Introduction:
I felt the sudden need to create a trash post full of information everyone with an IQ of "awesome" discovered for themselves in 5 minutes of fooling around. This post goes out to all the super noobs who are either too embarrassed to admit their fear of the editor's hyper-advanced graphical user interface or too lacking in hand-eye coordination to quickly explore all the menus available. With this easy to use cheat sheet, you can feel like winners too!


The Boring Normal View:

This is the default view of the editor. I bet you're so stupid that just one look had you vexed for hours, possibly even paralyzed where you sit.


Helpful Overlays:

This is the placement grid. It's used to show where players can and cannot build things. It also displays the minimum building distance from resources, which is especially helpful for people who can't count to three with any degree of accuracy.



This is the pathing mesh. It shows places units can go as green, places units can't go as red and places cliff walkers can use as blue. No one knows why but, sometimes when the rest of us super geniuses copy terrain or change the map bounds, the automatically generated pathing mesh gets filled in with all sorts of useless wharrgarbl and qrrbrbirlbel. When that happens we use this tool to track it down and give it a violent clobbering in the right direction.



This is the grid. You can cycle it through coarse/fine/off. (Thats big and small for you noobs). It's really good for measuring stuff and planning out sections of your map but, I bet you pansies will use the placement grid for all that because it's got colors that appeal to your small child brains.



This is the map border. Do you see the yellow line? You can't build anything between that and the edge of the map even if the placement grid says so. It's good to turn on if you're working near the edge of the map but, I'm not going to tell you why because I think you need to exercise your reasoning skills.



This is the game view. It's not really an overlay... it's more like a preview. When you tap V, your map editor window will show whatever you're looking at as if it were appearing in the game. See how the bird spawner actually became birds? Don't worry, I've highlighted the birds so that you can find them. They move around and everything. Make sure you turn it off when you're done because your other overlays won't work until you do and you probably won't be able to figure out why.



You can turn on rendering statistics that pop up a bunch of numbers that are probably too complicated for you to make sense of. They update very quickly so it might keep you interested for a while anyway. I highlighted them for you in case you were too distracted by the colorful part of the screenshot. If the number of primitives is too high then your map is going to make other player's computers work too hard. Then they'll come crying to you asking for a new video card. You don't want that.


Other Things With Toggle Buttons:

There are a bunch of other things you can toggle with a button. You can turn off lighting, shadows, fog and even hide entire layers of your map. Want to mess with the terrain without all those units you placed in the way? Press SHIFT+U! The same works for all the other modules. You can't hide the one you're working with unless you try really hard so don't hurt yourself.


How to Mirror Things Faster:

It's common for you lazy types to work on one half of your map and then try to copy it to the other side. Just this once I'll indulge you with a helpful tip: After you press the paste hotkey you can press ALT+[, or .] to flip the selection before you stamp it down. This works for terrain, units, doodads ... everything. It'll save you a lot of time trying to make your map super balanced and perfect. You can rotate things too but, the hotkeys for that are so far from the home row that you might get lost.


Switching to Modules Quickly:
If you want to edit some part of your map you need to switch to the appropriate module first. There are some nice toolbar buttons with pretty pictures to help with that but, if you ever want to become a real man, you'll have to start using hotkeys.

As long as your cursor isn't stuck in a text box these should work:

• T - Terrain
  
• U - Units
  
• D - Doodads
  
• H - Pathing
  
• P - Points
  

In closing I would like to say that I sincerely hope this cheat sheet has given you the knowledge to work slightly faster and boost your self esteem.