Getting Started

Getting Started

Performance While Railroader Is Running

The desktop editor keeps active painting, dragging, generation, and other input at 60 FPS. When the whole-map view is unchanged it drops to 15 FPS, or 5 FPS while minimized, so an editor left open on a second monitor does not compete as aggressively with Railroader's main game thread. The in-game bridge also coalesces heartbeat writes instead of queuing one disk write per update.

The Tile Editor is a desktop application for building Railroader maps: terrain tiles, track graphs, roads and rivers, scenery, operations, signals, and crossings. It pairs with an in-game F9 workspace that edits the same data live.

Requirements

• 64-bit Python 3.10 or newer
• pygame-ce, numpy, Pillow, requests, scipy

pip install -r requirements.txt

Running

Windows:

run_editor.bat

The launcher finds Python through the py launcher, PATH, registry entries, and common python.org, Conda, and Scoop locations — Python does not need to be on PATH. If you use a portable or unusual install, set TILE_EDITOR_PYTHON to the exact python.exe path.

Any platform:

python -m edit_tiles

The Interface

A two-row navigation bar sits at the top: row 1 is terrain tools, row 2 is mod tools. The minimap is top-right, the status bar is at the bottom, and selection properties appear top-left when something is selected.

Press ? or F1 at any time for nine pages of in-app help. Full bindings are in KEYBINDS.md.

First Session: Editing Track

1. Open an existing map with Mod → Open Mod Folder, or choose New Mod to create one from scratch. Existing packages may use RailLoader Definition.json or native FUSE Info.json.
2. The map shows every track layer, coloured by source file.
3. Click a node — its properties appear top-left.
4. Drag a selected node to move it. Terrain height is sampled automatically on release.
5. Ctrl+click empty space (or Geo → Add Node) to place a new node.
6. Select a node, click Connect →, then Ctrl+click a second node to draw a segment.
7. Changes auto-save to game-graph.json and hot-reload into a running game in about half a second.

Start A Stock-Map Add-on Or A New Map

Choose Mod → New Mod in the desktop editor, or Create New Mod in the F9 graph chooser.

1. Choose Native FUSE for new work. RailLoader Legacy is available for old data packages, but native-only controls are disabled in that mode.
2. Choose Stock-map add-on when your package changes the existing Railroader world.
3. Choose Standalone map when you are building a separate world from the ground up. Enter the real latitude and longitude of the southwest map origin.
4. The standalone wizard creates Info.json, map.fuse.json, and Map/Map.json. The native declaration suppresses the stock world only when this map is launched.
5. In the desktop editor, the new Map tile folder opens with the package and tile generation uses its georeference automatically.
6. When creating through F9, return to the main menu and launch the registered map through FUSE before authoring its empty world. F9 cannot replace the live stock-map session underneath the player.

Generated, deleted, and undo-restored terrain tiles update the tiles list in Map.json automatically. The stock map's historical westward terrain correction is applied only at the stock origin and never leaks into a new map.

First Session: Editing Terrain

1. Load tiles — Load Tiles, or drag a tile folder onto the window.
2. Press F to fit them in view.
3. Press E for edit mode. The cursor becomes a brush.
4. LMB paints, RMB erases. [ and ] size the brush; - and = change strength.
5. Press B to cycle brush type — Raise, Flatten, Paint, Smooth, Noise, Erode.
6. Ctrl+S saves modified tiles. Ctrl+Z undoes.

Press D for diff mode at any point to see which tiles you have changed.

Display Modes

Key	Mode
H	Heightmap — elevation contours, dark green low to yellow/white high
V	Vegetation — dominant biome per pixel (presets 0–7)
W	Water — white is water, black is land
D	Diff — tiles modified since the last save

Vegetation values are density levels, not eight fixed biomes or anonymous paint numbers. The examples describe common uses; the game's density rules still exclude plants around track, water, objects, steep slopes, and cut-tree masks.

ID	Density	Approx. mask	Typical use
0	Full	100%	Dense forest and maximum plant placement
1	Very Dense	86%	Woodland or other very dense cover
2	Dense	71%	Trees and brush with small openings
3	Medium	57%	Balanced mixed vegetation and open ground
4	Light	43%	Grass, shrubs, and scattered trees
5	Sparse	29%	Mostly open grass or ground
6	Minimal	14%	Pasture, cropland, and lightly planted yards
7	Clear	0%	Built-up, bare, snow, or open-water ground

Saving is atomic and keeps a recoverable tile backup. A successful desktop save recalculates tile statistics and invalidates every overview/detail/scale render cache, even when pixels were changed by paste or generation rather than the brush. The in-game editor invalidates Railroader's terrain cache after a successful save (or rebuilds it when a new override source was mounted), so vegetation and water reload from the saved tile instead of reverting to a stale texture.

S toggles hillshade, which adds directional lighting and is the fastest way to read terrain shape.

Live Connection To The Game

The ●LIVE/OFF indicator in the nav bar shows the TrackBridge connection.

With Hrogers.TileEditorBridge installed in Railroader, edits made in the desktop editor hot-reload into the running game, and the in-game F9 workspace edits the same data back. Track, scenery, splineys, telegraph poles, and terrain tiles synchronise in both directions.

Dirty-edit ownership locks prevent both sides writing at once. If a reload arrives while you have unsaved work, it is preserved as a timestamped conflict copy rather than being overwritten.

See In-Game Geo Workspace.

Interface Scale

Ctrl+- and Ctrl+= shrink and grow the whole UI; Ctrl+0 resets to 100%. The setting persists between launches. The sidebar A- / 100% / A+ buttons under Workspace do the same.

The Reload Button

Reopens the current track graph and mod JSON from disk. Its colour tells you the state:

Colour	Meaning
Grey	Nothing loaded that can be reloaded
Blue	Reload available
Yellow	Reload available and unsaved changes would be discarded

Undo

Ctrl+Z covers terrain strokes and mod edits, up to 50 mod steps. The status bar shows ↩ N with the number available.

Batch tile deletion is also undoable — deleted tiles move to a timestamped _TileEditor_Deleted_Tiles recovery folder, and Ctrl+Z restores the whole batch.

Next

• Keybind Reference — every binding
• Terrain Editing
• Track Editing
• Mod Tools
• Data Formats

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Mirrored from docs/GETTING_STARTED.md - edit there, not here.