Tabletop Simulator Import
If your game already exists as a Tabletop Simulator mod, that mod is a full description of your components and how they sit on the table. Designer Den can read a TTS save file and rebuild both: your cards, tiles, tokens, dice and bags become components, and the table arrangement becomes a saved setup you can open in a playtest room.
Note
This is a paid feature. See Plans & Pricing.
Importing a Save
- On the project page, open the Third-Party Sync panel and find Import a Tabletop Simulator mod.
- Drag your
.jsonsave onto the drop zone, or click to browse for it. - Tick the rights acknowledgement.
- Click Import mod.
Your saves live in Documents\My Games\Tabletop Simulator\Saves. Uploads are limited to 50 MB.
Important
The rights checkbox is not decoration, and the import is refused without it. Workshop mods frequently contain artwork the uploader does not own, and importing copies that artwork into your storage on this site.
While It Runs
A real Workshop mod is hundreds of images to download, cut up and re-host, so an import takes several minutes. It runs on the server, not in your browser: you can leave the page or close the tab, and you'll get a notification when it finishes wherever you are in the app.
The card shows a percentage and what it's currently doing. Most of the time is spent cutting individual card faces out of the sheet images TTS packs them into.
Copying the artwork into your storage carries on after the components themselves are finished, and it is the longest part of a large mod. The project page shows a Still working on this project panel while that runs, with a count of how many images have been copied so far. It appears whoever started the import and on whichever machine, so you can open the project later and still see whether it has finished.
What Each Object Becomes
Every object is converted by what you built it as in Tabletop Simulator. Nothing is guessed from an object's size: a tile is a token whether it's a tiny marker or a large player mat.
| In Tabletop Simulator | Becomes |
|---|---|
| Card, Custom Card, and the cards inside a deck | Card |
| Custom Board, and the built-in boards (chess, go, checkers, backgammon, pachisi, reversi, Chinese checkers, CardBot) | Board |
| Custom Tile, Custom Token, 2D figurine, tile and token stacks, domino, mahjong tile and stick, block shapes, player pawn | Token |
| Custom Model carrying a texture | Token, showing the artwork painted on the model |
| Custom Dice and the built-in D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, D20, piecepack die | Dice |
| Poker chips, checkers, Go stones, backgammon and piecepack pieces, mahjong coin, quarter | Coin |
| Counter | Counter |
| Digital clock | Timer |
| Bag, infinite bag, bowl, Go bowl, and bags whose look is a 3D model | Bag |
| Notecard, Custom PDF | Rulebook, one page per PDF page |
Three things become part of the table rather than components:
| In Tabletop Simulator | Becomes |
|---|---|
| Deck, Custom Deck | A Deck & Stack group, and the cards inside become the components |
| 3D Text | A text label on the table |
| Hand, randomise, layout and fog-of-war triggers | Zones with the matching behaviour |
Tip
If you'd rather a piece were a board or a card, change its type on the components page. It's one click, and a re-import won't undo it.
