Encounter editor manual

1. Your first maze

Ten minutes, start to finish: a maze you drew, armed, watched a bot fight through, and downloaded.

1. Click New. Give it a name, leave Generate draft checked, and click Create. A solver drafts a full maze for you: walls, a turret line, entries, an energy source, and a hero with a starting team. You are never starting from an empty grid unless you want to.

   

2. Pick the Paint tool, choose a wall variant from the Wall brush group, and drag across an edge in the maze to change it.

   

3. Choose a turret from the Turrets brush group and click an empty cell to place it.

   

4. Click Simulate. A bot plays your map on the seed shown in the box beside the button, and the replay opens in a new tab. Watch where it wins, where it stalls, and which of your entries it never touches.

   

5. Back in the editor, click Download to save the map as a JSON file you can share.

   

Every field in that first dialog stays editable afterward, in the Level panel (the top left corner chip on the map, described next).

2. The canvas

A maze is rings and sectors around a hub at the middle: think of it as concentric roads (rings) cut by spokes (sectors), with the hub as the target at the center and the corridor as a ring of open ground running around the outside. Your hero and your teams enter from the corridor, so open entries and spawn points always sit on the outer wall.

The four chips tucked into the map's own corners are shortcuts into the right-hand inspector: click one to open what it names (the level's own settings, the roster of heroes, the alarm call profiles, or the central hub). They scroll with the map, so on a map bigger than your screen you may need to scroll to reach them, the same as any other part of the maze.

3. The four tools

One tool is active at a time, shown at the top of the left sidebar.

Left mouse button only. There is no right-click menu and no scroll-wheel zoom, your browser's own zoom and the page's own scrollbars do that job. Press Esc at any time to clear your current selection.

4. Brushes

The Brush panel groups everything you can paint. Click a group's header to expand or collapse it, your choice is remembered between visits. Selecting a brush also switches you to the Paint tool.

Walls

Four states, all reachable from the Wall group: Solid (blocks everyone), Destructible (breaks under fire), Open (no wall at all), and Sheer (unclimbable, unvaultable, indestructible, crossable only by flight).

Entries and the energy source

The Entry group cuts a passage through the outer wall, open or destructible. The Spawn group marks where your force can enter the maze from the corridor. The Vent brush places an energy source: a socket sitting on a maze cell that pays you resources for as long as your side holds it, until a gateway is planted on it. Take a sector, plant a gateway on its energy source, and it fields your army for as long as you hold it, leave it uncaptured and it reverts.

Turrets and characters

The Turrets group is the full roster from the game's own catalog. The Characters group places a hero into a corridor cell (up to three per map, more on this in the next section).

Caches and interactables

Five cache types: Tickets (a flat resource refund), Heal (restores hero HP), Survey (a one-shot fog reveal, pick its target after placing), Schematic (a carried item wired to one turret, pick the target after placing), and Memento (a narrative pickup with no mechanical effect). Three more interactables round out the group: a Lever (toggles a matched pair of walls, pick the opens edge then the closes edge after placing), a Door (paint onto a wall edge, opens only with the matching keycard or breaks under heavy fire), and a Keycard (a pickup that opens every door and locked cache sharing its key). Check the Locked box on a cache to require a keycard for it.

Minibosses

Placed Grid mobiles with their own goal, stance and guard radius, set from the right-hand inspector once placed. They may share a cell with a turret or an interactable.

5. Heroes and teams

Place up to three heroes, each with up to four teams of creatures. Only the first two teams you build for the active hero actually fight, the rest wait in reserve and deploy if that hero falls and a reserve team is needed. Select a hero to open its panel: pick which two active abilities it carries, then click + Add team to build one.

Every team holds up to two creature types, but the design is uni-minion: one creature type per team is the doctrine the game is tuned around, mixing two into one team works, but the editor will warn you about it (more in the next section).

6. Simulate

Click Simulate and a bot plays your map on the seed shown in the box beside the button. The same map and the same seed always replay identically, change the seed (or click the reroll button next to it) to see a different attempt. The replay opens in a new tab: scrub the timeline, watch the fight unfold on the same maze you drew, and read the notes underneath explaining where the attack died and which of your entries it never used.

Not everything you can place is modeled the same way. A few pieces (shields, snare traps and a handful of others) are drawn but give the attack no resistance at all in simulation, and destructible walls are treated as solid, so a route that depends on breaching one can look blocked when it is not. If your map places something the simulator does not yet know how to fight, it will tell you before the run starts rather than fail partway through.

7. Validation

The Validation panel is pinned at the bottom right and updates automatically as you edit, there is no separate button to press. It reports two kinds of finding.

• Errors (marked with a cross) block saving. They mean a hero could get permanently stuck: a maze with no route to the hub, a keycard that can never be reached, a locked door with no key placed anywhere.
• Warnings (marked with a triangle) do not block saving. They flag a placement that will quietly do less than you expect: a team mixing two creature types, a turret sitting outside every relay's reach, a memento with no text set.

Click any line that names a cell and the map scrolls to it and flashes, so you do not have to hunt for what the message is talking about.

What the companion build can play

The editor offers the whole roster. The Windows companion build plays a smaller part of it, because it ships ahead of the rest of the game. Anything it cannot play yet is dimmed in the palette and carries a small marker. Hover it and the tooltip says why: no model built yet, or switched off in this build, or not in that build at all.

You can still place dimmed pieces. Maps here are authored for the finished game as well as for today's download, so nothing is taken away from you. What changes is that the Validation panel adds a third kind of line, marked with a flag, listing what the companion build would quietly skip if you loaded this map into it. Tick Workshop Build only at the top of the Brush panel to hide the dimmed pieces entirely and design against exactly what plays today.

8. Share it

1. Download saves the map as a JSON file on your own computer. Nothing proprietary, open format, readable in any text editor.
2. Copy share template writes a ready-to-paste post: the map's name, its size, whether it has been simulated and on what seed, and its description. Paste it into a new thread, attach the JSON file and a screenshot of the layout, and tag it.

Say what the map is trying to teach or test, which team you built it for, and whether you agree with what the simulator showed you. The most useful posts read like a note to a playtester, not just an attachment.

9. Beyond the basics

The editor goes considerably further than the loop above. Briefly, so you know it exists:

• Alarms. Turrets that sweep, call in reinforcements, or sit on an antenna wired to a call ladder, set from the alarm sub-panel on a capable turret's inspector.
• Call profiles and escalation. Named packages of reinforcements (droids, walking bombs, minibosses, bosses, bombardment) and a clock that raises the pressure over time, both opened from the bottom corner chips.
• The central hub. Its own antenna, a guardian shield, and an orbital-escape finale, opened from the bottom right corner chip.
• Multiple centers. A main maze with satellite mazes branching off it, grown from the + Add satellite button under Centers. This is an author-only feature on the public editor for now, see the note below.

None of this is required to build a map worth sharing. Start with one maze, one hero, and a turret line, the rest is there when you want it.

Shortcuts

Shortcuts are inactive while you are typing into a text field. Holding Alt while dragging a satellite center places it freely instead of snapping it to the main maze's angle.

A public instance

At kithlikeus.com/editor, a few things work differently from an author's own local copy:

• The official maps are read-only, marked with a lock badge in the encounter list. Editing one and saving does not overwrite it, it forks your own copy instead, and the Save button relabels itself to say so.
• Official maps cannot be deleted.
• + Add satellite is hidden, and a map with more than one center cannot be saved. Multiple-center maps are an author-only feature for now.
• Your drafts live in that browser only, named by a cookie that identifies the browser, not you. Nobody else can see them, and they do not follow you to a different browser or device.