Tile Editor Basics: Your First Map
January 2024
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January 2024
Contents
Overview
Tile Editor lets you fluidly paint tiles, handling the connections between tiles of arbitrary heights and configurations. It uses a tileset reference map that has all the appropriate tile lookups set for you. Tile Editor lets you push/pull terrain and water, place game objects, connect your different elevations with ramps, paint trees onto terrain, define dirt/road paths, and paint/cycle through relevant aesthetic details.
Your First Map Using the Tile Editor
Getting Started
- Launch Hammer and make a new map via File > New.
- Click the Tile Editor tool at the bottom of the Hammer interface on the left side, or use the hotkey ⇧ Shift+C. The Tile Editor will auto-generate a large area of flat empty tiles for you.
- Go to the Prefabs tab at the bottom of Hammer and drag basic_entities.vmap out into your map so that you’ve got the entities required for a playable Dota map.
Painting Terrain
Begin by painting some terrain elevations onto your empty map. Switch to Paint Terrain mode with Q. In the 3D and 2D viewports, your cursor becomes a brush that lets you paint tiles. You can adjust the brush's radius by holding Middle-Mouse Button 
and moving your mouse left or right. Also, the Undo command (Ctrl+Z) works with all of the Tile Editor's features, so feel free to play around with tile painting during this tutorial.
Let's make a small scene around your spawn point. Choose any brush radius you want and begin raising terrain by pressing 
on the tiles in your 3D viewport. You can hold down and drag your mouse around to raise a lot of terrain at once. Ctrl+ lowers your terrain. Make a big boundary of raised terrain around where you placed the basic_entities prefab, that way you've got a basic edge to your map.
Ramps, Water, and Trees
Next, switch to Paint Path mode with R, then use on one of your cliffs to paint a ramp that connects the lower ground to the upper ground. Switch to Paint Water mode with E and make a small body of water within the bounds of your raised terrain. Switch back to Paint Path mode and use to paint a ramp on a section of your water's cliff edge.
Switch to Paint Trees mode with T and paint a small forest within the bounds of your small scene. You can select different tree types as well as adjust the placement density of your brush by holding while dragging the mouse up and down.
Placing Objects
Next, switch to Place Objects mode with U. Make sure Object Type is set to Props, and Prop Type is set to shop_base. Place a single shop in your scene with . Hover over its blue node and then drag to move it around. After you've put your shop in a spot you like, place your cursor directly over its blue node and use F or V to cycle back and forth through its different variations. You can rotate your shop by hovering over its blue node and holding X while dragging .
Dota uses a grid navigation system to determine where units can and can't path. To get a visualization of this gridnav, click on the button named Toggle Grid Navigation Preview.
- Hammer grid navigation button.jpg
This is the "Toggle Grid Navigation Preview" button, located at the top of Hammer.
In gridnav view, green squares are pathable areas, red squares are unpathable areas (with exceptions for flying units), and pink squares are a special type of unpathable area associated with trees (since trees can be destroyed).
Verify that your hero will be able to walk to the shop by ensuring that there's an uninterrupted path of green squares between your hero start and your shop (the hero start is one of the entities contained in the basic_entities prefab).
Continue to Compile and Run, where you'll learn how to compile your map and load it in-game.
