Interface Guide

Every menu item now shows a small icon next to its label so you can spot commands faster. The menus, left to right, are File, Edit, View, Map, Tools, Mods, Help.

File: Open Project, Open Recent (recently opened projects, plus Clear Recent Projects), Open Project Folder (opens your project’s folder in Windows Explorer / Finder / your file manager — handy for dropping in graphics or checking what the editor wrote), Open Saves Folder (opens the folder the game writes its save files to — see Map Management), Save, Save All, Run Game, Clear Proton Preference (Linux only — forgets your remembered Proton/Wine launch choice so the picker dialog shows again next time you press Run; it is only listed when there is such a choice to forget)
Edit: Undo, Redo, Cut, Copy, Paste, Advanced Clipboard (Copy All Layers, Cut All Layers, Paste to Original Layers, Cross-Project Clipboard toggle — see below), Select All, Deselect, Shadows (Generate from Selection, Delete All Shadows)
- Cross-Project Clipboard is off by default. When ticked, copying tiles, events, or event commands also places them on your system clipboard so a second open Maker Studio window can paste them. Turn it on in each window you want to share between. (Deleting a tile selection still works with the Delete key; only the old menu entry was replaced by this toggle.)
View: Panels submenu (Maps, Tile Palette, Layers, Tile Properties, Tile Info, Events, Minimap — clicking an entry focuses that panel, bringing it to the front or reopening it as a floating window if closed; it never closes a panel, and the checkmark still shows which panels are open), Show Grid, Show Collision, Show Events, Show Event Cells (see below), Create Events on Double-Click (see below), Dim Inactive Layers, Show MS-Exclusive Indicators (see below), Zoom In/Out/100%, Dark Mode, Language submenu (see below), Layout submenu (Refresh Layout, Import/Export Configuration)
- Create Events on Double-Click is on by default, matching RPG Maker: with the Brush on the Events layer, clicking an empty tile selects it and a double-click creates the event there. Turn it off if you would rather have a single click create the event straight away.
- Show Event Cells is off by default. Events with no graphic always show a marker box on their tile; with this on, events that do have a graphic are outlined too — a thin border around their cell plus a small corner square — so you can tell exactly which tile every event sits on without hiding its sprite. It is greyed out while Show Events is off. Your choice is remembered across sessions.
Map: New Map, Duplicate Map, Map Versions…, Resize / Shift Map, Change Tileset, Change Battleback…, Map Audio…, Import Map from JSON, Export Map submenu (Export as JSON / PNG / GIF / WebP)
Tools: Tool selection (Brush/Eraser/Fill/Rectangle/Eyedropper/Select/Pan), Rotate CW/CCW, Flip Horizontal/Vertical, Brush Editor…, Database, Scripts
Mods: Mod Manager (+ any mod-contributed menu items and panels)
Help: Documentation (opens this online documentation in your browser), Keyboard Shortcuts, Reset App (reload the editor — your panel layout is kept; Ctrl+R), Check for Updates (shows the version you are running next to the newest published one), Stats, About Maker Studio, Toggle DevTools

Language

The interface is available in English and Español, and installed mods can add more languages — any language a mod provides appears in the same menu automatically (if the mod that provides your chosen language is disabled, the editor falls back to its default language and switches back when the mod returns). Switch under View → Language — the change applies immediately and is remembered across sessions. On first launch the editor picks your system language (Spanish systems start in Español; everything else defaults to English). The whole interface is translated — menus, panels, dialogs, the event editor and its command forms, the simulator, and notifications. A few technical terms stay in English on purpose (for example tile, tileset, autotile, script, mod, and audio kinds like BGM/SE) so they match RPG Maker and the modding API.

MS-Exclusive Feature Indicators

Some editor features go beyond what stock RPG Maker XP supports — they only work in the running game if your project has the MakerStudio plugin installed (the integration that ships with the editor). A tiny MS badge marks those features throughout the interface so you always know which ones depend on the plugin. Hover a badge for a reminder of why — most say “Maker Studio exclusive — requires the MakerStudio plugin in-game”, while some explain their specific reason.

