CRETE (Comet RadiativE Transfer and Excitation) is a one-dimensional water excitation and radiation transfer code for sub-millimeter wavelengths based on the RATRAN code (ascl:0008.002). The code considers rotational transitions of water molecules given a Haser spherically symmetric distribution for the cometary coma and produces FITS image cubes that can be analyzed with tools like MIRIAD (ascl:1106.007). In addition to collisional processes to excite water molecules, the effect of infrared radiation from the Sun is approximated by effective pumping rates for the rotational levels in the ground vibrational state.