Hey everyone, so you're diving into Godot & you've got this awesome tilemap set up. It looks great, but it's just... static. You want to click on tiles, make things happen, maybe build a city, select a unit, or have a farmer plant some crops. Honestly, making your tilemap interactive is one of the most common hurdles for new & even experienced Godot developers. Turns out, there are a bunch of ways to tackle this, each with its own pros & cons.

I've spent a good chunk of time wrestling with this myself, so I figured I'd put together a pretty extensive guide on how to get it done. We'll start with the basics & then move into some more advanced, specialized techniques. By the end of this, you'll be able to handle just about any kind of tilemap interaction you can dream up.

Before we do anything fancy, we need to handle the absolute basics: detecting a mouse click & figuring out which tile you clicked on. This is the bedrock of any clickable tilemap system.

First things first, you'll want to set up an input action. This is WAY better than hardcoding mouse buttons directly in your script. It gives you more flexibility later on.

Pretty cool, right? Now, in any script, you can just check for the action.

Let's create a script & attach it to your node or a parent node that has the as a child. Here's the basic code to get the tile coordinates from a mouse click: