The Worldshaper

Press F4 in a dungeon room and it becomes your canvas, edited live with the real game systems. Nothing is a preview: the shapes you draw have real collision, the enemies you place have their real AI, and the room you save is the room the game loads.

Tools

Icon	Tool	What it does
	Select	Pick, move, resize and re-depth objects. Shift-click multi-selects, Ctrl-drag copies, Ctrl+G groups.
	Shape	Draw the terrain itself, with real collision, from sprite shape profiles.
	Structure	Place vanilla and custom structures. Custom ones sit in a Custom group; the browser also carries the DLC dungeon dressing (DLC Dungeon / Ewefall, DLC Dungeon / Rot), the Art groups and Tile Decorations.
	Enemy	Place enemies, including bosses (under "Bosses (inside rooms)") and everything under Custom (mods).
	NPC	Place custom NPCs with their dialogue and quests.
	Podium	Place reward podiums. A Weapon dropdown pins which weapon the podium hands out, vanilla or custom.
	Trigger	Volumes that run action sequences: cutscenes, camera moves, screen text, lighting, music.
	Door	Connect rooms and control where each exit leads.
	Whiteboard	Draw planning marks over the room.
	Lighting	Ambient, sun and fog values for the room, plus a weather override.
	Music	Change the room's FMOD music event.
	Clear	Wipe the scenery, the terrain, the placed objects or every trigger.
	Load Map	A full-screen browser of saved rooms, with a picture and details of the map you pick.
	Level	Assemble rooms into a level blueprint.
	Dungeon Builder	Turn level blueprints into a playable dungeon map.
	Save	Save the room under a name, through the game's own naming modal.
	Preview	Hide the editor's UI and look at the room the way a player would.

The world editor adds two of its own:

Icon	Tool	What it does
	World File	New, open and save a world map.
	World Layers	The sprite and Spine layers a world map is drawn from.

Picking a tool opens its panel at the right edge; the shortcuts for whatever is in your hand are always listed at the left. The tools that have a screen of their own - Load Map, Level, Dungeon Builder - are covered further down.

Select

The panel names what you have picked and shows its position, its scale and a picture of it, along with how much is behind it - scripts, child objects and renderers - which is the quickest way to tell a single prop from a whole assembly. Flipped horizontally mirrors it in place.

Dragging is colour-coded: the yellow handle moves, the blue ones resize, and Shift with a blue handle stretches one axis only.

Layers, multi-select and groups

The Layers panel at the left edge, opened with the + beside the shortcut hints, lists every object in the room by what placed it - Shapes, Podiums, Enemies, NPCs, Structures, Props and Triggers - under the same names the tools use.

• Click a row to select that object with the Select tool. The tree follows your selection in the world and scrolls to it, and section headers stay pinned while you scroll.
• Shift-click two rows to select the run between them, like a file list.
• It is built for big rooms: a base town of six hundred objects scrolls and highlights without lag.

Multi-selection lives on the Select tool: Shift-click adds an object to the selection or takes it out. Move and depth drags move everything together, one undo puts the whole drag back, and Del removes the lot.

Groups are made with Ctrl+G: two or more selected objects become a group, and picking any member picks the group. Ctrl+G on a whole group dissolves it, and both are undoable. Groups are saved with the map and come back on load; the Layers panel shows each group as a folder whose row selects the whole group.

Shape

The dropdown at the top is the material the terrain is drawn from - Biome1_Grass and the rest of the game's sprite shape profiles.

New Shape (screen centre) starts another one, and every shape in the room is listed below with its point count; - and + walk through them and X deletes one. On the shape itself, LMB drags a node, Ctrl+LMB inserts one, RMB removes one, and Del deletes the whole shape.

Structure

A search box and a category dropdown - Build Menu Structures, the DLC dungeon dressing, the Art groups, Tile Decorations and Custom - over a grid of everything in that group. The name of the current pick sits under the grid, and four toggles change how placement behaves: Multi-select randomised placement, Break apart randomised sets, a Structure quick pick dock for what you have been using, and Place see-through.

Enemy

The same shape of browser: search, a category dropdown that starts on All with the count beside it, and a grid. The selected enemy is named under the grid, and Clear Selection puts the tool down without placing anything.

NPC

Search scanned NPCs covers everything CultTweaker found at startup, grouped by where they come from. Hovering a tile blows it up into a portrait with the NPC's name, drawn from the NPC's own spine - so a custom one looks here exactly as it will in the room.

Podium

Two dropdowns: what kind of podium it is, and what it hands out. Custom rewards are listed as Mod/Name, so TEST1/TestFlail is the TestFlail weapon from the TEST1 mod. Equip clears all makes the room's other podiums disappear once the player takes one, the way a vanilla weapon choice does.

