Tile Shelf and tile stamp

The Tile Shelf is your pack’s tile library, docked at the bottom of the canvas. It turns the other assets in your pack into stamps you can paint with: make a few small tiles (grass, stone, water), open a larger canvas or a map, and lay them down cell by cell.

The Tile Shelf - the category rail on the left, an imported tileset open as an atlas with one tile armed, and the Stamp / Edit toggle in the header

Stamping onto a regular canvas bakes pixels: once placed, the canvas forgets which tile went where. For a map you intend to keep working on, use a tilemap instead - its cells stay linked to their tiles, editing a tile updates the map live, and the arrangement exports as a Tiled .tmx map. The shelf works the same way in both workflows; this page covers the shelf and the pixel-stamping path.

The Tile menu in the top bar is the other half of the workflow: New Tilemap, Import Tileset, Draw a Blank Tileset, Generate Terrain (Pro), Draw a Terrain (Pro), and Make Seamless (Pro) all start there. See Top bar and menus.

The Tile Shelf

The shelf sits between the canvas and the footer. Drag its top edge to resize it (double-click the edge to reset), and show or hide it from View → Bottom dock → Tile Shelf.

The left rail lists one tab per category, each with a leading type icon so you can tell the kind apart at a glance:

Terrains (brush icon) - each terrain gets its own named tab, shown as a small terrain patch you can pick pieces from, with an “All pieces” strip below it. A terrain is a smart brush, not a collection: you paint regions and the edges pick themselves. Terrains come from either Generate Terrain (derived from two tiles) or Draw a Terrain (every piece hand-drawn); a hand-drawn terrain’s tab is a labeled template you fill in.
Tilesets (grid icon) - each imported or hand-drawn tileset gets a tab showing the sheet as one continuous atlas, every tile in its position. A tileset is a palette you pick from tile by tile.
Single tiles (square icon) - the pack’s loose assets. Tile-type assets sort first.
Hidden (eye-off icon) - anything you have hidden from the shelf, ready to restore.

A terrain and a tileset are different primitives, not just different names - the icons keep that obvious.

A teal dot on a tab marks the category holding your armed stamp, so you always know what you are painting with. Beside the TILES label, a + button opens a create menu - new tilemap, import a tileset, draw a blank tileset, generate a terrain, or draw a terrain - and a ? starts the guided tiles tour.

There is no separate “add to tiles” step - every asset in the pack is automatically available as a stamp. The one exception is the asset you currently have open, which is not listed because it cannot stamp onto itself.

The shelf appears in tilemap, sprite, UI-kit, icon, and mixed packs. Block-texture packs have no tile workflow, so they show no shelf (and no Tile menu).

Arming a stamp

Click any tile to arm it - a teal ring marks the armed tile, and the editor switches to the Tile Stamp tool, so one click is all it takes to start painting. Click the armed tile again to disarm. Assets larger than the open canvas are grayed out.

The tool options bar always names what is armed - a single tile, a block, or a terrain

with a small preview swatch, so a stray click never leaves you guessing. On a tileset, what a click does depends on the panel’s Stamp / Edit toggle.

The Tile Stamp tool

Tile Stamp lives in the tool rail (shortcut S). With a tile armed:

Hover shows a ghost of the tile snapped to its grid cell - exactly the pixels a click will place. The canvas grid switches to match the tile size while the tool is active, so the cells are visible whenever the grid is on (').
Click or drag stamps the tile into each cell you cross. Fast drags fill every cell along the path; each cell is stamped once per stroke.
Right-click (or right-drag) clears cells back to transparent.

The grid starts at the canvas’s top-left corner, and its cell size is the armed tile’s size - a 16x16 tile paints on a 16-pixel grid, a 24x24 tile on a 24-pixel grid. Cells that only partly fit at the right or bottom edge are clipped.

Stamping whole blocks

On an imported sheet’s atlas, drag across several tiles to arm them as one block - a tree, a house, a bridge, anything the sheet draws across multiple cells. The whole block then places per click, keeping its internal arrangement. The tool options bar shows what you grabbed, for example “block (2x3, 6 tiles)”.

Click any single tile to go back to a one-tile stamp.

Stamp or Edit a tileset

A tileset’s atlas - imported or hand-drawn - has a Stamp / Edit toggle in its panel header that decides what clicking a cell does. The toggle is remembered per tileset for the session, and only one selection ring shows at a time, so arming and editing never compete:

Stamp - click a cell to arm it (teal ring) and paint maps with it; drag to grab a multi-tile block; the tool switches to Tile Stamp. Empty cells do nothing.
Edit - click a cell to open it for drawing (amber ring + pencil badge); the tool switches to the Brush. On a hand-drawn tileset, clicking an empty cell creates the tile first. No marquee.

