Minecraft Level Dat Editor

[Yoana Terrano]

Thisoverview is intended to introduce you to the parts of the Editor interface and the tools. The keyboard shortcuts, also known as keybindings, have been provided with each tool and in the table at the end of this document.

The Editor is in early preview and we're working to add more capabilities.It will change significantly as we get feedback from creators like you.Also, the images of Editor in this document might vary a little from what you have on your screen.

Hint: If you accidentally adjust things to where you can't read the settings to fix it, press the Alt F4 keys on your keyboard to close Editor. Then, launch Editor again and create a new project. (This is part of why we're doing this first.)

Crosshair Mode has more precise, single-block editing capabilities. It also uses the usual Minecraft keybindings you can see on the Settings > Controls > Keyboard & Mouse screen. When you move the mouse, you look around.

Practice: In the top right corner of the screen, select the "Crosshair Mode" button or press Ctrl Tab to go into Crosshair Mode. Note the differences. To go back to Tool Mode, you can press Ctrl Tab again or press Esc. You can also go from Tool Mode to Crosshair Mode by clicking the Crosshair Mode button in the upper right corner.

Moving around: In Tool Mode, hold the right mouse button down while you press W, A, S, D, Space, and Shift keys. You do not need to hold down the right mouse button to use the same keys to move around in Crosshair Mode.

Think of the Tool Mode UI as a collection of containers. The menu bar contains menus. The action bar contains buttons that do simple functions like Undo and Redo. The toolrail contains more complicated tools that have their own configuration windows where you can change the settings.

You can change the Brush Size, ranging from 1 to 16. Brush sizes are rendered as squares of the selected brush size. This means a brush size of 1 draws a 1x1 block shape. If you select a brush size of 3, you get a 3x3 block shape, or 9 total blocks arranged as a cube.

If the Face Mode checkbox is selected, the brush cursor acts like the Adjacent selection cursor - meaning you can select the air above a solid block to draw your blocks. This should make it easier to build up shapes from the ground - like mountains!

The Selection window that you use to configure the selection tool has sections where you can change the selection mode, transform the selection, fill the selection with blocks, or deselect your selection.

Freeform mode creates a selection area when you choose the x, z, and y coordinates, in that order. It can include air in the selection, but you can only click on a non-air block to choose it as a coordinate.

You can use the scroll wheel on the mouse to increase or decrease the distance between you and the selection cube.Fixed distance is the easiest mode to use if you want to select only air blocks.Like Freeform selection, you build the selection shape by selecting the x, z, and y coordinates (in that order).

Create a selection and click on a corner of the selection box. You will see a little cube with arrows appear. That's a Resize Gizmo! You can click and drag these arrows to adjust the size of your selection box.

As you probably already know, when you create a world in Minecraft, that world is stored in the minecraftWorlds folder in your com.Mojang folder.When you create a project in Editor, that file is also a world, so it is also stored in the minecraftWorlds folder but it is invisible to non-Editor Minecraft unless you import it.The Editor project file goes into the projectbackups folder only when you export it.

Editor Mode is controlled by a flag in the level data (not by the command line), so you need to launch the server either by having the server create a new Editor project, or by launching the server using an existing Editor project.

When the server is up and running, any client connections from Minecraft Bedrock Preview Edition will connect as editor sessions and present the editor interface. Connections from Non-Preview editions of Minecraft will be refused.

15 years ago, in 2002, Warcraft 3 was released. Aside from being a great RTS game, it had lived for years past its release mostly due its World Editor - a fully-functional industrial-grade Map Editor that gave players all the tools the devs had during the development process. It has lead to creation of millions of custom maps, cinematics, campaigns, and first MobAs.

Very few companies have released their own Editors with their games since then. Even Blizzard didn't do it again with the new Starcraft release (the version which was eventually released wasn't nearly as powerful as the Warcraft's one). As we see from the history, something as seemingly trivial as this may tremendously prolong the game's lifetime. So why wouldn't developers release World Editors they used alongside with their games?