You will see the badge on, for example:

Menu items such as Edit → Shadows and Map → Map Versions… (also on the matching Map Tree right-click entries).
Map → Change Battleback… — the battleback is stored on the map (not on its tileset), and the plugin is what applies it in-game, so this item and the version submenu’s “(this version)” entry both carry the badge. (Panoramas are no longer changed from a menu — they are edited as the Panorama Layers group in the Layer panel; see the Layers Guide.)
Layer panel rows for the fog/panorama layer groups (and any mod-added groups), shadow groups, and extra (non-native) tile layers.
The Autotiles section of the Tile Palette — Maker Studio uses its own autotile system that is not tied to a map’s tileset, so all painted autotiles need the plugin in-game (the badge’s tooltip says so). Also a small badge over the tileset search box while you are browsing a tileset other than the map’s own (cross-tileset painting).
The Tile Properties panel header, and plugin-dependent event command forms (Change Map Settings when its type is set to Fog, fog color/opacity, the move-route Set Frame section). In tight spots — like the Sheet Cols/Rows fields in the graphic picker — the badge appears as a small dot instead.

If you use these features in a game that does not have the plugin, the game simply ignores them (or they are unavailable) at runtime — your maps still load fine in stock RPG Maker XP.

The badges are on by default. Hide or show them with View → Show MS-Exclusive Indicators; your choice is remembered across sessions.

The toolbar sits at the top of the window and provides quick access to common actions:

Left to right, the toolbar groups are:

Save, Run — Save writes the current map (Shift+Click saves every open map); Run launches the game (on Linux, Shift+Click lets you choose the Proton/Wine prefix or, if available, a native Linux build). (Creating a new map now lives in the Maps panel header — see Map Tree below.)
Saves — appears after the first Run; opens the folder where the game stores its save files. On Windows this is the native saves folder; on macOS and Linux it is the folder inside the Wine/Proton prefix the game ran in, or — after a native Linux build run — the game’s own Linux save folder. See Running the Game.
Sim Map — opens the Game Simulator on the current map with player input enabled.
Tools — the seven drawing tools (Brush, Eraser, Fill, Rectangle, Eyedropper, Select, Pan), shown as icons. Hover any of them to see its name and keyboard shortcut.
Brush tool — hover to reveal a popover with a size slider, a quick brush switcher (your saved Custom Shape Brush presets plus Default/Custom), and a Brush Editor… opener. When a custom brush is active, a compact indicator next to the tools shows the brush’s name with a ✕ to clear it. See Custom Shape Brush.
Zoom — shows the current zoom percentage; hover to reveal zoom in/out controls.
Database / Scripts — open the Database window and the Scripts editor. (Also available under the Tools menu.) Switches, Variables, and Tilesets no longer have their own toolbar buttons — they are now tabs inside the Database (where you can still rename entries inline, add more slots, and edit tilesets).
Versions — shows the current map version as a badge (e.g. V2/3) and opens the Version Manager. Relevant once a map has extra versions.
Grid / Col / Dim — icon + text toggle buttons for Show Grid, Show Collision, and Dim Inactive Layers.
Theme — sun/moon toggle switch. Thumb left = light mode (☀ visible on the right); thumb right = dark mode (☾ visible on the left). Your choice is remembered across sessions. (Themes and individual colours live in Help → Settings… → Appearance, below.)
Refresh Layout — available under View then Layout (restores the default panel arrangement).

If the window is too narrow to show every toolbar group at once, the groups that don’t fit collapse into a ”…” (More) button at the right end of the toolbar. Click it to reveal the hidden groups in a dropdown. Widening the window brings them back into the toolbar automatically.