Imported tilesets open in Stamp (you’re painting with them); hand-drawn ones open in Edit (you’re drawing them). Flip the toggle any time.

Create your own tileset

You don’t have to import a sheet to get a tileset - Tile → Draw a Blank Tileset… mints a blank grid you draw your own tiles into (free). It reads exactly like an imported tileset once you start filling cells. See Create a tileset for the full walkthrough.

Painting terrain with Autotile

New to terrains? When the shelf is empty it offers Try an example terrain (Pro) - one click seeds a working grass terrain and a map and arms it, so your first action is painting one. See Generate terrain.

Pieces of a terrain autotile on a tilemap’s tile layer: drag across the map and every cell picks the right edge, corner, or fill piece to match its neighbors - and the neighbors re-fix themselves as the patch grows. Right-click erases terrain, and the surrounding cells heal their edges. This works the same whether the terrain was generated from two tiles or hand-drawn piece by piece.

While a terrain piece is armed on a tile layer, the tool options bar shows an Autotile toggle - that toggle is the mechanism. Turn it off to place the exact piece you armed, with no neighbor matching; hold Shift to flip it for a single stroke. Tilesets and single tiles have no Autotile toggle because they always stamp exactly what you picked - the toggle’s presence is how you can tell a terrain apart at a glance.

Blend modes

The tool options bar has one knob while the Tile Stamp is active:

Replace (default) - the stamp overwrites the whole cell, including its transparent pixels. Predictable tile-laying: every cell is exactly the tile.
Overlay - the stamp’s transparent pixels are skipped, so the tile layers over whatever is already in the cell. Use it for decals and props with transparent backgrounds.

On a tilemap’s tile layer the second mode reads Stack instead: overlapping stamps go to a tile layer above (created automatically), so trees and props overlap cleanly while every cell keeps a single tile. See Tilemaps.

Tile numbers

Turn on View → Tile Numbers to label each grid cell with the number of the tile in it - a quick read of your map’s layout. The same toggle adds a matching number to each tile’s corner in the shelf, so a cell showing “2” is the tile badged “2” in the shelf. Both turn on and off together.

On a regular canvas the numbers are read from the pixels, not stored: a cell shows a number only when its pixels exactly match a tile. Cells you have hand-painted over, or stamped with a tile’s transparent areas showing through, show no number - they are no longer purely that tile. In a clean stamping workflow (place tiles, do not freehand over them) every cell is numbered. On a tilemap the numbers come from the map’s own records instead, so they always show - even while you paint over the tiles.

The numbers use the tile grid of the dominant tile size in the pack (or the armed stamp’s size while the Tile Stamp tool is active), and appear once the cells are large enough on screen to read - zoom in if they are hidden.

Right-click a tile for actions

Right-click any tile in the shelf for its actions menu:

Replace all / Clear all - swap every cell on the open map’s active tile layer that holds this tile for the one you have armed, or clear them. See Replacing tiles.
Add a variant of this piece (terrain pieces) - duplicate the piece as an alternate that Autotile mixes in.
Hide from shelf (single tiles) - see below.

On a tileset’s atlas, the right-click menu instead offers Edit this tile - open it for painting, with changes applying everywhere the tile is used - and Revert to original. (Flipping the panel’s Stamp / Edit toggle to Edit does the same thing by plain click.) See Editing a tile.

Hiding tiles from the shelf

Hover a tile in Single tiles and click the x in its corner (or right-click it and pick Hide from shelf) to hide it - useful for level canvases that would otherwise show up as giant “tiles.” Hidden tiles move to the Hidden tab; open it and click one to restore it. Hiding never touches the asset itself - it stays in the pack, in exports, and in the assets panel.

Starting a map from your tiles

The new map icon in the shelf’s header opens the New Tilemap dialog (the same one as Tile → New Tilemap… and the map button in the assets panel), sized from your tiles. The result is a real tilemap - cells stay linked to their tiles and update when you edit them. If you specifically want a plain canvas to stamp pixels onto instead, create one with the assets panel’s + button.

Working tips

On a regular canvas, stamps are pixels on the active layer once placed. Undo removes a whole stroke; every other tool works on the result as usual.
A selection acts as a stencil: stamp pixels only land inside the marquee.
Put the ground tiles on one layer and overlay props on a layer above - the same layering you would use in a game engine.
Editing a source tile asset later does not update copies you already stamped onto a regular canvas; restamp the cells you want refreshed. If you want edits to flow into the map automatically, build it as a tilemap - that is exactly what tilemaps are for.
Right-click inside a marquee and choose Create tile from selection to turn any region of the canvas into a new tile asset - it lands in the shelf ready to stamp.
Lost? The ? in the shelf’s header (or Help → Show Tiles Tour) walks through the whole workflow in the editor.