The community feedback that reached us through the years made it clear that the former Serious Engine, the game engine of the original The Talos Principle, had a very steep learning curve, gatekeeping lots of users from creating and sharing their own content.

Therefore, we at Croteam chose a different approach in The Talos Principle: Reawakened. This game features an in-game puzzle editor, eliminating the need an additional software package. This editor aims to be a simple, yet extensive tool to allow you, our community, to create all kind of experiences imaginable!



Ready? Let's go 🚀


Select the Community Puzzles option from the game's main menu.

From here, you're able to tab through My Creations, as well as Subscriptions. User-generated content is created from within the game's editor, and distributed via the Steam Workshop. To subscribe to content from another user, you can either open the Workshop in Steam, or directly in the game via the Subscriptions tab.


Once you've subscribed to an workshop item, it will appear in the Subscriptions list in the game, and will be ready for playing.


To start playing, hover over the desired entry in the Subscriptions tab and click the Play button! This will bring you to the first level of the published episode in no time!

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Note: Terminology
In the puzzle editor context, we talk about Episodes and Levels a lot. Episodes represent the items you subscribe to on the workshop – and episodes can contain one or more levels. Those hold your actual puzzles. See the episodes as a small campaign, holding multiple playable levels, all in one workshop file!

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When subscribing to workshop items, Steam automatically downloads them to the following folder:
The folder which contains a downloaded episode can also be automatically opened by clicking the Open Episode On Disk button.

To unsubscribe from an item, simply click the Unsubscribe button on the episode, or unsubscribe through the Steam Workshop.

Alright, we've talked about downloading and playing episodes of our lovely community, but you've been eagerly waiting to play ELOHIM and get your hands on creating your own puzzles!

Jump to the Creations tab and click + ADD NEW EPISODE. You'll then be able to name your new episode directly inline in the episode entry. This name can be changed at all times, so don't worry if you don't have a final name just yet!

Additionally, you can specify a difficulty rating by clicking on the stars below the thumbnail on the right. Also, below the star rating, you can enter a nice little description, letting your players know what to expect in your episode.


And just like that, you created your first episode – but this episode now also needs an actual level to hold your puzzles. To add a new level, simply press the + ADD NEW LEVEL button below the episode and name it in the same fashion.

To open the puzzle editor for the newly created level, simply click on the Edit selected level button on the level entry.

Congratulations! 🥳 You've now successfully created an episode, together with a first level!

Let's not hesitate and get familiar with the editor's user interface.


The editor can be exited at any time by pressing Escape.

The camera flight mode is activated by holding down the Right Mouse Button. Now, you can press W, A, S and D to move around, and use your mouse to pan the camera. Furthermore, you can press Q and E to move the camera up or down vertically.

Using the Mouse Wheel while holding down the Right Mouse Button will increase/decrease the current movement speed. Turning the Mouse Wheel WITHOUT being in flight mode will zoom in/out the scene.



Looking at the top right corner of the editor, you'll be greeted with a palette of buttons. Each of those can be activated with a single click, and will open the selected view in the space below.

From here, you can quickly save and playtest your level, tweak world and editor settings, access drawing tools, insert devices, edit actor properties, and more.

More information about their uses can be found on the wiki![taloseditor.croteam.com]

Every object that can be placed in the level is called an actor. When starting from scratch, every level contains a first actor: the Player Start.


The Player Start defines the "spawn" point of the level. Players that start your level will spawn at this position.

To edit an actor's properties – or just alter its transform, you need to select it. Actors can be selected in multiple ways: the simplest one is to simply click on it with the Left Mouse Button.

To focus the camera on a selected actor, you can press A.



To select multiple actors in the scene, you can simply drag a selection rectangle across the screen, just like this:




When an actor is selected, a location and rotation gizmo appears. The puzzle editor follows a Z-up coordinate system. Dragging the red (X-axis), green (Y-axis) and blue (Z-axis) lines in the gizmo's center will adjust the actor's translation in that specific direction.

Using the three rotation handles will alter the actor's rotation heading (around the Z-axis, blue), pitch (around the Y-axis, green) and bank (around the X-axis, red).

Editing the scale of an actor is only supported for some actor types, such as Meshes.



In addition, every actor can have a name, which is displayed at the top of the properties window. Actors receive a default name when they get spawned, but you're free to rename them to your liking, which can help to organize some bigger levels.

Depending on the actor type, additional properties can be altered here. See this Jammer for example:

Next to the translation properties, a Jammer can also be set up to jam a specific actor right from the start. Many gameplay actors (devices) therefore have their own set of properties that can be edited to customize their behavior.






While working on your levels, you'll quickly learn that you might want to save yourself from extra work that can be done with a few tools and shortcuts instead.

That includes the *copy* and *paste* functionality. Having an actor selected, you can press Ctrl + C at any point to copy, and Ctrl + V to paste an actor to the current mouse position (or Ctrl + X to cut an actor to the desired location). These functions can also be found in the Tools window.