Trigger

A trigger is a volume that runs a sequence of actions when the players enter it. It can also be marked a blocking volume, which turns it into an invisible wall for players and enemies, drawn in red, with enemy pathfinding routed around it as it is moved and resized.

The header names the trigger, its size in tiles and how many actions it carries.

Actions are built underneath: pick a category, pick a Target if the action needs one, then press the action itself; every action is listed below. While picking, V sets the camera offset from the view you are looking at and Esc abandons the pick; Ctrl-drag copies a trigger and everything on it.

Player

Camera

Screen text

Each takes a typed title and subtext.

Enemies and ambient

Door

All four doors are required to save - a room blueprint carries a north, east, south and west door whether or not a given level uses them. Each has its own toggle, Enable All Doors turns the lot on at once, and the volumes themselves are dragged around the room's edge with LMB.

Lighting

Everything here is a live slider - the room relights as you drag.

The values are saved with the room. Cross-fading to a saved profile during play is the trigger action Apply lighting, not this panel.

Music

One dropdown of the game's own FMOD events, listed as bank/event - base/base_main, cave/cave, forest/forest_main, haunted_marshes/haunted_marshes, death_cat_battle/death_cat_battle and the rest, including the credits and the Devolver splash. Vanilla (no override) at the top leaves the room playing whatever it normally would.

Clear

Four buttons, each wiping one kind of thing: Clear Scenery for the vanilla dressing, Clear Terrain for the shapes, Clear Placed Objects for everything you put down, and Clear All Triggers.

The whiteboard

The Whiteboard tool draws freehand over the room, in the world, to plan with: a Show whiteboard toggle, Draw with a size slider and nine colours, Erase with its own size, and Clear all.

Strokes are never selectable and never part of the room. They show only while the editor is open, are saved with the map, and travel to the other player live as you draw. One drag is one stroke and one undo; an erase drag is one undo too, and Clear all wipes the board in a single undoable step. The chosen colour shows a white border instead of being covered, and the brush lands exactly under the cursor.

Saving and loading

Ctrl+S quicksaves under the current name; the Save tool names a new map through the game's own naming modal, with a live overwrite warning. Rooms are saved to CustomNodeBlueprints, levels to CustomLevelBlueprints, dungeon maps to CustomDungeonMaps, world maps to CustomWorldMaps, base edits to CustomBaseMaps and menu presets to CustomMainMenus.

A room blueprint is a full snapshot: loading always clears the room first, so a deleted object is simply absent from the snapshot and vanilla scenery is captured as props. Structures and custom enemies are stored by name, never by enum id, because vanilla ids shift between game versions and custom ones are minted at runtime.

Every object saved by pre-release 6 also carries an id, so it can be told apart from its neighbours across a save, a load and a second machine. Maps saved by pre-release 5 still open.

The Load Map browser is a full screen with a picture and details of the map you pick, and click-to-enlarge on the picture.

Saved rooms are tiled by name and date. Picking one fills the left-hand pane with its picture, when it was saved, how much it takes on disk, and a count of what is in it - terrain shapes, props, structures, enemies, NPCs, podiums, triggers, doors and the vanilla objects the room kept. If the room you are standing in has unsaved changes, the pane warns you before Load Map discards them.

Dungeon builder and levels

The Level tool assembles rooms into a floor:

• Hand-built floor layouts ("custom walk") on a visual layout screen, or a random walk tickbox
• Auto-connecting doors, fixed entrance and exit rooms, and a choice of vanilla podium entrance and exit rooms
• A pool of maps per room, one picked at random per run
• Combat and Reward room markers

On the layout screen:

Rooms are numbered in the order the run visits them, and the coloured tab on a cell's edge marks its doors. Selecting one opens its settings on the right: Entrance and Exit mark where the floor starts and ends, Room kind chooses what sort of room it is, and Modifier applies one of the game's room modifiers.

Under Maps is that room's pool: search the saved rooms and pick as many as you like, and the run draws one of them at random. Leave the pool empty - it says so - and any saved map can come up there. Clear Map Selection empties it again.

The Dungeon Builder is a full-screen map drawn with the game's own artwork. Nodes are placed freely: Ctrl+click places, right-click links or cuts, Del deletes, and placing beside a selected node links it automatically. Any node can lead to any other, links follow a node as it is dragged, Preview Map shows the result, and the builder checks live whether the map will actually play. Close it with Esc, the X button or F4.

The panel keeps a running readout: how many nodes over how many layers, how many of them play a level of yours rather than a vanilla floor, and which floor the run starts on. Type for new nodes is what the next node will be, and each node is labelled in the map with its type, its layer and what it leads to. Playable in the corner is the live check - it tells you the map will actually run before you try it.

Where a run's exit door leads depends on the layer it is on:

The base editor

The base editor, started from the F7 panel, edits your real town - structures, terrain and paths - with the same F4 tools. Every change is kept in the mod's own files; the game's save is never written to.

