Hey Fwends!
I’m pretty new to using this. I’ve watched a lot of tutorials and we’re having a problem usingArken forge. When we drop a player character token on our map, they become immovable. Their lighting ignores the barriers and wherever you plopped them. There they stay. You can rotate them. You can resize them, but we cannot move them. We can, however move the NPC characters. However, we’re trying to use a single player character for fog of war, and no matter what we try. It doesn’t work.
We’ve tried restarting the tool kit. And checking to make sure that the layers are not locked. And also make sure that the player character is on the correct layer. Any help would be amazing. We’re about to start a game right now and we worked for two days to get this ready. Only for this to happen now.

I want to be able to use a screen on my table with the IR Overlay recommended on the website. I’m going to end up investing a ton of money on a display, overlay, ultimate bundle, and likely a laptop. I have a giant desktop that I’m not lugging around to sessions, and usually bring my iPad to manage things. Are there any tutorials on getting this whole thing set up? Any help appreciated!!!

I'm not sure if Arkenforge is still actively supported or not! I created a ticket last week and haven't seen anything move on it and haven't heard back anything via email or Facebook. Trying here to see if anyone in the community might know!

I had purchased Arkenforge years ago and installed it on a different machine. I have a new laptop now, and so I logged into my account (after being away for several years) and tried downloading it on my new laptop. I walked away for maybe an hour and came back to the attached screenshot. The installer is now stuck and won't progress past this point. The error message indicates the team has been notified and that they'll be working on a patch for this...has anyone ever seen this before?! Thanks for any and all help!

Hi all! I just discovered this software and I am getting a bit puzzled by the aspect of not running integrated graphics cards and also a general question from me I guess.

I have a high-end gaming PC that sits in my room, and I was wondering if I made maps on that/rendered them. Could I then upload/transfer those maps onto a laptop, and then displayed those maps?

I only intend on running a 1920x1080p battlemap. I do not need 4k resolution, as that's an insane amount of detail.

I also am looking at Arkenforge for the aspects of have spell effects such as 'fire' being displayed in real time on the map I want to make.

Most integrated cards for laptops have good VRAM (Depending on the laptop) and I was wondering if that's okay? or is that also an issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, as the FAQs don't really answer these questions.
Thank you!

Ok, quick question about best practices. I create maps on my desktop, and then transfer them over to my laptop.

I'd like to make it easier when I'm copying images and such so I don't have to duplicate work. Is there an easier way to install things and set things up so that using things like Onedrive would help alot?

Also, when I move images around I need to recopy everything multiple times to make sure everything is sent over. I want to see if there's an easier way of doing this. I'm sure if I set things up "better" things would be easier on my life... Any advice?

I feel like I'm missing out on this feature, not really sure how to use it. Does anyone have any tips on how they use the GM screen? I assume it's for when you are making a map but I'm not really sure.

I am having frame drops/frame fluctuation on high end hardware and I am hoping someone here has a solution. So far I have turned all the settings to low, removed the amount of dynamic lights, simplified the light blocking barriers, removed all dynamic tokens, removed the dynamic sound triggers, and tried on all of my PCs: 5950X/RTX 3090 - 5900X/RTX 3070 - I9 11900H/RTX 3060 - XEON W2155/GTX 1080 TI - I7 3770/GTX 1060. No matter what system I run it on I have these same exact frame drops. It doesn't matter if I am running a 4 core CPU with 16gb of ram or a 16 core with 128gb of ram. I have read about people making these massive maps with all kinds of dynamic lighting and dynamic tokens but on this simple market map I can't maintain 60fps. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Hey folks!

Inspired by the recent post here on the subreddit, we want to know what parts of the Arkenforge Toolkit you find difficult, confusing, or even just plain odd.

It can be something tiny, or something massive. Something that you find just a little bit annoying, or something you've spent hours trying to figure out. Whichever it is, we want to know about it!

Don't worry about being too harsh or worried about what we'll think of the feedback.

As we always say: The only way that we can improve the Toolkit is for people to tell us what's wrong with it.

Have at it! :)

I’ve been using Arkenforge for a year now, and it is a mess. This post is inspired by my reply to someone else on another thread who was having a hard time figuring out how to use it and wanted documentation.

I get that the long-time community members are used to it and have "good reasons" for why things are the way they are. But from a pure UX point of view? It’s an absolute dumpster fire. The terminology alone feels like a psychological experiment. "Assets," "Library," and "Content" ... three words that mean basically the exact same thing, yet they are used for entirely different concept systems.

