Tabletop Simulator
Playtest tonight. Boardsmith packs the sheets, writes the saved object, and can take an existing mod apart again.
Exporting a deck
Tick Grid sheet images and Boardsmith packs the cards into atlas sheets and writes
a saved object beside them. Drop that _tts.json into
Documents/My Games/Tabletop Simulator/Saves/Saved Objects/ and spawn it from
Objects ▸ Saved Objects. The deck arrives with per-card names, tooltips and GM
notes already filled in — no grid numbers to type.
The blueprint's Tabletop Simulator section decides what those say. Every field takes
column tokens, so {name} and {type}\n\n{text} give each card
its own hover name and tooltip. There is also a switch for hiding the card when it is
face down, and one for landscape cards.
The limits, and why they exist
- A sheet holds at most 10 × 7 = 70 cards. A larger deck rolls into a second sheet, a third, and so on.
- A sheet should stay within 4096 px per side. That is where the card presets come from: 408 × 572 packs a full 10 × 7 sheet at 4080 × 4004, which is the largest standard-ratio card that fits one.
- A back image is required — either a back face on the blueprint or one you supply.
Playing with other people
Without a base URL the saved object references files on your own disk. That loads perfectly for you and will not sync to anyone else. Host the sheets somewhere — any static host — give Boardsmith that URL, and export again. Nothing else changes.
Object ids are derived from the deck name and the card index, so re-exporting an updated deck produces a clean diff instead of churning every object.
Importing a mod you made
Import a Tabletop Simulator mod takes a .json save — from Saves, or
from Mods/Workshop — and turns it into a project. The structure comes with it: deck
names, card sizes, and the resolution the pictures really have rather than one assumed
for them. Optionally the words on each card are read off the artwork onto editable text
layers; how much comes back depends on the art, since text over busy backgrounds reads
worse than text on a plain ground.
Import a mod you made yourself. Your mod file is never written to, and everything lands in a new project folder.
Tabletop Simulator caches a mod's artwork the first time you open it, so playing the mod once means there is nothing left to download. Whatever is still missing, Boardsmith can fetch.
What the colours in the import dialog mean
- Print — how the cards will look on paper at that size. Green from about 300 DPI; amber below that, or at a size cards are rarely made in.
- TTS — whether the deck still fits one sheet. Amber means that deck keeps its old artwork when the mod is written back out, because a deck has to be a single sheet.
Writing the mod back out
A project that came from a mod can export straight back into it: Boardsmith patches that mod with the new sheets rather than building a new one, so the subscriptions, the scripts and everything else in it survive.