SuperTiled2Unity: Tiled Maps That Reimport Themselves Inside Unity

The import problem this package exists to remove

SuperTiled2Unity is a Unity package that gives you the ability to import your Tiled Map Editor maps directly into your Unity projects. The project describes itself as better than regular Tiled2Unity, and the important word in the repository title is imports. The workflow it removes is the familiar one where a designer saves a map in an external editor, exports a set of tiles and a data file, and somebody in the Unity project imports them, and then the next change to the map means doing that again. SuperTiled2Unity is aimed at exactly that loop. The repository description is blunt about the comparison it is making, and the readme is otherwise short, which tells you the mechanism is the story and not the feature count.

Scripted Importers are what make it work

The technical heart of the package is Unity's Scripted Importers, which the readme links to the Unity manual, and it notes they are available with Unity 2018 and later. The consequence of using them is stated directly: the import process is contained completely within your Unity project across all platforms. That is the difference from an editor-side conversion. A Scripted Importer is a class Unity invokes when it sees a file type it does not natively understand, and the importer produces Unity assets from it. So the Tiled map file becomes a file in the project that Unity knows how to handle, rather than a file you manually convert into assets. Because the conversion happens inside the project, the same map file works in a desktop build, a mobile build and a console build without a separate per-platform export path.

Saving in Tiled is enough to trigger a reimport

The update behaviour is the payoff. Updates are made automatically as you make changes to your map in Tiled and save them, and there is no need for a separate export process. That single sentence describes a different relationship between the two tools. In a manual workflow the map in the Unity project is a copy, and the copy drifts; in this workflow the map file in the project is the map. The practical effect is that the designer and the programmer are working on the same artefact. The programmer never asks whether the tiles were re-exported, and the designer never has to remember which command to run or which folder to copy into. The cost is that the pipeline is only as good as the file watching and the reimport trigger, and those are Unity's behaviour rather than something the package controls.

Where to get the package

There is no command line to run here, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than inventing one. The deployed Unity package is available for download at itch.io, on the author's page for the project. The model is described as free or name your price, and the readme notes that donations or a kind word are always appreciated. That is the whole distribution story: this is a Unity package, not a library, so it is not installed with a package manager but dropped into a project, and the itch.io download is the delivery mechanism. The documentation is separate from the download and lives on Read the Docs at the supertiled2unity.readthedocs.io address, which is where you would look for how to set the package up, what it expects from your Tiled files and what it does with the layers and objects it finds.

What the repository contains

The top level of the repository is small and tells you how the project is organised. There is a SuperTiled2Unity directory holding the Unity package itself, a docs directory for the documentation, and a deploy directory, which is the tooling for publishing the package to itch.io. The documentation is separate from the code rather than embedded in it, which is the arrangement a package with an external user-facing surface usually ends up with, since the docs are read by people who have downloaded the package rather than by people reading the source. The licence is MIT, so the code is permissive even though the packaged distribution is priced the way the author chose. The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-05-25, and there are no GitHub releases, so the itch.io listing is the versioned artefact a user actually installs.

Why keep a second map editor at all

The interesting question behind the package is why a Unity team would use Tiled rather than build the map in Unity. Tiled is a dedicated 2D tile map editor, with a grid model, layers, objects and a file format that is designed to be diffable and to be edited in parallel by several people, and for a project with a large hand-authored world that combination of tooling and plain file is often better than a scene graph. The cost of that choice is the import step, and SuperTiled2Unity is the piece that makes the cost close to zero. So the package is not competing with Unity's own map workflow, it is a bridge for teams who made a different choice upstream, and judging it against a Unity-native workflow misses that. The alternative approach, and the one the package deliberately replaces, is the manual export and reimport: it needs no package at all, and it needs constant human effort.

What to check before you build a project on it

The documentation is the right place to look for the details this repository does not cover, and there are a few questions worth asking there before you commit a project. What happens to your tile set assets, whether the package expects them already in the project or generates them. How object layers and collisions are represented, since a tile map in a game usually carries physics and triggers that the editor does not know about. How the importer names and orders the generated assets, since that affects how scenes reference them and whether a rename breaks a level. And what happens with the Tiled file format when it changes, since Tiled evolves and an importer written against one version of the map format can fail quietly on a new one. The screenshots in the readme show the package's presence in the Unity editor and an overhead view, which is enough to confirm the workflow before you read the manual.

Editorial conclusion

SuperTiled2Unity fits a Unity project whose tile maps are authored in the Tiled Map Editor, and who want the map file to stay the single source of truth instead of being re-exported by hand before every build. It is the wrong choice if your team has already committed to authoring maps inside Unity, since the package exists to bridge two tools rather than to replace either, and the wrong choice if you need the plugin to be free of a download step, since the package is distributed through itch.io rather than a package registry. Before you commit, open a Tiled map in the project and change one tile, then confirm Unity reimports it without you touching the project window.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: MIT
3. README
4. Seanba/SuperTiled2Unity on GitHub