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BEEmod History

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Kelsey edited this page Nov 14, 2026 · 3 revisions

Note

Heavily unfinished page, will be expanded and cleaned up later. Some events might be at the wrong places on the timeline.

Origins of Puzzlemaker modding

Modders began researching the inner workings of the Puzzlemaker from the moment it released on May 8th, 2012. Early discussion of this occurred in the ThinkingWithPortals forum thread Puzzle Creator Tech Info, Hacks, and Laughs. The first proper breakdown of the editoritems.txt format was posted in said thread by HMW on the 20th.

HMW would go on to release a Puzzlemaker mod he made a week later which added new items to the editor, becoming arguably the first publicly released mod of this kind. His additions included the save point, portal magnet, square light, and visible logic gate items which would later be integrated into BEE2.

Felix Griffin also began development of his own mod around this time.

June 6th saw the release of Sicklebrick's Fudge Packer, the first mod to implement the compiler wrapping concept that BEE2 now relies on. Fudge Packer allowed bypassing the entity limit and packing assets into maps, making it possible for custom items to begin using new models, textures, and sounds.

Ben and August's Extended Editor (BEEMOD)

The original BEEMOD was created by Benjamin Blodgett (BenVlodgi), one of the beta testers for the Puzzlemaker. He first showed BEEMOD in a preview video on June 22nd, 2012, and a TWP thread was made the following day.

Initially, the name had been intended to stand for "Ben's Extended Editor". After August Loolam (Rantis) was brought onto the project to make the editor models, his name was added to the title. BEEMOD 1.0 was officially released on August 10th, 2012. The final version added a total of 10 new items to the Puzzlemaker, including many of the staples of modern BEEmod such as autoportals, high energy pellets, triggers, and logic gates.

Though prior experiments with precompilers had been a success, BEEMOD did not include or require one. This meant it could be used on Mac, but the downside was that custom assets could not be packed, so maps featuring High Energy Pellets would require players to download BEE themselves in order to play them. A BEEMOD Resource Package was intended to be released to allow players to download the assets without installing the mod, but this never ended up happening.

The lack of a precompiler also meant there was no support for chamber styles. Ben had wanted to focus on expanding puzzle design options rather than adding visual features, and so left it to other modders to add this functionality.

A few revisions of the mod were released over the next week. Initially the logic gate item had included NAND and NOR gates, but these continued to cause crashes in the editor and so were removed in v1.01. More bug fixes came in v1.02 and v1.03. That same week the PeTI co-op update was released and broke BEEMOD, so v1.04 was released to restore compatibility. Version 1.05 was released on the 17th, only a week after 1.0, with one final bug fix. It would remain the latest version of BEEMOD for some time and the final version of BEE1.

Further Puzzlemaker experiments

(~2012-2013)

Carl Kenner's Stylechanger began development around early July, which reimplemented Fudge Packer's functionality along with the ability to change map textures, making custom styles possible.

  • FGE Mod is released
  • Stylechanger is released

Ben and Carl's Extended Editor (BEE2.2)

(~2013-2014)

  • BEE2 development begins, with no style support
  • Stylechanger is merged into BEE2, Carl is added to the name
  • BEE2.2 is released (~2013)
  • TeamSpen begins development on a BEE2 addon/fix pack
  • BEE2.3 is started and later dropped due to being Windows only (+chocolate milk spill?)

Better Extended Editor (BEE2.4)

(2014+)

  • Ben and TeamSpen discuss rewriting BEE2 to be more modular and cross platform
  • Full name changed to Better Extended Editor to reflect the many people involved
  • BEE2.4 development begins (August 2014)
  • BEE2.4 is released in beta state (May 2015)
  • BEE2.4 gains Mac support (August 2015)
  • BEE2.4 "leaves beta" (November 2015)

  • BEE2 Gitter chat is opened
  • Repositories are migrated to the BEEmod organization
  • BEE2.4 loses Mac support (January 2017)
  • BEE2 Gitter chat is split into multiple rooms (February 2017)
  • BEE2 Discord is opened (April 2017)
  • BEE2 Steam Group is opened (May 2017)

  • portal2backstock.com goes offline (January 2019)
  • BEE2 Steam Group is closed (February 2019)
  • BEE2.4 gains Mac support again (March 2019)
  • Tiling system update, BEE2.4 loses Mac support again (July 2020)
  • BEE2 Gitter chats are closed (September 2020)

  • After several buggy releases following the tiling system update, various beta testing schemes are tried
  • GitHub Actions is set up to automatically build weekly snapshot versions of BEE2 (February 2023)

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