Introduction

Jackdaw is a 3D level editor built with Bevy. It does brush-based geometry, material and texture management, heightmap terrain, and a human-readable scene format (.jsn). The editor is itself a Bevy plugin, so you can drop it into a project alongside your own gameplay code without a separate runtime.

We are pre-1.0. Things change. Some pieces are in active flux (PIE, plugin / dylib loading, the BSN migration), and this book tries to call out what is solid versus what is in flight.

What you can do today

• Author levels by drawing brushes (TrenchBroom-style), carving, and applying materials.
• Build heightmap terrain with sculpt and erosion tools.
• Add Bevy-reflect components to entities through a picker, edit their fields, and see your custom components round- trip through save/load.
• Run the same scene as a standalone Bevy binary, with no editor in the dependency graph.
• Write extensions in plain Rust that plug into the editor’s operator and panel system.

Who this is for

Two audiences:

• Bevy developers who want a level editor for their game and don’t want to glue something together themselves.
• Editor / tooling developers who want to build on top of a pluggable Bevy editor.

If you are coming from Hammer, TrenchBroom, or Unreal’s brush workflow, the brush model will feel familiar. If you are coming from Unity or Godot, the closest analogue is the scene editor; jackdaw’s .jsn files play the role of .unity / .tscn scenes.

What this book covers

• Getting Started: install, scaffold a project, save a scene.
• User Guide: the panels and tools you actually click on.
• Developer Guide: how the editor is put together, how to write custom components, how to extend the editor with your own operators and windows.
• Reference: feature flags, configuration, file paths.
• Open Challenges lists what we have not built yet but want to. If you came here looking for something to hack on, start there.

Where to find us

• Discord: discord.gg/S9k2HRwc. The fastest way to ask a question or share a screenshot.
• GitHub: jbuehler23/jackdaw. Source, issue tracker, and this book (under book/).

See Giving Feedback for what kinds of reports are most useful, and where to drop the RustWeek questionnaire.

If you find a missing page or an instruction that doesn’t match what the editor does, the book lives at book/ in the repo. PRs welcome.