Top-Down Water 2D for Godot

Shape a shallow shelf, natural bowl, steep bank or terraced lagoon. Edit a custom profile, use a raw bathymetry map, or paint local adjustments in the 2D viewport.

The brushes and fills target the final water depth, with a cursor readout that shows what the current map can represent. Shape a ford through a river, deepen a harbour entrance, or cut a trench beside a shelf. Paint local tint where the water needs a different colour without changing the whole material.

Water level is an authoring setting, separate from the stored map. Adjust it without repainting the bathymetry. Rendering and runtime depth queries use that level together with the authored depth.

A seafloor with relief

Assign a Sprite2D or TextureRect as the bed source. Its texture and placement stay connected to the water as you move the source or replace its artwork. The renderer follows the view ray through the water to the shaped bed, so slopes, ledges, and walls affect which part of the underwater terrain is visible.

Independent bodies of water have their own projection centre, with adjustable tilt, direction, and perspective. You can share the projection settings between basins while each retains its own centre. Camera movement and zoom preserve the authored projection.

Objects at their own underwater depth

Place fish, plants, submerged ruins, or other sprites at individual depths. They use the same projection and wave refraction as the bed, with the same absorption, water veil, and depth blur. A nearer part of the seafloor can hide all or part of a sprite behind it.

Keep your existing controller. The addon handles how the submerged sprite appears in the water, while your code controls its position and movement.

Control how the depth looks

Tune shallow and deep colours, or supply a colour gradient over depth. Adjust absorption, scattering, bed visibility, wet-bed darkening, and depth blur to move between clear shallows and water that obscures the bottom.

Surface lighting adds stylized sky reflection, sun glint, and animated caustics. Optional Light2D support connects the water to your scene's lighting. Self illumination and molten material controls support lava and other luminous surfaces. These controls work alongside the authored depth and material preset.

Boats with draft and grounding

The vessel component reads water depth across its sampling points and compares it with the hull's draft. It tracks clearance, bottom drag, and grounding. The included boat controller applies the corresponding water drag and propulsion response, alongside steering, forward and reverse thrust, and braking.

The boat template includes its vessel and wake components. Drive it with the default arrow-key or gamepad controls, bind your own input actions, or supply helm input from a script.

Buoyancy and floating props

The buoyancy component uses the body's mass, displacement capacity, and available water depth to track floating, depth-limited, and overloaded states. It represents vertical submersion while the object moves in the 2D navigation plane. Optional angular drag and current response support floating objects that turn as they drift.

Wakes, ripples, and displacement

Moving vessels produce an analytic wake and a persistent foam trail. Ripple emitters support individual events, bursts, and automatic emission. Persistent displacement sources let hulls, swimmers, and floating props depress the surface.

Interaction areas expose water entry and exit events for your own game logic. The components can be combined separately, so a prop can float and make ripples without needing a boat controller.

Start with a circle, ellipse, rectangle, rounded rectangle, triangle, or ring. Draw a custom polygon for a particular coastline, use a closed path, or derive water coverage from a TileMapLayer. Coverage groups combine water outlines and land cutouts within one body of water.

For islands, select the sprites that represent land and trace their visible outlines into the water coverage. Retrace them after moving or repainting the islands, or draw the land outlines yourself. Boats, crates, and fish remain separate from that land selection.

The editor can bake coverage, collision, and navigation from the authored shape. For rivers, one curve defines the channel's width and current direction.

Set the surface's wave direction, wavelength, speed, strength, detail, and crest shape. Give shallow water a calmer or sharper wave character, with a controlled transition into the deeper water.

Optional shore waves follow the actual coastline. Their crests run parallel to the shore and travel toward it, fading with distance and local depth. Use them around a beach, a bay, or islands. They fade out at deep cliffs and where opposing shores leave no clear approach direction.

Boats and floating objects can sample the same surface motion that the renderer draws, including the shallow-water and shore-wave adjustments. Shoreline foam, current foam, and ripple-driven impact foam provide separate controls for the surface detail.

Paint local current direction and speed, or bake the current from a river curve. An obstacle-flow bake bends the authored field around scene colliders, so a rock can redirect the current without requiring you to paint every deflection by hand.

Flow maps drive visible current patterns and can steer the waves. The same field is available to the runtime components for water response, drift, and drag. A crate can turn as it drifts when the current pushes differently on each side. Multi-point sampling supplies that rotational response.

Wave steering is adjustable independently of gameplay flow. Reduce its influence for a partly wind-driven surface, or turn it off while retaining the current that moves objects.

Wading, swimming, and immersion

Use continuous immersion and stable immersion thresholds to drive transitions between dry, wading, swimming, and fully submerged states. The submerged-sprite component crops or tints the part of a character beneath the water, while entry and exit events can trigger splashes, particles, and your own audio.

The swimmer template includes the water interaction components. Connect it to your character controller to define movement and swimming behaviour.

Connect water entry and exit signals to your game logic. Add ripple emitters and displacement sources to give a moving swimmer a visible response at the surface.

Seven material presets provide starting points: Lake, River, Shallow Sea, Deep Sea, Swamp, Lava, and Toxic. Change the material's appearance while retaining the water's shape, bathymetry, and flow maps.

Pixel Art mode works across the presets. It provides posterized colours or an authored palette, a hard game-pixel shoreline, snapped dynamic effects, and controlled wave refraction. Bed projection and underwater sprite occlusion remain part of the rendering. Turning the mode on leaves the original preset resource intact.

For water that spans multiple chunks, the optional Water World module provides a shared set of settings and a common clock. A boat can cross a chunk boundary while its hull samples the water on both sides. Each sampling point queries the chunk beneath it.

The editor creates and manages the grid from polygons, closed paths, outline groups, River sources, and TileMap sources. It bakes coverage with neighbouring outlines and validates coverage, depth, and flow at the seams. Managed chunks support depth and flow painting, with batch Depth/Flow baking across the grid. Ripple, wake, and displacement events are routed to the loaded chunks they overlap. Foam trail history follows a moving emitter across chunk boundaries.

Runtime add and remove operations connect this system to your game's scene loader. Off-screen upload culling avoids sending unnecessary render updates while water sampling and effect timing continue. Diagnostics show unavailable chunks, effect budgets, and seam disagreements.

Continuous chunked water also supports the independent-basin bed-projection model. These authoring and projection workflows are included in the first release.