Of course, selected actors can easily be deleted by pressing the Del key, or by using the relevant Delete selected actors button in the Tools menu.

Another fantastic time-saver is the Alt hotkey. Try holding Alt while dragging the translation handles of an actor's gizmo. This will automatically duplicate the selected actor, keeping the original actor where it was. This way, you can quickly create e.g. big parts of level geometry without having to copy and paste.

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Note: If you notice that your actor is floating mid-air, and you want to bring it down, you can use the Drop to ground feature (hotkey: Page Down). This will try to bring any selected actor down to the floor.

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In many cases, it can be helpful to rotate actors 90° around (for instance, to make a Pressure Plate on the ground match up with a wall). For this, you can use the Rotate 90° tool, or conveniently press Tab.



One last tip: if you find that your actor is not snapped to the current grid, but should be, you can use the Snap selected actors to grid feature (hotkey: Alt + S).


There are different types of actors that can be placed in your level: devices, and meshes.


Devices are gameplay elements - the ones you'll often find in The Talos Principle puzzles, such as Plasma Doors, Jammers or Pressure Plates. You will use these a lot to craft your actual puzzles.

Meshes however have a purely visual nature. They're grouped into themes (Egypt, Rome, Medieval, Wood, Metal) and categories (Walls, Windows, Fences, Decorations, etc.).

Both devices and meshes feature a text search at the top, so you can quickly find what you're looking for. To place an actor in the level, simply drag'n'drop it from the devices or meshes panel. The actor will be placed where you dropped it - respecting any potentially enabled snapping.



Another way of quickly placing devices is by using your Right Mouse Button. Simply click on the ground or on a wall to reveal a Quick Placement menu.




While editing your level, you'll surely want to playtest, whether it might be for fun - or because you want to make sure your puzzles are actually solvable. Luckily, this is very easy.

You can either simply click Test your level in the main editor's toolbar - or press the shortcut T. This will enter play mode and spawn the player at the Player Start actor in your level.

From there, you can play the game as you're used to, having access to all gameplay features you have in the regular game. If you're done testing, you can get back by pressing Esc.

With all the tools under your belt now, we're finally ready to build a puzzle!

To help with this task, we invented the drawing tools. While you could place walls, pillars or doors yourself with the Meshes tab, the drawing tools make it a lot easier and faster.

All drawing tools follow a grid and only allow right angles.

Furthermore, the drawing tools leave the actual meshes behind, rather than the whole construct. That means that after drawing, every mesh can be altered by your likings.

To activate the wall drawing tool, select Draw walls from the Drawing tools menu (or activate it with the shortcut 2). You can then select a style (egypt, medieval, rome, wood) and a wall height (2, 3, 6 and 8 meters).

To draw, simply hold down your Left Mouse Button, and release it when you're done.



The wall drawing tool will automatically pick a combination of different wall and pillar variants to meet the wanted length.

Fences are drawn in almost the same fashion. Select the Draw fences (shortcut 4) from the Drawing tools menu, select a style and a height, and go for it!



Similar to the wall drawing tool, you can paint walls with openings. To do so, simply select the Draw walls with openings from the Drawing tools menu (or activate it with the shortcut 3). You can again choose a style and a desired wall height.



And just like that, we got some nice looking windows to enjoy the view.

Every puzzle should have an entry. In classic The Talos Principle fashion, this is done using the purple plasma barriers.

Select the Draw plasma barrier drawing tool (or activate it with 6). You can then choose a desired height (2, 3, 4, 6 and 8 meters), and paint it in same fashion, using Left Mouse Button.

In our little example, there's an intentional gap in the walls – which is where the plasma barrier goes:



Awesome! Usually, when players enter a plasma barrier, the name of the current puzzle is presented. Let's replicate that. Select the plasma barrier you just painted, and observe its actor properties.


You can observe that next to the plasma barrier's height and length (which is automatically set by the drawing tool) we can decide on a puzzle name that's displayed upon passing it.

While the purple barriers are just for making sure players can't enter with any carried items, the blue so-called plasma walls can be jammed by a Jammer and/or toggled by activators.

To draw plasma walls, we have another drawing tool handy for you. Select the Draw plasma wall drawing tool (or activate it with 5). You can again specify the plasma door's height before painting.



Awesome, you've now learnt how to draw basic puzzle geometry, with walls, windows, fences, plasma barriers and plasma walls. To make the puzzle functional, we'll now need devices. Devices are, as already explained in the previous chapter, gameplay elements such as Jammers, Connectors, Pressure Plates, and so on.

Before we continue, it's helpful to know how the final puzzle is supposed to work, so we can set it up like that. See this GIF as a little foreshadowing of what we're going to achieve:



We can utilize the Quick Placement menu by clicking the Right Mouse Button.

The Quick Placement menu is context-sensitive, so it will show different devices when opened on the ground than on a wall.

In addition to the Quick Placement menu, the Tab shortcut was used to rotate the Pressure Plate around, and Alt + S was used to snap the placed Switch to the grid, before moving it up (while holding Shift to disable snapping while moving).



Now that the devices have been placed, they need to be logically connected. The idea of this puzzle is that both the Pressure Plate and the Switch need to be activated to open the first Plasma Wall.

To link two actors together, select both of them, and use either the Auto-link selected actors tool from the Tools menu, or press L.



Note that the blue arrows that visualize linked actors are only visible if you enabled the Render Actor Links option in the Tweak editor settings menu.

To observe that the links have been made, we can jump over to the Plasma Door's actor properties.

Under Activators, we can now observe that both the Pressure Plate and the Switch are linked as actors that activate this Plasma Door. From here, individual links can also be removed, or inverted.

Another important property for this puzzle is the Condition property. This can be set to either Any or All. While Any means that any of the linked actors must be triggered in order to activate the target (here the Plasma Door), All means that all actors must be triggered – which is the desired behavior in this instance.

Every puzzle should have a main objective (either a Tetromino or a Star).


Great. The functionality of the puzzle can now be playtested, either by clicking Test your level in the main editor's toolbar – or by pressing the shortcut T.



The functionality is confirmed – the player can reach the star! Of course, in a real-world scenario, it should also be tested whether it's possible to cheese this puzzle by using actors in a different way than imagined. For the sake of this demo, we'll call it done.

After confirming the correct behavior and functionality of the puzzle, we can start decorating it by placing meshes, like bushes, trees, floors, and more walls.

As for trees and foliage, we can use the Add trees and Remove trees drawing tools to first paint trees over the whole area, and then gradually remove them where they appear annoying.



Another awesome feature is the Auto decoration feature. By making use of Unreal Engine's procedural generation system, the puzzle editor is able to automatically decorate areas around the puzzle. To start the auto decoration process, navigate to the Tools menu and select Auto-decorate area surrounding the puzzle (or press +).



The actors spawned by the auto decoration feature can be deleted again by using the Delete actors spawned by the "Auto-decorate" or by pressing -.

By default, all levels created are in the Medieval theme, but don't worry, you can change that, even after creating your level.

Jump to the level settings and observe the Apply Environment section at the bottom of the panel.


Here, you can select the Egypt, Rome, Medieval or Wood theme, as they can be found in the original game. Observe how the vegetation, terrain, and painted walls adapt to the new environment!



You might want to adjust the default music and weather to customize your level even more to your likings. To do that, visit the level settings and check the level music, sun, cloudiness and fog properties.

Play around with them to find a look you like!

Congratulations! You've created an episode, a level, and built some great puzzles. Now, the last missing step is to upload it to the Steam Workshop and let people enjoy your handcrafted experience.

In order to have a representation of your level, it's best to create a meaningful thumbnail. You can do that straight from the puzzle editor!

Simply move your camera to capture a nice motiv, jump to the Level Settings and select Take new thumbnail.





















When having multiple levels in one episode, the thumbnails will automatically get merged like this:


Review your difficulty rating, episode and level titles, and the episode's description again in the My Creations menu.

Protip: Before uploading, you can also decide whether you'd like to lock or unlock your episode. Locking an episode means that players downloading your episode will always start with the first level. If an episode is unlocked, players can choose which level to play. You can find these buttons when hovering your episode in the My Creations menu.

If that's all up to your likings, we can start the upload process.

Click the Publish button that appears when hovering your episode in the My Creations menu. And just like that, players from all over the world are able to see your creation 🥳.

You know how it goes. You've uploaded your episode, players are playing it, you're receiving feedback, and suddenly you need to change something because a player found a very obscure way to cheese your puzzle. Or maybe you just want to update a typo in the description text.

You can do all of that by simply clicking Publish on your episode again - and you're done!

By default, the level content, episode name, description, and image is updated.

To customize what's going to be updated, next to the PUBLISH button in the upcoming menu, you'll find a small pencil symbol. Clicking on it reveals three buttons you can toggle on and off. All of those are enabled by default. To turn OFF updating e.g. the episode name, click it so it becomes dim.

This can become helpful if you've customized the workshop item's details over on Steam, and don't want these changes to get lost.

Well, that's it! You've learned how to create episodes and levels, level geometry, insert devices and playtest your experiences. Now, it's up to you - go ahead and create something awesome!

We at Croteam can't wait to see what our community is coming up with and we surely hope you like the new puzzle editing capabilities as much as we do.

The editor is still in development, so expect things to change down the line, but if you got any feedback, questions or just want to share your latest creations, the Croteam Discord server[discord.gg] awaits you!

While this guide aims to give you a full introduction in The Talos Principle: Reawakened's puzzle editor, there's more information and material collected on our ever expanding Puzzle Editor Wiki![taloseditor.croteam.com]

For example, there's a full-fledged Device Reference[taloseditor.croteam.com], which goes very in-depth about every placeable device and their actor properties.



See you around and thanks for reading ♥️

~ Love, Croteam.