Map Tree (left panel)

The Map Tree shows a hierarchical view of every map in your project. The panel header has a + button that creates a new blank map. You can:

Double-click a map name to rename it.
Right-click for a context menu: Open, Rename, Change Tileset, Resize/Shift, Delete.
Drag and drop maps to reorganize the hierarchy.
Click the arrow next to a map that has children to fold it away. Folded folders stay folded the next time you open the project, and the map you were last editing reopens with it — see Opening Maps.

Tab Bar

Each open map gets its own tab along the top of the editor area.

A dot indicator means the map has unsaved changes.
Italic text means it is a preview tab that auto-closes when you open another map.
Double-click a preview tab to make it permanent.
Click the x button or middle-click a tab to close it.
Drag a tab to reorder it. A line marks where it will land, and the tab drops into that slot.
When you reopen a project, every map you had open comes back, in the same left-to-right order, and the map you were last editing becomes the active one. (Opening a map file directly — by double-clicking it in your file manager — still opens just that one map.) This is remembered per project, on this computer only.

Status Bar (bottom)

The status bar displays useful context at a glance: cursor coordinates (X, Y), the event name under your cursor, the current tool, brush size, the active layer’s name, zoom level, and whether undo history is available.

On very large or heavy maps it may also show ”⏸ Animations paused (performance)”. When many tiles are visible at once, the editor keeps panning smooth by drawing from a cached image — and pauses autotile/fog animation when rebuilding that cache would take longer than 16ms (~60fps). Zoom back in (so fewer tiles are visible) and animation resumes automatically. (Animations also pause, without the indicator, while a dialog is open or the simulator is running.)

Dockable Panels

Every panel in the editor can be dragged, floated as a separate window, and rearranged to suit your workflow. If you ever want to start fresh, use View → Layout → Refresh Layout to restore the default arrangement. (To just reload the editor while keeping your layout, use Help → Reset App / Ctrl+R.)

Detach a panel: right-click a tab or empty header area and pick Detach to floating window. The panel pops out as a draggable, resizable floating window inside the editor.
Floating windows stay on-screen: if a floating panel is dragged or resized past the editor bounds, it auto-snaps back inside on release.
Reattach: drag the floating window’s tab back onto a dock zone, or close the panel.
Focus from the menu: View → Panels brings a panel to the front (or reopens it floating if you closed it) — it never closes panels.

Resizing dialogs

Every dialog window — Event Editor, Database, Tileset Editor, the pickers, all of them — can be resized by dragging any edge or corner, and moved by dragging its title bar. Clicking the dimmed area outside a dialog closes it, but a click that just misses an edge counts as a resize grab, not a dismiss. Esc closes the top-most dialog only, so closing a picker opened on top of the Event Editor no longer closes the editor underneath it.

Number fields

Every numeric field in the editor — map sizes, brush values, animation frames, simulator settings — can be emptied while you type. Select the contents and delete them, type the number you want, and it is applied when you leave the field (or press Tab/Enter). Minimums and maximums are applied at that point too, so typing “160” into a field whose minimum is 160 no longer fights you at the first digit. An empty field left as-is falls back to that field’s minimum.

Mod panels and layouts

Panels added by mods keep their place in your layout. If a mod is disabled, uninstalled, or reloading, its panel slot stays where you docked it and shows a placeholder (“Panel provided by mod … — not loaded”) until the mod is back; close the placeholder if you don’t want to keep the slot. Exported layout configurations (View → Layout → Export Configuration) also record which mods provided which panels — importing a layout that uses panels from mods you don’t have installed warns you with the list of missing mods and keeps those panels as placeholders. Older exported configurations still import fine.

Minimap

Bottom-right panel. Shows a scaled view of the entire map (all native + extended layers + shadows) with a yellow viewport rectangle. Click or drag to recenter the main canvas.

Events display: when View → Events is on, events render on the minimap with their active-page graphic (character or tile). Events with no graphic on any page are hidden so the minimap stays clean.

