Inside Tomb Raider's creative PC mapping community

When Lara Croft's grittier incarnation drew players in 2013, Axel Hatté began building custom levels for Core Design's older Tomb Raider games. He had long been intrigued by the level editor bundled with 2000's Tomb Raider: Chronicles, but it took 13 years before he made his own maps and found the Tomb Raider mapping community.

A dedicated community formed around the '90s Core Design titles, driven by a love of 3D level design much like the mod scenes for Quake, Thief and Half‑Life. Early fan work even predated the official editor thanks to a toolkit from a modder known as Turbo Pascal, and TRLE later gave way to the more flexible Tomb Editor released in 2017 as fans expanded editors with custom tools and patches.

The scene hosts nearly 4,000 custom levels across trle.net and TRCustoms, with more than 3,000 made for Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. Creations range from classical adventures such as Himalayan Mysteries to novelty maps like Enterprise, and the community's sites and tools have enabled ambitious, varied projects.

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