the whole city as a file you can back up or import later.
- Turn sound off or on, Explore cities, Docs and DreamMist home.
Starting from Hoenn
New city lists 60 towns, cities and routes from Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald. They come with their tiles, collisions, wild Pokémon zones from the real games, and people in their original spots. Collisions are worked out from the tiles, so check them before sharing. The open sea around islands and on sea routes becomes water you can't walk on.