Cut the Rope DX: Level Editor

About

Cut the Rope DX: Level Editor is a standalone app for creating and editing levels for Cut the Rope: DX.

Try the online version of the editor at https://yell0wsuit.github.io/ctrdx-editor/ (beta).

Inspired by @adriandrummis's Cut the Rope Level Editor, it aims to be portable, lightweight, and streamlined to edit with.

This project is a part of the Cut the Rope Home fan project, created by yell0wsuit, with help from contributors.

The icon is designed by adriandrummis.

Note

This project is not, and will never be affiliated with or endorsed by ZeptoLab. All rights to the original game and its assets belong to ZeptoLab.

Related projects

• Cut the Rope: DX: a fan-made enhancement of the PC version of Cut the Rope, aims to improve the original game's codebase, add new features, and enhance the overall gaming experience.
• Cut the Rope Level Editor: a Turbowarp-based level editor for Cut the Rope.

Download

Coming soon.

Features

Editing

• Drag-and-drop palette: searchable object list, grouped by Cut the Rope and Cut the Rope: Experiments, with the objects unavailable to the current level gated out.
• Full object roster: Om Nom, candy (whole and split halves), stars, rope hooks, bubbles, air cushions, gravity buttons, light bulbs, lanterns, spikes, electric sparks, magic hats, bouncers, ghosts, steam pipes, vinyls, mice, conveyors, ant conveyors, bamboo tubes, rockets, snails, mechanical hands, and tutorial icons and text.
• Direct canvas manipulation: rotation dials, resize handles, grab rails and radii, mechanical-hand segments, and editable movement paths—drag points to reshape a polyline, right-click one to remove it.
• Movement modes: orbit and polyline paths (up to 99 points) with speed, direction, retrace, and closed-loop control.
• Property panel: per-attribute editors with inline help for the non-obvious ones (rocket impulse, slack-rope factor, water drain, and so on).
• Selection and clipboard: shift to multi-select, select all, cut/copy/paste, delete, and full undo/redo across every edit.
• Snap to grid for precise placement.

Layers

• Add, rename, reorder, merge, and delete layers, with an undo-safe confirmation before a layer and its contents go away.
• Per-layer and per-object visibility and lock toggles—double-click an object on the canvas to lock or unlock it.
• Object counts per layer and expand/collapse-all for large levels.

Level setup

• Level settings dialog: resolution presets or a custom size, rope physics speed, mobile physics, half-candy and night-level mechanics, and the special tutorial staging id.
• Water: pool height plus drain speed, with a live readout of how long the pool takes to empty.
• Customization: rope color, 17 backgrounds, 52 candy skins, and 17 Om Nom platforms—each pickable at random, and optionally remembered as your defaults for the next new level.

Viewing

• Live animation preview: play object animations while you edit, per object or for the whole level.
• Diagnostic overlays: toggle hitboxes, force fields, and movement paths.
• Tutorial language picker: levels with localized tutorial text can be viewed one locale at a time.
• Navigation: zoom in/out/fit, Ctrl+wheel zoom, wheel and Shift+wheel scrolling, middle-drag panning, and pinch/magnify gestures on trackpads and touchscreens.

Files and workflow

• Drag and drop to open: drop a level XML anywhere on the window.
• Lossless XML round-trip: unknown layers and attributes are preserved verbatim, so opening and re-saving a level never rewrites data the editor doesn't understand.
• Level validation: catches missing candy or Om Nom, mismatched candy halves, a night level with no bulb, duplicate candyNumbers, grabs bound to nonexistent candies or bulbs, idle ghosts, candy that spawns inside a spike or on Om Nom's mouth, and more—before you save or play.
• Review changes: a diff of the live level against the last save or open, side-by-side or unified, highlighting the exact characters that changed.
• Playtest: launch the level straight into Cut the Rope: DX from the File menu.
• Screenshot export: save a PNG of the level as rendered.
• Unsaved-changes protection on new, open, close, and quit.
• Guided asset setup: the editor fetches the game assets it needs on first run, or installs them from a zip you already have.

Platform

• Cross-platform: a native AOT, single-file desktop app for Windows, macOS, and Linux, or run it directly in the browser (WebAssembly)—no install required.

Keyboard shortcuts

Ctrl is ⌘ on macOS.

Action	Shortcut
New level	Ctrl+N
Open	Ctrl+O
Save / Save As	Ctrl+S / Ctrl+Shift+S
Screenshot	Ctrl+Shift+P
Close level	Ctrl+W
Undo / Redo	Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y (⌘+Shift+Z on macOS)
Cut / Copy / Paste	Ctrl+X / Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V
Select all	Ctrl+A
Delete selection	Delete
Zoom in / out / fit	Ctrl++ / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0
Toggle animation preview	Space

Development & contributing

The development of Cut the Rope DX: Level Editor is an ongoing process, and contributions are welcome! If you'd like to help out, please consider the following:

• Reporting issues: If you encounter any bugs or issues, please report them on the GitHub Issues page.
• Feature requests: If you have ideas for new features or improvements, feel free to submit a feature request through Issues.
• Contributing code: If you're a developer and want to contribute code, please fork the repository and submit a pull request. Make sure to read the contribution guidelines in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Building and running

The editor is an Avalonia app targeting .NET 10. It ships two front-ends that share the same core: Desktop (src/CtrDxEditor.Desktop) and Browser (src/CtrDxEditor.Browser, WebAssembly).

Prerequisites

1. Install the .NET 10 SDK, version 10.0.302 or higher.

Note

The minimum is pinned in global.json with rollForward: latestFeature, so newer 10.0.x SDKs work automatically. However, if your SDK is older than that, dotnet commands will fail with a version-mismatch error until you update.

2. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/yell0wsuit/ctrdx-editor.git
   cd ctrdx-editor

   You can also use GitHub Desktop for ease of cloning.

3. (Browser only) Install the WebAssembly build tools:

   dotnet workload install wasm-tools

Run in development

Desktop:

dotnet run --project src/CtrDxEditor.Desktop/CtrDxEditor.Desktop.csproj

Browser (serves the app locally in your browser):

dotnet run --project src/CtrDxEditor.Browser/CtrDxEditor.Browser.csproj

Run the tests

dotnet test

Publish a desktop build

Desktop publishes as a self-contained, native AOT single-file executable.

Note:
To make PublishAot work, you need to follow the AOT prerequisites for your OS.

a. Windows

dotnet publish src/CtrDxEditor.Desktop/CtrDxEditor.Desktop.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 -o ./publish/win-x64

b. macOS

dotnet publish src/CtrDxEditor.Desktop/CtrDxEditor.Desktop.csproj -c Release -r osx-arm64 -o ./publish/osx-arm64

Note:
You can change osx-arm64 to osx-x64 for the Intel-based version. However, we do not guarantee it will work properly on Intel Macs.

c. Linux

dotnet publish src/CtrDxEditor.Desktop/CtrDxEditor.Desktop.csproj -c Release -r linux-x64 -o ./publish/linux-x64

Warning:
A native AOT binary built on Linux is only guaranteed to run on the same or newer Linux distribution version.

Publish the browser build

dotnet publish src/CtrDxEditor.Browser/CtrDxEditor.Browser.csproj -c Release -o dist

The publishable static site is written to dist/wwwroot. This is what the Deploy Browser to GitHub Pages workflow ships on every push to main.