What is Tiled and what is it used for?

Tiled is a free and open source, easy-to-use, and flexible level editor. You use it to build and annotate game levels — placing tiles, drawing terrain, positioning objects, and organizing maps — then export that data into formats your game engine or framework can load. It fits best if you are designing 2D levels (orthogonal, isometric, or hexagonal) and want a dedicated editor that stays separate from your engine.

What you actually do in Tiled

Tiled centers on two kinds of content: tile layers and object layers.

• Tile layers are grids of tiles you paint. You can edit multiple layers at once and paint terrain quickly.
• Object layers let you annotate a level with rectangles, ellipses, or polygons, and place, resize, and rotate tiles freely. Object templates help you avoid repeating the same setup.

Beyond the basics, Tiled supports rule-based tile and object placement, so recurring arrangements can be applied automatically instead of painted by hand each time.

Map types and world size

Tiled supports orthogonal, isometric, and hexagonal maps. It also handles infinite maps that grow as needed, and lets you organize multiple maps into a world — useful when a single level isn't enough and you need connected or large-scale spaces.

Workflow features

• Quickly switch between projects and jump to any file within a project.
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
• Extensible with JavaScript: add support for custom file formats, write your own actions or tools, and automate your workflow.

What it exports to and what supports it

Tiled exports to Image, JSON, Lua, GameMaker (1.4 and 2.3), Defold, tBIN, and many more formats. It is supported by many game development frameworks, which is the main reason it can sit alongside different engines rather than locking you into one.

Games made with Tiled

Tiled has been used to create levels for shipped games, including:

More games made with Tiled can be found on itch.io.

Who it's for

Choose Tiled if you want a standalone, flexible 2D level editor that exports into your existing pipeline and supports tile layers, object layers, large or infinite maps, and scripted extensions. If your levels are simple and already built inside your engine's own tools, a separate editor may add a step you don't need.

Getting started and staying current

The site provides Docs, a Get Started entry point, a Forum, Discord, and a GitHub repository, plus downloads on itch.io. Recent updates include Tiled 1.12.2 (27 May 2026), a larger patch release with fixes for list-typed custom properties and a Properties view regression, and a feature write-up on Automapping (14 July 2026) for letting the right tiles fall into place automatically.

Tiled is funded by sponsors — over 200 sponsors donate about $3600/month, funding roughly 2 days/week of development by Thorbjørn Lindeijer, with a next goal of 3 days/week.