Build order in Creator

A custom map comes out well or badly depending mostly on the order you build it in. This is that order, done in Creator. It follows the build order in Drizzza’s workflow cheatsheet, with each step restated as the Creator action.

Terrain first, monuments second, paths third, dressing last, and test in game before the last two steps. Everything below is that sentence in detail. Work out of order and you will redo work: a monument moved after its roads are laid means laying the roads again.

Decide the size before you start

A map’s size is the one decision that is expensive to change later, because everything you place is positioned in it. Rust also skips whole generation passes below certain sizes, so the size decides which features the map can have at all: see what a size gets you. Resizing later is possible (TOOLS > Map Tools: Rotate, Resize, Merge…) and it rescales everything proportionally, which is rarely what you meant.

1 to 4: the terrain

Step	In Creator
1. Update everything	Update Creator through the launcher, and sync your Rust content if you have not synced against this month’s build. A map built against an old snapshot is fine, but know which one you are on.
2 and 3. Shape the land	Two routes. Either generate a whole world and keep the terrain it made, or shape the land in Crucible Heightmap and bring the export in. The second route is From Crucible Heightmap to Creator. Sculpting from a blank island is the third route and the slowest.
4. Open it	There is no export-and-reopen step: Creator is where the rest of the work happens. If you came from Heightmap, this is the load.

5: the first sweep

Before you place anything, fly the whole map once and fix the terrain.

Look at the shoreline all the way around, from a low camera.
Look for terrain that is jagged where it should be smooth, and smooth where you wanted a ridge.
Check your topology layers actually cover what they should, with the Painting tool’s topology view.

Fixing terrain now is sculpting. Fixing it after the monuments are seated means re-seating them.

6 to 10: monuments

Step	In Creator
6. Harbors and the ferry terminal	Place them, or let the Monuments passes place them. They want coastline that suits them, which is why they come before the inland set. Rust generates the cargo ship’s path itself, at runtime, so there is nothing to author for it.
7. Main monuments	The big ones: Launch Site, Military Tunnels, Airfield, Power Plant, Trainyard, Water Treatment, Excavator, Compound, Apartments. Place them from the prefab browser, or run the Monuments group in TOOLS > Procedural Generation… and then move what you want moved. What makes a spot valid for one is on Monuments and where they go.
8. Tunnels, then the masks	Run the tunnel passes, then seat each monument into the terrain. With a monument selected, the Prefab Modifiers section offers one button per mask the monument actually authors: Apply Height Mask, Apply Splat Mask, Apply Alpha Mask, Apply Biome Mask, Apply Topology Mask. That is the same mask data the game itself uses, so a masked monument sits the way it does on an official server.
9. The rest of the monuments	The smaller set, placed with roads and trails in mind, because they are what the roads will connect.
10. Safe zones and custom prefabs	Outpost, Bandit Camp, and anything of your own from the custom prefab library.

11 to 14: water, roads and rail

Step	In Creator
11. Rivers, lakes and waterfalls	Rivers are paths; lakes are terrain plus the water layer. A path’s own inspector applies its terrain work: APPLY HEIGHT MASK carves it, APPLY TOPOLOGY and APPLY SIDE-TOPOLOGY write the River and Riverside bits that make it behave like a river in game.
12. Roads	Run the Paths / Roads passes, look at what you got, and hand-edit the nodes where it went somewhere silly. Roads carry the same apply buttons as rivers.
13. Road tunnels (optional)	Prefabs, placed by hand, like any other.
14. Rail	Same as roads, and it wants a big enough map to generate at all.

15 to 17: dressing

Step	In Creator
15. Road and rail dressing	Substations, poles, signs, and the powerline network. Then clean up the topology the dressing sat on: TOOLS > Clean topology under roads, rivers and monuments does that pass in one undoable step.
16. Rocks, trees and scatter	Run the Rocks / Decor group, or place by hand. Trees, ore and collectibles are not placed here: Rust spawns those at runtime from your biome and topology layers, so if a forest is missing, the layer is what to fix.
17. Ziplines	Ziplines, generated or hand-placed.

18: test in game, more than once

Not once. The things that are wrong with a map are invisible from an editor camera: cliffs floating a meter off the ground, a monument door that opens into dirt, nowhere valid to spawn, a zipline that does not connect.

Test in Crucible Local Server is the short loop, and it has the checklist of what to look at.

19: make it yours

Plugins, server config, your own prefabs, and the parts of the map that need the server extension to come alive: trigger volumes, IO wiring, loot, vending and NPC profiles, and ziplines. Install it on the server or those do nothing, which is quiet rather than broken.

Then run it on a server.

Save early, save under names

A generation pass is not an edit: it rewrites layers and places thousands of prefabs at once, and reopening a saved file is the reliable way back. Save before every pass you run, and keep the good states under names (mymap-terrain.map, mymap-monuments.map) rather than trusting one file and the undo stack. Autosave is running too, but autosave protects you from a crash, not from a decision.