So you’re happy with your Tabletop Simulator game. You’ve got a nice saved game with everything laid out just so, your cards separated into their decks, and so on. But it’s all offline.

To make your game playable online, with other players, you need to host your images somewhere and use those to create your cards and components. But re-importing everything and re-sorting all your decks out can be time consuming and generally less fun that just playing it with your friends.

There’s a pretty straightforward way to get around that, though you need to venture… (gasp!) into the save game files themselves… (scream!)

Save Games

First, you need to locate your save game files. I’ll be talking about Windows, but you can probably find out where they live on other systems in the TTS knowledgebase.

Open up a file explorer and you should see a “Documents” folder on that first page. If not, maybe you can find it on the left hand side. Sorry I can’t give the full path here, but it changes based on the OS version and user name.

Anyway, once you’re in the Documents folder, go to My Games > Tabletop Simulator. Here is where all the magic happens, where all the mods live, and so on. Be careful what you do here; you can lose your own saves if you delete random files. But if you just make sure you’re looking at the right file before you mess with it, you can edit this stuff however you like.

Now go into the Saves folder. This contains all of your stuff that the game saves for you. But you can also add and edit these files once you know how. See all those files like TS_Save_1.json and TS_Save_2.json and so on? Those are basically special text files that hold the data for those saved games.

Open one; any text editor will work fine for this. (It’s a safe bet all operating systems have a text editing app built-in, or you can install an “IDE” specifically designed to edit code to make things a tad easier.) Don’t worry if you don’t understand everything you see in there; you just need to follow the steps to convert all the cards into the online versions.

Find/Replace

Find one of your custom cards. Just “Find” (shortcut should be CTRL + F) the text “FaceURL” (without quotes). This will take you to a definition of one of your custom cards. It’ll probably look something like this:

“FaceURL”: “_Faces_1.png”,

“BackURL”: “_Backs_1.png”,



These are the filenames you entered when you first imported your custom deck. We basically need to just replace those filenames with the full urls of those same images you’ve uploaded somewhere.

So for example, I use Github to host my images (click here for why), which gives me a url for the online “_Faces_1.png” as “https://raw.githubusercontent.com/project/_Faces_1.png” (simplified). So if I change that line to…

“FaceURL”: “https://raw.githubusercontent.com/project/_Faces_1.png”,

…then that specific card will use the online faces image instead of the local one. And you can do the exact same thing for the BackURL, too.

Of course, you want to apply this change to all the cards in the whole saved game, so doing this by hand would totally suck. Luckily text editors have “find-replace” functionality built-in too! What a wonderful world we live in…

You can root through the menus to find the replace, or hitting CTRL + H usually brings it up. This directly finds the “find” text you give it, chops it out, and crams in the “replacement” text.

So in our example, we put in “FaceURL”: “_Faces_1.png” as the “find” text, and “FaceURL”: “https://raw.githubusercontent.com/project/_Faces_1.png”, as the “replacement” text. Press “Replace All” or whatever, and each of those FaceURL lines for the _Faces_1.png image are fixed to point at the url instead.

Repeat this for the BackURL. Then, if you have more than one “card sheet” in your game, do the same for those other images.

Job Done!

Now all you need to do is load up your game in TTS, and it’ll be online! (You can tell by the “Downloading 1/2” messages at the top of the window.)

Note that if you update your images online, you may have to disable Mod Caching to force them to reload every time. Just go into Settings and uncheck that box on the first page. I’d recommend leaving it checked while you’re not actively changing things, to reduce load times for other online games.

Congratulations! You now have an online-ready game! Just host a server, load your game, give your playtesters the password to get in, and enjoy playing… ^^