Required C++ Tools

To be able to use the Geode SDK, you will need at least the following:

A C++ compiler
CMake - Version 3.25+ is required - make sure to add to PATH when installing on Windows.
Git - Hey you. Yes, you! I know a lot of people skip this step but you will need it. Don’t come at us asking for why you “could not find git for clone of json-populate”.

Compiler

To use the Geode SDK, and in turn make Geometry Dash mods, you will need either:

Visual Studio 2022+ on Windows
Clang on MacOS
A secret third thing on Linux

Windows

Download Visual Studio from its website. If you want just the compiler and not the code editor, look for Build Tools for Visual Studio further down in the page.

After launching the installer, select Desktop development with C++. You may choose other features, but you will need at least MSVC and Windows SDK installed.

Once Visual Studio is installed, you should now have a working C++ compiler that is suited for GD mod development.

Please note that Visual Studio 2022 or higher is required. 2019 or lower will not work, as they don’t support C++20 properly.

MacOS

Install brew if you don’t already have it, and then run:

brew install llvm

Linux

Linux is a bit more complicated, as there’s no official Linux release of GD (yet). Of course, you can run the Windows version of GD through software like wine quite well, which is probably what you’re already doing.

Because of that, this guide will set you up to cross-compile Windows Geode mods from Linux.

First, besides Git and Cmake, make sure you have clang and lld installed.

On Ubuntu:

apt install clang-17 clang-tools-17 lld-17

On Arch-based systems:

pacman -S clang lld

The next step will install the Windows SDK and a CMake toolchain. For ease of installation, first install the Geode CLI and then come back here. If you want to do it manually, you can follow this guide.

After installing the CLI, run this command to install all the needed tools:

geode sdk install-linux

Now you can proceed to setting up Geode CLI.