A desktop Photoshop-for-Isaac — a multi-layer pixel-art editor and a live .anm2 animation previewer, side by side. Paint into a sprite layer in one pane, watch the animation re-render in the other, and save straight into a mod folder. Built specifically to make sprite modding for The Binding of Isaac: Repentance less painful.
Browse the game by name, not by file path. A semantic catalog reads the game's own XML (entities2.xml, items.xml, players.xml, costumes2.xml) and turns the 8,000+ extracted PNGs and 2,000+ anm2 files into a navigable grid of characters, enemies, items, familiars, pickups, effects, UI, and cutscenes. Rendered hover-animated thumbnails so you can see what something looks like before opening it.
Live preview while you edit. Click any sprite to open it in a document tab. The right pane plays the actual animation (with body + head + costume composited the way the game does it). The left pane is the editor. Strokes appear in the preview during the gesture, not on save.
Photoshop-style editor:
- Multi-layer documents (visible / opacity / lock / rename / reorder by drag), composite is what the game sees
- Tools: Move (V), Brush (B), Eraser (E), Eyedropper (I), Fill bucket (G), Rectangle marquee (M), Lasso (L), Magic wand (W), Pan (H)
- Selections clip paint, support inside-drag (Photoshop's "move marquee" gesture), Free Transform (Ctrl+T), Cut (Ctrl+X), Delete, Alt+drag to duplicate, Ctrl+D to deselect
- Free Transform with corner and edge handles — uniform scale on corners, axis-locked on edges
- Mirror brush (horizontal / vertical / both) for symmetric sprites
- Frame strip under the preview shows every frame of the current animation as a clickable thumbnail; click one to jump the editor's pan to the matching crop rect
- Layers + History panels docked beside the canvas (Photoshop layout); every operation lands in the History panel with a label, click any row to jump to that state
- Merge down (Ctrl+E), drag-to-reorder layers, per-layer opacity slider that lands as a single history entry on release
Mod manager (separate tab):
- Lists every folder under
modsPathwith parsedmetadata.xml, version, file count, and a Steam Workshop badge when the mod has a workshop<id> - Active mod — one mod at a time receives saves and overlays into the preview so modded sprites appear live
- Diff viewer — side-by-side or overlay-slider comparison of any modded file against vanilla
- New mod creation, hard-delete with confirm, BBCode-rendered descriptions (including remote images)
- Dirty-state modal stops you closing a tab or switching active mods over unsaved edits
Mod export: Ctrl+S in the editor writes the flattened sprite into <modsPath>/<name>/resources/gfx/<mirrored path>/... and generates metadata.xml on first save. Your game files are never touched.
| Catalog browser | Mod manager |
|---|---|
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| Color picker | Diff viewer |
|---|---|
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Massive thanks to Edmund McMillen, Nicalis, and the entire team behind The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Afterbirth, Afterbirth+, Repentance, and Repentance+. This project exists because the game has thirteen years of incredible art and the existing tools for modifying that art are genuinely difficult to work with. Basement Suite is a labor of love, built specifically to make sprite modding accessible — none of it would exist without the world they made.
This app reads only data the game's own resource extractor produces locally; it does not bundle, redistribute, or modify any of the game's assets.
Repentance / Repentance+ DLC is recommended for the full asset tree. Basement Suite browses your installed game; without it, there is nothing to load.
Repentance keeps its art packed inside .a archive files that no normal program can read. The game ships with an official extractor that unpacks everything into a real folder. Run it once.
- Open Steam → right-click The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth → Manage → Browse local files.
- Open
tools\ResourceExtractor\inside that folder. - Right-click
ResourceExtractor.exe→ Run as administrator (important — it writes back into the game directory and will silently do nothing otherwise). - Click Extract resources. Takes a couple of minutes the first time.
- When it finishes you'll have a new folder:
<game folder>\extracted_resources\resources\with thousands of PNGs and.anm2files undergfx\. That's what Basement Suite reads.
Download the latest installer from the Releases page and run it. Two installers are attached to every release — pick whichever you prefer:
Basement.Suite_<version>_x64-setup.exe— NSIS installer (smaller, easier to uninstall)Basement.Suite_<version>_x64_en-US.msi— MSI installer (good for enterprise / managed Windows)
The installer is unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen will warn "Windows protected your PC" on first run. Click More info → Run anyway to proceed.
macOS / Linux installers aren't published yet — see Building from source at the bottom of this README if you're on a non-Windows platform.
Launch Basement Suite from the Start menu. The first time it opens you'll see a setup form with three folder fields. Click Browse next to each and pick the right folder:
| Field | What to pick |
|---|---|
| Isaac install folder | The folder Steam opened in Step 2 (the one with isaac-ng.exe). |
| Mods folder | The mods subfolder inside the Isaac folder. |
| Extracted resources folder | The resources folder you got in Step 2 (<Isaac folder>\extracted_resources\resources). |
Hit Save and continue. Your choices are stored in %APPDATA%\dev.kyle.basement-suite\bs.config.json so you only do this once — change them later via the gear icon at the top-right.
That's it. The Home tab populates as the catalog finishes building (~5 seconds on first launch).
- "Windows protected your PC" SmartScreen warning — expected; the installer isn't signed. Click More info → Run anyway.
- Empty Home tab — the
Extracted resources folderis wrong, or the extractor was never run. Open Settings (gear icon), point at<Isaac folder>\extracted_resources\resources, hit Save. - Setup form shows "does not exist on disk" — the path you typed isn't a real folder. Use the Browse button to pick it instead of typing.
- Characters render as blank silhouettes — the catalog loaded but spritesheet PNGs can't be found. Confirm
extracted_resources/resourcescontains agfx/folder; if not, re-run the resource extractor as administrator.
Tauri 2 · React · TypeScript · Vite · Canvas 2D. The Rust side is a thin, capability-scoped file I/O shell (fs plugin, dialog plugin); everything else is TypeScript. The anm2 parser is pure, lenient by design, and unit-tested against the entire shipped game corpus (2,199 files).
This repo contains no game assets. Spritesheets and .anm2 files are copyrighted; the app and its tests read them from your local game installation at runtime. The game directory is treated as strictly read-only — every write call routes through lib/fsx/modWrite.ts and is rejected unless the target lives under modsPath.
If Basement Suite has saved you time on a mod and you'd like to throw a tip in the jar:
For non-Windows users, or anyone who wants to contribute. You'll need Node.js 20+, Rust, and your platform's native build tools (on Windows: Visual Studio Build Tools with the C++ workload; on macOS: xcode-select --install; on Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev build-essential libxdo-dev libssl-dev librsvg2-dev).
git clone https://github.com/laughable-9/basement-suite.git
cd basement-suite
npm install
npm run tauri dev # desktop window with hot-reloadThe first Rust compile takes 5–10 minutes (downloads ~400 crates); subsequent runs are seconds. npm run tauri build produces a packaged installer in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/. npm test runs the 93-test vitest suite.
In dev mode the app reads bs.config.json from the repo root as a fallback, so you don't have to migrate your config to AppData while iterating.
MIT — covers the code in this repository only, not any game content it reads.