What Carries Across on Each Piece
| From Tabletop Simulator | Becomes |
|---|---|
| Nickname | The component's name |
| Description | Description |
| GM Notes, or Memo | Notes |
| Front and back image | Front and back artwork. A piece with only a front in TTS gets the same picture on both sides, which is what TTS shows |
| Which way up it was sitting | Face up or face down on the saved setup |
| Cut-out artwork with transparency | Masked to its own outline |
| Tile shape (box, rounded, circle, hex), where the artwork is solid | The component's mask |
| A piece the save gives no shape for, such as a custom model | A rectangle, so its artwork arrives whole rather than cropped to a shape the mod never asked for |
| Size and scale | The piece's size in inches. See Scale below for how TTS's scale is handled |
| The scale of the deck a card sits in | The card's size. Tabletop Simulator draws every card in a deck at the deck's scale, which is why a card dragged out of one comes away the size of the deck it came from |
| Position, rotation, and which way up | Its placement on the saved setup |
| Locked | Locked on the table, exactly as the save has it. Text labels are the exception and always arrive free to move |
| Hide when face down | Marked as having a meaningful back |
| Tags | Snap tags, so a tagged slot still only takes the right piece |
| Stack quantity | Quantity, and a pile that deep on the saved setup |
| Snap points attached to the object | The slots printed on that piece |
| Decals attached to the object | Stickers on the piece |
| Lines drawn on the object | Marker strokes on the piece |
| States | A rulebook, one page per face |
| Dice face count | The die's size, a D4 through to a D20 |
| Dice rotation values | The name of each face, shown in the die's right-click face list |
| Custom six-sided dice artwork | The six faces, cut out of the die's texture |
| Sideways card | Kept sideways |
| A PDF's address | Recorded in the component's notes |
Scale, and the "normalise this mod's scale" box
A Tabletop Simulator object carries a scale on top of its size, and that scale is a display zoom: how big the designer wanted the piece to look on their own virtual table. It has no fixed relation to anything real, and mods are commonly drawn at two or three times over.
Nothing here works that way. A size in this project is simply the size, so an imported piece has to carry its TTS scale somewhere, and by default it carries it in its measurements. A mod drawn at roughly 2.7× therefore brings its pieces in about 2.7× larger than the ruler suggests.
Tick Normalise this mod's scale on the import form and that zoom is taken out instead. It is one factor applied to the whole table at once, sizes and positions together, so the layout is exactly as it was and only the units change.
The factor is read from the pieces whose real-world mesh is known, which is cards and dice: Tabletop Simulator's card is a poker card and its die is a real die, whatever scale they happen to be sitting at. Nothing else in a save has a fixed size to measure against.
Leave the box unticked to keep the sizes exactly as Tabletop Simulator has them. Either way the import tells you afterwards what it did, and by how much.
What the Table Itself Brings
| From Tabletop Simulator | Becomes |
|---|---|
| Save name | The saved setup's name |
| Player counts | The setup's maximum players |
| Table type and its image | The table surface, under everything |
| A surface the mod built for itself | The table surface, under everything |
| Grid settings | The table's grid |
| Snap points | Snap points on the table |
| Vector lines | Lines drawn on the table |
| Decals | Stickers on the table |
| Hand zones | Hand zones |
Decks become Deck & Stack groups in the order TTS drew them.
The table itself becomes a saved setup named after the save. It carries the position, rotation, size and facing of every piece, plus:
- hand zones and TTS's randomise, layout and fog-of-war zones
- snap points, both loose on the table and the slots printed on a board
- snap tags, so a slot that only accepts one kind of piece still does
- text captions floating on the table
- lines drawn on the table and on individual pieces
- stickers, from TTS decals
- the table's own background image
An object with alternate faces (TTS calls them States) becomes a rulebook with one page per face, opened to whichever face the mod was showing.
Some mods switch the Tabletop Simulator table off and lay down a surface of their own instead. A locked, unnamed object sitting at the centre of the table is read as that surface: it arrives under everything on a "Table surface" layer of its own, so you can move it or delete it in one action, and the room opens framed on your game rather than on the surface beneath it. If that surface is a single flat colour rather than a picture, it comes in as that colour.
Limitations
Designer Den's table is 2D, so anything whose whole identity is a 3D model has no honest equivalent. The import reports each of these by type and count rather than importing a wrong-looking placeholder, so you always know what's missing.
