Creators
- Bxrflip
- Mongolian Warlord
- SyFex
- Nox
Synecdoche (noun): A figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole.
Watching the map making community evolve and grow over the years I got to see and experience many incredible and unique worlds that the community created. The concept of creating terrain manually for custom maps in Rust isn’t new. Most of the maps made have custom terrain, as well as many new and exciting custom monuments to go with them. However, creating custom terrain for a map as large as the ones in Rust poses a significant challenge. A 4K map is 16 square Kilometers of area. That’s over 6 Square miles!
We need to create a world which spans this massive area, while making each location feel unique and rich in detail. It must be easily traversable, but also feel grand, with large and tall features. Finally, it must be universally immersive and fun to explore.
Here’s how we did it:
First, the world was planned and drawn with an island that occupies each quadrant of the map. The idea is to separate loot and monument tiers with a barrier in the form of waterways dividing the islands. This will incentivize players in the late game to avoid unfair interactions with fresh spawns and will slow progression a bit.
The islands were designed to be bridged for a ring road running around all 4 of them. There is only one bridge route connecting each island to its neighbor, making the bridge a natural choke point.
A rough heightmap consisting of the major terrain features is crafted manually. Terrain features are primarily designed as round plateaus which consume little space, but tower over the player. This makes navigating around cliffs somewhat straightforward. Instead of long lines of unsaleable cliffs, there are circular nodes around 100 meters in diameter. Wide, sloped paths are added to at least one side of every plateau. This means traversing the map requires the player to venture through valleys, but also gives them the choice to occasionally climb these tall formations. The majority of the time the player will be running through lowlands, with the world looming above and all around them, feeling immersed in each isolated area, broken by the rewarding view presented when they reach the summit, only to dive back down into the next valley.
Next, the outline heightmap is imported to WorldCreator where it’s processed by procedural filters which alter the terrain slightly to feel realistic and paint the splat map with erosion paths. This process adds some detail and simulates erosion, but smooths the terrain and doesn’t effect flat areas of the map. What we are left with is a world which looks good from far away, but ultimately boring up close. We need to add cliffs and rocks, so we import the map to RustEdit.
The native procedural cliff generator is not made for this kind of custom terrain, so we have to place each cliff manually. This process takes a very long time. Like a game of Tetris, the appropriate prefab is carefully chosen to fit the desired location and every aspect manipulated to cover as much area with as few prefabs as possible. Over 10,000 cliff prefabs were fitted to the heightmap over the course of months of hard work.
Now, the real work begins. With cliffs and rocks in place, we add in our vanilla monuments, roads, rivers, waterfalls, Train rails, bridges, etc. However, these installations require changes to the heightmap. Using the automatic heightmap application undoes a lot of our work. Applying the heightmap modifiers for monuments stamps a large ring of perfectly flat terrain around the structure and smooths it along the edges. The result looks and feels artificial and awkward. So we went back and modified the terrain to include rich details all the way up to the edge of each monument. This makes a world of difference for immersion. The monuments now feel like they are a natural part of this place, built into the terrain.
The same is done for road and rail. Cliffs are brought right up to the edge of these paths, and sloped areas are blended to look realistic. Rail bridged terrain was completely redone to allow the rail to pass over the terrain on bridges.
We also went back over the entire map and shaped the terrain to better fit cliffs. The terrain is sloped and raised around the base of every cliff, and stone/rock/gravel splat is repainted to add high definition details. Skirts of rock debris piled up against the base of large formations mimic real terrain. Each erosion path painted in world creator is depressed into the ground, along with dirt paths, to exaggerate the worn in feel of the terrain. Beaches are sculpted to the tenth of a meter and smoothed to look flat near the waterline, but have a slight berm at the beachside transition to grass. All rivers and waterways less than 20 meters across are set to a depth of 1 meter, so players can run across them without swimming, but boats are able navigate them. Stones are replaced with gravel on some cliffs to add a unique feel to some areas.
Each and every spot on the map a player can stand on was precisely manicured to feel unique and significant. Every rock has its purpose, and every nook and cranny was deliberately planned to inspire exploration. There are no locations on the map that were forgotten or left behind. Each square meter plays its part to represent the world as a whole.
Information and Specifics
This map includes only vanilla monuments and can be run under the community tab. However, Powerplant had to be broken to get the ring rail through, so you will need the RustEdit Oxide extension to get the keycard puzzle working for Powerplant. All other monuments are completely untouched.
- Size: 4096 x 4096
- Entity Count: ~68,000
- Prefab Count: ~16,000
- Can Edit: True
Required Plugins
Monuments
- Synecdoche Bunker
- Cobalt Research
- Security Tower
- Anomaly
- Junkyard
- Trainyard
- Outpost
- Bandit Camp
- Fishing Village (X3)
- Missile Silo
- Arctic Research Base
- Military Base
- Airfield
- Water Treatment Plant
- Sewer Branch
- Satellite Dish
- The Dome
- Harbor
- Military Tunnel
- Launch Site
- Power Plant
- Mining outpost (X7)
- Oxum’s Gas Station
- Supermarket (X3)
- Lighthouse (X5)
- Abandoned Cabins
- Oil Rigs (large and small)
- Caves
- Underground train system
- Aboveground train system
- Underwater Labs (X2)
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<iframe width="1140" height="641" src="
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- https://nulledvault.com/data/attachments/26/26753-1c4fb2dd87291b8bc78d332f9523ffe9.jpg
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