Tile Editor

EarthBound's maps are arranged in 32x32 chunks, which are in turn made up of four rows of 8x8 mini-tiles.

The Tile Editor lets you arrange those mini-tiles into those chunks, which you then have to piece together like a puzzle in the Map Editor.

Here's what it looks like when you look at the Onett tileset:

The top left part of the window is a collection of every single tile in the tileset. The bottom left is all of the map chunks. Let's make a new chunk (or modify an old chunk).

Select the chunk you want to modify. I'll select a blank one, scrolling to the very end.

Now, look at the right-hand side of the window. That's a lot to take in, but here's what everything is.

In order from left to right, there are three dropdowns for selecting which tileset you want to edit and palette attributes for it, some simple paint tools, two pixel editors (one for "foreground" and one for "background" -- pixels on the "foreground" layer will appear above sprites when the right collision value is applied, while pixels on the "background" layer will always appear behind sprites; the "copy" buttons allow you to copy the contents to and from either of the pixel editors), a palette editor (right click to change colors!), a place to input collision data (TODO: add a whole new page for all the collision values), and the place to edit the chunks themselves.

Click a minitile, then click on the editor to add it. Right-click to apply horizontal flip, vertical flip, or both to minitiles in the editor.

Shift-Click on a minitile in the editor to select it in the tileset.

You can go about this by either assembling the existing tiles in the tileset to make new chunks or by creating a mockup in a program like GraphicsGale and re-creating the palette and all of the tiles in the map editor. Drawing on graph paper to get ideas helps a lot too!

SURFACE FLAGS:
0001 -> Foreground lower-body obscurity?
0002 -> Foreground upper-body obscurity?
0004 -> Sunstroke area
0008 -> Shallow water
000C -> Deep water (0004 + 0008 combined)
0010 -> Ladder/Stairs?
0020 -> (unused)
0040 -> (unused, alternate version of solid)
0080 -> Solid tile