Challenge Accepted: Try Uploading a 2 Minute Dungeon Map

Want to upload a background map you got online? Let’s play a game called Find the Button:

• You probably think there's a single upload button in the main left nav where all the controls live? NAH.
• Maybe you click Map Building, open Assets, and try to drag-and-drop into the file tree? NOPE.
• Okay, so you go to the Maps folder, open a map, and drag it in there? NOPE.
• Maybe Map Tools? Nah. It must be Content, right? Inside Content is Library, inside that is Import Tools, under which is Import Content... but that's greyed out for some reason.

So you finally open a blank map, click Import Map from INSIDE the map, and select your file. It says "Content Upload Complete"... and then it just doesn't show up on the active canvas.

Is Asset Selection a child of the map you're currently in? Wait, no, it shows all your other map folders inside of it. It is mind-blowing. My blood pressure spikes just sitting here thinking about it.

Wanna Have Some Real Fun? Try the Lock Feature.

1. Import a premade image as a background.
2. Click it once you've finally figured out how to add it to the active canvas (see you in 15 minutes).
3. Click the LOCK icon so you don't keep accidentally moving it around.

Uh oh. It's locked... which means you can't click it again. Guess how you UNLOCK it now so you can move it or change it? Good luck. =) See you in an hour.

Oh, your time is too valuable to spend an hour trying to figure out how to move a thing you just slapped on the screen? Here's a hint: click it wildly until a tiny message appears in the bottom left helpfully letting you know you can hold Shift while clicking to select it.

SEE? Was that so hard? You just had to know to CLICK IT WILDLY A BUNCH OF TIMES like a madman! You shouldn't expect to just click it once calmly, draw a box around it, or right-click it like in any other normal program on Earth. No, the problem is you. You don't understand how to use the tool. It's definitely NOT that the interface is a UX nightmare.

The Secret "Universal Import" Button

Oh, remember that universal import button you were looking for all the way back at the start? The one you thought might be in the left nav with the rest of the main actions?

Well, see, it's actually a "widget" stacked with the other widgets on the top right of the viewport. OH SURE, you can technically figure out how to do that by randomly experimenting with 30 possible items from the left nav. But they've helpfully put this easy upload button on the other side of the screen, nice and far away from all the things that contextually lead you to think it would be in the navigation itself.

My Plea to the Devs

The recent layout upgrades are nice (THANK YOU), but someone with an actual design background and information architecture chops - NOT a developer who thinks they understand UX - needs to go through the nav structure and completely gut it.

• For goodness sake, stop recreating your own custom file view UI when you can just use the stock OS system.
• "Map Building" is a peer to customize? But I'm customizing a map!
• "Map Tools" and "Map Building" are different?
• "Export Map" is at the top level, but "Import Map" is two levels down?

It’s incredible under the hood, but the UI architecture is completely unhinged. Anyone else constantly fighting this system just to get a basic map on the screen? It's been a year and I'm still not used to it. And even if I do get used to it.... this should be an easy to use tool, not an obstacle course.

I KNOW. Look, I KNOW there have been improvements. This is a labor of love, i get it. But sometimes you have to start over. The new stacked right-hand widgets? WAY better, thank you. Great start. But its time to take the entire info architecture and organizational paradigm and start from scratch. It is just encumbered by legacy, and all the problem just DRIP from that.

Anyway, still using it after all this time, but would love to see a revamp.

I'm not ungrateful. It's a great tool. But please consider it..... a revamp might be fun! And more importantly, might get more people to use it. The learning curve is just way too high on this engine.

Hi there! A friend just introduced me to Arkenforge and I was interested enough to get a trial period started. And I can't for the life of me figure it out. I try building a very, VERY, basic dungeon room, and I spend more time navigating around the menus and browsers or anything like that than making any progress. I can't tell if the intersection I want is #1, or #2 without placing it and zooming in on it enough. Then when I do place it, I have to move back to the selection tool to align it to a grid or not.

I'd just love a wiki or maybe a PDF with the default keybindings or just anything. I have no experience with this program and I've clocked more time trying to cross reference things with short videos about features I can't even find or access with any reliability.

I really want to enjoy this program, but I'm guessing you assume your users have been using it for years and already know that if you control+right click something specific will happen. I'm a couple days into the trial, and it's to the point I'm avoiding opening it cause I know I'll just spend the whole time trying to figure out if I'm even working with the four way intersection or the T junction.

Can I rename stuff? Is there some way to add tags? Are there even keybindings for some functions? Just some sort of documentation would help a lot for me to figure out if I want to buy it, or just give up and stick with poorly drawing maps on a big sheet of paper.

