OXTILE Lab

Requires an OpenXcom installation. OXTILE Lab works on the files of your own game and your own mods. It contains no game files.

Open any map you already have. The base game, your mods, other people's mods. Every block opens with its own tile chain, read from your rulesets — so what you see is what the game will draw.

Paint. Tile by tile, or fill a rectangle in one stroke. Scatter trees across a meadow with Random Fill: pick a few tiles, set a density, and paint. The ground underneath stays where it is, and the slopes you shaped are never buried. Every stroke can be undone.

Shape the ground. Stretch a rectangle, roll the wheel, and the land rises. Each hill blends into the ones already there — ridges, valleys, uneven slopes, not perfect pyramids. The editor places the right slope on every corner and quietly fixes the impossible ones. It finds the slopes in the tile set itself, so it works with the game's terrains and with tile sets that order their own tiles differently.

Walk it before you play it. Drop a figure, point anywhere, and watch the path: diagonals, slopes, stairs, climbing to the next level. You see at once where a map flows and where it blocks. A pawn comes with the editor, so this works out of the box — or walk any unit of your game that the engine draws in one piece.

Make new maps. A blank block, painted, then saved: the editor writes the map file, its route file, and declares the block in the terrain's ruleset. Everything the game needs to use it in a mission.

Change your tiles and see it at once. Open a tile sheet in your pixel-art editor, save, and the map redraws. The game reads the very same file: no export, no conversion, no copies.

What's in the download

OXTILE_Lab.exe — one file, nothing to install

Exemple\ — a small complete mod, drawn for this editor: open its MAPS folder and everything works, with no game data involved

the readme, the licence and the changelog

Before you edit, copy your mod. The editor writes into your real files. It keeps the previous version of each file beside it with the extension .avant-edition, but that is a convenience, not a backup.

Windows will warn you that the program is not recognised: it is not signed with a commercial certificate. Click More info, then Run anyway.

Requirements: Windows 64-bit, an OpenXcom or OpenXcom Extended installation. No .NET to install — everything is in the executable.

How this was made. The source code was written with the help of an AI assistant, working from formats I analysed and decisions I made. The artwork is not AI-generated: the example tile set and the walking pawn were drawn by hand.

OXTILE Lab is an independent tool. It is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or connected to the publishers of X-COM or XCOM, nor to the OpenXcom project. It contains no code and no artwork from any game.