| Not imported | Why |
|---|---|
| Unity asset bundles | The object is a packaged 3D asset. There's nothing 2D to stand in for it. |
| The shape of a 3D model | The mesh can't come across, but its artwork can. See the row for custom models above. |
| Built-in 3D chess pieces and figurines | Same: the mesh is the piece. |
| Tileset scenery (barrels, chairs, chests, corners) | Set dressing built from 3D meshes. |
| Scripting zones | An invisible trigger that does nothing without the Lua below. |
| The tablet and the calculator | A web browser panel and a widget, with no counterpart here. |
| Custom artwork on a D4 | Its artwork is drawn to be folded around a solid, not laid out as flat faces, so there is no flat face to take. See Dice below. |
| Lua scripting, XML UI | Anything your mod automated is yours to do by hand. |
| Physics (joints, mass, friction, bounce) | A flat table has no physics to apply them to. |
| Snap settings, auto-raise, sticky, measure-movement, tooltips | TTS behaviours with no equivalent. |
| Notebook tabs, saved camera positions | Not part of a component or the table layout. |
A 3D model inside a bag is a special case: the bag comes across with its other contents intact rather than being dropped, so you don't lose the grouping along with the model.
Note
A bag whose look is a 3D model still imports as a bag. The mesh can't come across, but "a container holding these things" is the part that matters.
Rulebooks
A PDF rulebook comes across as pages you can turn. (You can do the same with your own PDFs: see Rulebooks from a PDF.) Tabletop Simulator stores a rulebook as a PDF; Designer Den's rulebook is a stack of page images. Each page of the PDF is rendered into its own page, they are kept together as one book in the order they appear, and the rulebook lands on your table opened at the page Tabletop Simulator had it on.
Pages count towards your storage like any other artwork. Very long PDFs stop at 60 pages.
Note
Rendering happens on our servers, so there is nothing for you to install. If a rulebook comes in with no pages, its PDF link is kept on the component so nothing is lost.
Dice
Every die keeps its size (a D4 through to a D20), its face names if the mod set rotation values, and its position on the table. What differs is whether its artwork can come across.
A custom die brings its faces with it. Tabletop Simulator stores a die's artwork as one image of all its faces laid out flat, and Designer Den cuts each face out the way it cuts cards out of a deck sheet. A cube's faces are squares on a tidy grid; a D8, D10, D12 and D20 pack triangles, kites and pentagons together at angles, so those are cut to the shape of the face rather than to a square. Your painted dice arrive painted, and each one is drawn on the table as the shape of the face you are looking at.
A die with no custom artwork stays a plain die. It keeps its shape and its face names and shows numbers, exactly as though you had added a die here yourself.
The D4 is the exception, and arrives showing numbers. Its artwork is drawn to be folded around a solid rather than laid out as flat faces, so there is no flat face on it to take. The die still comes across at the right size with its face names; only the painted artwork is left behind, and the import tells you how many were affected.
Tip
If a D4's artwork matters to your game, you can add it by hand: open the die, set Dice Style to Custom under Appearance, and give each of the four faces an image of its own.
Tip
Every imported die can be edited afterwards. Open the component and look under Appearance: with Dice Style set to Custom, each face has its own image and label. Face labels are what the probability calculators group rolls by, so two faces sharing a label count as the same symbol. See Components.
Artwork and Storage
Imported artwork is copied into your own storage rather than left pointing at the Steam Workshop, so it keeps working if the original is removed. That counts against your storage allowance.
If you run out of space part way through, the import stops and says so. Everything created up to that point stays, and the message tells you what's missing, and you're never handed a half-finished import that claims to have worked. See My Files for what's using your space.
Your table survives even then. The saved setup, the decks, the zones and every snap point cost no storage at all, so they are built whichever way the import ends. Free some space and import the same file again: the components that missed out get their artwork, and everything else updates in place.
Importing Again
Re-importing the same mod updates what's there instead of duplicating it. Components are matched on what they are (name, artwork, shape), so a piece you've already imported is recognised and updated in place. Artwork already copied into your storage is kept rather than fetched again.
Each import also creates a new saved setup, so you can keep an older arrangement or delete it. If the project page is open while an import finishes, its Saved Table Setups list updates itself to show the new one, so you do not have to reload to launch it.
Note
If the result says some components from an earlier import didn't match this one, those are left alone rather than deleted, because you may have edited them since. Review or remove them yourself if you don't want them.
Related: Components · Component Types · Saved Table Setups · Deck & Stack Builder · Dextrous Import · The Game Crafter Import