Setting up multicart games

For multi-file PICO-8 games where you provide the cart files yourself

Most PICO-8 games fit comfortably inside a single cart, but a handful are larger and ship as several cart files that load each other at runtime. There's usually one "main" cart you launch — the one with the title screen — and one or more sub-carts the game switches to as you progress.

For these games to work in Pixl8, every cart file has to be present and reachable. This page covers where to put them.

Step 1 — figure out which carts you need

Some BBS pages list every cart file in one place; others only show the main cart and leave you to discover the rest. Three ways to find them all:

A. Check the author's itch.io page

A lot of multicart authors mirror their game on itch.io and offer a ready-made offline bundle with every cart already included — usually a single ZIP that just unpacks straight into a folder. Scroll the BBS thread or the cart description for an itch.io link; if one exists, this is the easiest path by far. You skip the discovery work entirely.

B. Read the main cart's code

Open the main cart in any PICO-8 editor (or just a text editor for plain .p8 files), and search for load(. Every sub-cart the game uses appears as a literal filename inside one of those calls. Write the names down and grab each from the BBS.

C. Let Pixl8 tell you

The path of least effort: just drop the main cart into Pixl8 and run it. When the game tries to load a sub-cart that isn't there, Pixl8 pauses with a prompt naming the exact filename it needs. Note it down, fetch it from the BBS, drop it in, and try again. Repeat through the game and you'll have collected every sub-cart by the end without ever opening any code.

Step 2 — download the carts

Download every file into the same folder. Don't rename them. PICO-8 looks the sub-carts up by their exact filename (including any ..._2.p8.png, ..._3.p8.png version suffix), so renaming will stop the game from finding its own pieces.

Shortcut if you own the original PICO-8. Run the game in the desktop PICO-8 (either by downloading the main cart from the BBS, or by browsing to it through SPLORE) and just play. As the game progresses through chapters, PICO-8 fetches each sub-cart from the BBS on demand and caches it locally. Once you've reached the end (or far enough to have triggered every load), every cart file is sitting in your PICO-8 BBS cache — typically ~/.lexaloffle/pico-8/bbs/carts/ on Linux and macOS, or %APPDATA%\pico-8\bbs\carts\ on Windows. Copy that whole pile over to your Android device and skip the file-by-file hunt on the BBS. This also solves Step 1 by itself — anything PICO-8 successfully cached is, by definition, a cart the game needs.

Step 3 — choose a layout

Pixl8 looks for sub-carts in two places — either works, but one is much cleaner in practice.

Option A — flat (works, but messy)

Drop every cart file straight into the same folder. Pixl8 finds them because they're sitting next to the main cart.

my_carts/
├── game.p8.png          ← launch this one
├── game_2.p8.png
├── game_3.p8.png
└── game_4.p8.png

The downside: every sub-cart shows up as its own tile in your Pixl8 library. Tapping one of them launches it standalone, which usually doesn't work — sub-carts expect to be loaded mid-game by the main cart and won't have the state they need when started from scratch. You'll see broken-looking entries sitting next to the real one.

Option B — `.multicarts` subfolder (recommended)

Create a folder called .multicarts right next to the main cart, and move every sub-cart into it. Pixl8 still finds them when the game asks — but it skips the folder when building your library list, so only the main cart shows up as a launchable tile. No broken duplicates, no clutter, and the game runs exactly the same as in Option A.

my_carts/
├── game.p8.png          ← launch this one
└── .multicarts/
    ├── game_2.p8.png
    ├── game_3.p8.png
    └── game_4.p8.png

The leading dot is deliberate — it's what tells Pixl8 (and most file managers) to treat the folder as hidden housekeeping rather than user-visible content.

Notes for Android file managers

Most file managers hide folders that start with a dot. In Files by Google, Material Files, and Solid Explorer, look in the menu or settings for a Show hidden files toggle. You'll need it on to see and create .multicarts.
When you create the folder, type the name with the leading dot — .multicarts — exactly that. Capitalisation matters on most Android storage roots.
If you copy the folder over from a computer using a cable, the dot is preserved automatically — you don't have to fiddle with anything on the phone side.

Troubleshooting

The game crashes or shows a "missing cart" message mid-play — a sub-cart isn't where Pixl8 expects it. Re-check that every file from the BBS download is present, named exactly as downloaded, and either next to the main cart or inside .multicarts/.
The game launches but skips a later chapter — usually a renamed file. PICO-8 uses the version suffix in the filename to pick the right cart; restore the original names from the BBS download.
Still stuck? Open an issue on GitHub with the game name and a list of the cart files you have. We'll take a look.