Structures that block the camera while you edit turn see-through.

Hubs and the build totem

A hub is a safe town built in the emptied DLC town. The F7 panel offers three entries:

A hub is edited with the same F4 tools, minus the ones a town has no use for: there are no enemies, podiums or doors in the hub toolbar, and no level or dungeon screens.

Every hub needs a trigger carrying the Hub spawn point action - that is where arrivals walk in, and a hub cannot be saved without one. Add Return to base or Open world map triggers as portals.

Visited, it is an ordinary part of the game: the day clock runs, quests track, and followers go about their business in it.

The build totem lets a hub's structures be built during play through the game's own build menu, at costs you set. Building costs and refunds are kept in the hub rather than the save, and a placement region stops hub building from reaching your real town.

World maps

The world editor, opened from the F7 panel's World Maps section, builds a custom overworld in the shape of the DLC's Ewefall map: a full-screen travel menu built from the map's own art, with travel nodes that unlock outward from what the player has completed. The vanilla DLC map is never touched, and completion lives in the mod's own per-save-slot file.

Nodes sit on the map's own artwork and are joined by dashed paths. Each carries the vanilla styling for its kind, its own label, and - where one is set - its lock: the node here asks for eight keys and shows ??? until it is opened.

CustomWorldMaps/
    <MapName>/
        config.json      the map (layers + nodes)
        *.png            sprite layers and node icons, referenced by file name
        <SpineFolder>/   one spine per subfolder: skeleton .json + .atlas + pages
    progress_slot<N>.json    per-save-slot completion (managed by the mod)

F6 flips between edit and play view.

Nodes and unlocking

Positions are in the canvas's 1920x1080 reference space. A node's Id is a string it keeps forever - progress is keyed on it, so renaming a node orphans progress earned under the old id.

States follow the DLC cascade: a completed node's children become selectable, its grandchildren become a grey preview ("???"), and everything further stays hidden. States only ever upgrade when branches meet. On top of that:

• InitialState (Hidden / Preview / Selectable) is what a node is before any completion reaches it. The starting node is authored Selectable.
• A Base node is home: selecting it closes the map, it never completes, and its children unlock from the start.
• A Key node banks KeysGranted keys when completed, once however often it is replayed.
• A Lock node surfaces where a selectable node would be, priced at KeysCost keys, and blocks its branch until opened. An opened lock passes completion straight through. A lock is the one node that asks before it acts.
• RequiredCompletedCount plus RequiredNodes holds a node at preview until N of the listed nodes are completed.

A node's destination is TargetKind plus Target: a saved dungeon map from CustomDungeonMaps, a saved level from CustomLevelBlueprints, or None, which completes on the spot when selected. Completion is recorded only when a run entered from the map ends in the success path - dying records nothing.

NodeType chooses which vanilla node style is borrowed:

Layers

Sprite layers are the PNG at its authored pixel size, tinted and scaled as configured. Spine layers render on the canvas and animate even while the world is paused; for them, scale 1 means the size the game draws that skeleton at, matching what 1 means for a sprite.

ParallaxDistance (0 pinned, 1 moves most) drifts a layer toward the mouse in play view. The editor keeps everything pinned so placement is exact.

The menu editor

Customize Menu on the title screen opens the main menu editor. Looks are saved as named presets under CustomMainMenus/, a folder each with a config.json beside its art, and the chosen preset dresses the menu on every launch.

• The Look tool: palette pick and blend, background colour, hue / saturation / brightness, dither, grain, the glitch effect, and a negative effect for the field behind the lamb.
• The Centrepiece tool: skin, animation, position, scale and rotation for the lamb - or a custom spine dropped into the preset's folder.
• The Title tool: replace the logo with any PNG, move, resize or hide it, and set, move, recolour or hide the edition line.

Drop a PNG into a preset's folder to use it as the title; drop a spine folder (.json + .atlas + pages) to stand it where the lamb is.

Editing together

With COTL MP Steam on both machines - a build that includes editor sync - press F4 in the base while in a session and the world pauses for both players. The other player is invited in chat and can press F4 to edit with you.

• Your selection is cyan, theirs is amber, on the object, its outline, their cursor and in the layer list.
• An object the other player has selected or is dragging is locked until they let go.
• Moves, resizes and reshapes show on the other screen while the mouse is still down, not only on release; lighting changes fade in.
• Saving from either side saves on the host's machine; the guest receives the files.
• Custom dungeon levels work in a session: the host starts a level, the guest follows into the same layout with the same rooms, and both can edit the rooms together.
• If the two rooms ever disagree, the Resync button in the shortcut panel puts them back in step. MapEditor / NetVerbose in the config logs every change sent and received, and a Sync self-test button runs the room through the sync on one machine.