Building tools to create games is hard and expensive already. It becomes harder and more expensive when those tools need to be brought up to the level of polish required to ship them to (potentially very non-technical) end-users. Once you ship those tools, you also have customer expectations that you will support them: provide documentation, create examples, fix bugs, add new features over time.

In the past, building games was somewhat simpler and building the tools similarly so. Customer expectations about how much support they should get around official mod tools and the like were lower. Games have become more complex, the related toolchains have increased in complexity in lockstep. It's become harder and harder to justify the business expense of what is essentially building and shipping an entire separate product at the same time a game. Especially since almost never bring in revenue on their own (and attempts to monetize them have been met with consumer backlash; recall the Skyrim paid mods fiasco).

Further, in many cases there isn't a single "map editor" but rather a complex pipeline of smaller bespoke tools. Or the "map editor" is an existing, commercial product that cannot be redistributed by the developer anyway.

An AAA office environment would most likely have company-provided computers, meaning there would be very little variety in the OS and hardware that the program would need to support. This would mean fewer bugs, and it would also mean that if released to the public they would need frequent bugfixes and patches to make it available to a large variety of systems.

Second, (the most probable reason) is ease of use. The small team of people making the mapping engine aren't going to waste time making it look fancy. It takes time and money to do so. They know that the people using the software are "experts" and thus they will give them the minimum graphical interface needed to make the program work. However, if it was released to the public many people with no skill in mapping would want to pick it up, and a minimal or ugly interface is daunting to newbs and generally looked down upon compared to simple, easy to use map editors like Portal 2's test chamber builder.

Prolonging the lifetime of a game is great for the customer, but for the studio? Blizzard had to keep the original Battle.Net servers online much longer, and with much greater capacity. That costs money. at the same time, sales of new copies of the game are almost non-existent.

Users expect patches for new OS versions, compatibility with new hardware etc. The more lifetime your game has and the more users, the higher the demand will be and the higher the backlash for not doing so.

Finally, making a releasable map editor is a tremendous amount of work. Having a buggy, hard-to-use map editor for in-house production is something you might be able to live with. But releasing it to non-technical customers? That's a recipe for disaster. When making such an editor, you have the initial cost of polishing it enough to actually release it, and then have to maintain and support it. You are basically building two products at the same time.

You have to undertake quite some financial efforts to make that possible, for a questionable gain. It's a simple business decision, does having an editor and custom maps drives sales of your game really enough to justify the costs of providing the editor? In the modern gaming industry, the question is increasingly "no".

Consider Age of Empires 2. The scenario editor created a community of mappers and modders, and part of them went on to create the unofficial expansion: The Forgotten Empires. That was successful, and the product owners decided given AoE2's lingering popularity, there was money in reviving it with Age of Empires 2 HD, and subsequent expansions. It's the most popular paid RTS on Steam by a mile, with over 4 million owners last I checked. Sure the developers at the time didn't benefit from that, but the product owner certainly did later. Producers/developers?

While this is true, its a risk. At release time, you cannot foresee the future. You can either have lower costs and thus more profits now, or gamble on some sales 10 years in the future that may or may not happen at all. Its a huge risk, and AoE2 is one of the extremely few examples where this did work out that way. Since companies are usually risk-averse, this is not a strategy that would deliberately be chosen.

While WC3 and AoE are good examples for games where it worked, Settlers V, which included a very powerful map editor with its own scripting language, receved very mixed critics and is generally considered a failure, despite being part of a very popular and strong series of games (granted, they probably peaked at Settlers II/III and then went downhill) and having such an editor.

Often newer games have more complex geometry, effects or design (I'm not speaking of level layout here, only the complexity of the objects/buildings placed in one level). In old games you could just create a new map my placing different already existing terrain or structures in a new way, in newer games you often need new assets to create new levels.

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