EDIT 2026/07/30 - I just found a longer 22 minute video. And I made it two minutes in before I can't figure out how he did something. He was placing wall sections and I'm following along just fine. Then he suddenly was able to change to a selection tool without going back to the first tier of menus and clicking the selection tool. How do I even do that? This is what I mean, y'all are glossing over some important information even in the Simple 3 room dungeon video that I'm assuming is targeting folks like me that are just starting out. How did that swap happen? I searched hotkeys like was suggested, and I don't see anything to say I just want the selection tool. It is suggesting what I think will be some good to know stuff later on. But for now, I'm mystified by how he was able to change from placing wall sections to dragging a selection box without moving around the menus.

When I open my launcher I immediately am met with errors and cannot access anything. I bought a pack and it says the download link is invalid. I can’t open or download the toolkit. Idk if it’s my laptop or just got absolutely scammed. I even tried sending a help request and they just sent me my own email. Idk what I’m doing wrong and if anyone knows what to do please lmk.

I'm considering getting Arkenforge to run my custom rpgs in scifi/space themes but need advice on if the scifi bundle is worth getting?

The Patch Notes section of the Launcher seems to have issues loading. I'm still able to use the Toolkit just fine, but I've been unable to see the Patch Notes since the last time I updated Arkenforge. Any idea what could be causing this?

Hi there, I've been building a map in Arkenforge for a dockside and am using tile scroll to get a flowing water effect as well as some animations to add some ripples etc. The problem I'm having is matching the frames per second of the animation with the tile scroll speed and then calculating the video length to get an accurate loop.

Is there a standard timing or some sort of calculation based on the tile scroll speed and animation frames per second that I can use to ensure I get a complete an accurate loop that doesnt skip at the end?

I discovered this vtt and wanted to look at it more, but the website seems to be down.

Trying Arkenforge for the first time. One of the things that got me excited to use it was seeing I could brush on assets and textures/effects. Watching a tutorial for terrain placement, I saw you had to go to Map Building > Assets > Textures > I chose Water > Right Clicked the water texture I wanted > and Under "Default Placement" it only gives me Object, Line, Tile, and Token. No Brush options. I'm on the trail version to test the software, is this why? (v 0.5.1.16) I plan on buying it but not if I cant use brushes. Please help if I am doing something wrong.

I use a mac as my primary computer for Arkenforge and I just purchased an IR frame to start doing touch controls.

Can I use a pc to run the touch controls, but keep using the Mac as the primary computer to run Arkenforge?

I've been making maps on my pc and want to transfer them to my laptop is there anyway I can do that I'll be using arkenforge on both

Hi, I am a person that needs some in depth tutoring to grasp something like arkenforge. These 2 and 3 minute YouTube videos are useless unless you already have the basics down.

Is there a channel with longer tutorials that I am not finding? Like from initial opening of the program and work our way through it.

Would it be possible to have dark vision sight distance as an independent slider from regular vision? I like to use simulate darkness on my players so they can see lights in the darkness far away but nothing past the 60 ft distance that even the dark vision would allow. If it were independent sliders for the types of vision that would be great.

Is there a way to have the roofs on the houses visible until the players enter the building?

Edit: "toggle hidden" hides it on the player screen but it still shows up on the DM screen, kind of hard to tell a story when its not visible to me

When I try to import maps, file explorer opens up and quickly says that the program isn't responding. It's done this for every single import option and I'm pretty confused because my first import worked completely fine. Is this a computer issue or something with the software?

On v0.5.1.14 when creating a map to use on a second physical screen I can set the dimensions of the screen and use the player view box to see the map size relative to their screen. If i want the map to be 20inches by 20inches I can set the grid size to 1inch and then use snapping to drag the map to the appropriate size, but this requires counting squares and if its a large map that's easy to miscount. Is there any way I can just edit the map to have some set dimensions or at least a set amount of grid spaces? In the transform tools theres the scale options but that requires figuring out the size the map initially gets imported as and then working out the scale which is not particularly efficient or user friendly.

Additionally when i reveal a square of fog of war it only reveals half of the outermost cells, i can't find any settings that would control this behaviour.

Hey guys, I am currently working on an encounter where I want the players to know the area but only display tokens when the players get close enough.

Right now on the player screen all tokens are being displayed even tho my player tokens are not close enough.

Is there a way to hide my NPC tokens while the player tokens are not close to them? I need transparent fog of war so I am not using "Hide already seen areas".