Settings (Help → Settings…)

Editor-wide preferences, separate from anything stored in your project. They are split across three tabs: Editor (how the Maker Studio window itself opens), Appearance (theme and colours), and Game (where the game window opens).

Changes are only kept when you press Save. If you close the dialog with unsaved changes — Cancel, the ×, Esc, or a click outside — Maker Studio asks first and offers Discard or Save & Close. Discarding also puts the theme and Dark Mode back the way they were, so trying a theme out and changing your mind costs nothing.

Editor tab

Window size at startup — leave it at the default (1400 × 900, centred), remember the size and position from last time, always open maximized or fullscreen, or give it an exact size.

Which monitor — the one Maker Studio is launched from (in practice, the screen your pointer is on), the one it was closed on last time, or always a specific one. Screens are listed by number and resolution, and remembered by name: if that screen isn’t connected the window falls back to the one it was launched from instead of opening off in the dark.

A specific size can’t go below 1280 × 720 — that’s the smallest the window can be.

Both apply the next time Maker Studio starts.

Appearance tab

Theme — Default (Maker Studio’s own look) or any theme added by an installed mod. The same list is in View → Theme; this tab just puts it next to the colours.

Dark mode — the same switch as the toolbar’s sun/moon toggle. A theme that only comes in one shade locks it, and the tab says so.

Colours — every colour the editor uses, grouped by what it paints: Surfaces (backgrounds, panels, borders), Text, Accent, Status (danger/warning/success), Map canvas, Event commands (the colour coding of the command list in the event editor) and Script editor (Ruby syntax highlighting).

Click a swatch to pick a colour, or type a value in the field beside it — the field takes anything CSS understands, including rgba(...) if you want something semi-transparent. (The swatch picker itself has no transparency slider, which is why the text field is there.)
The circular arrow at the end of a row puts that one colour back to the theme’s; Reset N changes at the top puts them all back. The filter box narrows the list when you know roughly what you’re after.
Colours are saved per theme and per light/dark mode. Recolouring the dark theme leaves the light one alone, and each mod theme keeps its own set — switch away and back and your edits are still there. The header above the list tells you which combination you are editing.
Your colours are stored on this computer, not in your project, so they follow you between projects and never end up in your game.

Game tab

Game names — the only two settings here that belong to the project, not to the editor, so they change with the project you have open and Restore defaults leaves them alone.

Save folder name — the game’s title in Game.ini. RPG Maker creates the saved-games folder from it (%AppData%\<name> on Windows), which is the folder the toolbar’s Saves button opens. Changing it means the saves are stored somewhere else from then on. It cannot be empty or contain \ / : * ? " < > |, since it has to work as a folder name.
Window title — the windowTitle in mkxp.json, the caption of the game’s own window. Purely cosmetic; it has no effect on saves, and unlike the name above it may contain anything, including accents. The field is greyed out with “(no mkxp.json in this project)” when the project doesn’t ship one.

Both are written straight into Game.ini / mkxp.json when you press Save, leaving the rest of those files — comments included — exactly as they were. They apply at your next Run.

Which monitor the game opens on (Windows only) — The same one as the editor (the default) puts the game on whichever screen the Maker Studio window is on when you press Run. Left to itself RPG Maker always centres the game on your primary screen, wherever you happen to be working, which is what this setting exists to fix. Pick Always this monitor instead to pin it to one screen no matter where the editor is. Unlike the two settings above, this one applies at your next Run Game, not at the next start. If the screen you picked isn’t connected, the game is left where it opened.

RPG Maker moves its own window back to the primary screen while the game is booting, so Maker Studio keeps putting it back for the first ~20 seconds. On a slow-loading project you may see the window jump between screens once or twice before it settles — that is the two fighting, and Maker Studio wins as long as the game finishes booting inside that window.

On macOS and Linux the setting is shown but greyed out, and says so: there the game runs through Wine or Proton, which owns its window, so the editor can’t place it.