Connect Claude Desktop

Creator can be driven by your own Claude Desktop app: you describe the map you want, Claude reads what is open in the editor and proposes changes, and you approve each one with a click inside Creator. This page is the whole setup, start to finish.

You bring your own Claude account. Creator holds no key of its own, makes no call to any service, and sends no telemetry.

What you are connecting to

While Creator is open it can run a small server of its own, and three facts about it are worth knowing before you start:

• It listens on 127.0.0.1 only. That address is your own machine and nothing else. No port is opened to your network or to the internet.
• It exists only while Creator is open. Close Creator, or press the stop button, and the server is gone.
• Nothing about your map leaves the PC except what you yourself send into your own Claude session, the same way pasting text into a chat does.

Every change waits for you. Claude can read the open map freely, but a tool that would change something never acts on its own: it returns a proposal, Creator shows a confirm card, and nothing moves until you click it. There is no setting that turns that off.

Step 1: start Creator’s server

1. Open Creator.
2. Open Preferences and choose the CONNECT tab. On the start screen, PREFERENCES is the button beside HELP at the bottom left; with a map open, it is EDIT > Preferences…. You do not need a map open to connect.
3. Click START.

The tab now shows the port it is listening on (8790 unless you changed it) and this session’s token, which is the password Claude Desktop uses to talk to it.

To start it automatically instead, launch Creator with the -mcp flag:

RustCreator.exe -mcp

That starts a fresh token each time. To keep one token across restarts, use the Launch line the CONNECT tab shows instead; the token section below explains it.

Step 2: install Creator’s connector into Claude Desktop

Claude Desktop reaches a server on your own PC by starting a small program rather than by opening an address. That program is creator-mcp.exe, it ships with Creator, and all it does is pass messages between Claude Desktop and the running editor.

There are two ways to install it. The bundle is quicker; the config file works on every plan.

Option A: the bundle (one double-click)

1. Find creator-mcp.mcpb in your Creator download. Every release records that file’s SHA-256, so if you want to be sure the copy you have is the one we shipped, run Get-FileHash creator-mcp.mcpb -Algorithm SHA256 in PowerShell and compare it to the mcpbSha256 line in the release record that came with your download.
2. Double-click it. Claude Desktop opens and offers to install the extension.
3. It asks for two values, both of which the CONNECT tab is showing:
   • Port, normally 8790
   • Session token, the long string next to Token (use the COPY button beside it)
4. Confirm the install.

Anthropic documents installed bundles (MCPB desktop extensions) for Team and Enterprise plans. If your plan does not offer them, use Option B, which has no plan requirement.

Option B: the config file

1. In Claude Desktop, open the Claude menu and choose Settings, then the Developer tab, then click Edit Config. That opens (or creates) the file %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json.
2. Paste the block below. If the file already has an mcpServers section with other servers in it, add only the "creator" entry inside that section rather than replacing the whole file.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "creator": {
      "command": "C:\\path\\to\\creator-mcp.exe",
      "args": ["--port", "8790"],
      "env": { "CREATOR_MCP_TOKEN": "<token>" }
    }
  }
}

3. Replace the two placeholders:
   • C:\\path\\to\\creator-mcp.exe with the real location of creator-mcp.exe from your Creator download. Keep the doubled backslashes: a single one is an escape character in this file format and will break it.
   • <token> with the token from Preferences > CONNECT.
4. Save the file and quit Claude Desktop completely, then start it again. It reads this file only at startup.

Creator’s CONNECT tab has a COPY button that puts this whole block on your clipboard with the live port already filled in.

Step 3: check that it worked

1. In Claude Desktop, click the Add files, connectors, and more button at the bottom left of the message box, hover Connectors, and choose Manage connectors. creator should be listed, with its tools.

2. With a map open in Creator, ask Claude:

   What map is open in Creator right now?

Claude calls the get_map_summary tool and answers with the map’s size, its seed, how many prefabs it holds, and which content snapshot it is being rendered against. That answer means the connection works end to end.

What “confirm in Creator” looks like

Ask for something that changes the map and Claude does not change it. Instead:

1. Claude’s answer says it has proposed the change.
2. Creator shows a confirm card describing exactly what would happen, and naming the client that asked for it (the name that client gives itself, such as claude-code), so with two clients connected you can tell whose request it is.
3. You click to accept or dismiss it. Dismissing it is a real refusal, and Claude is told so.
4. Long work, such as generating a world, then runs as a job you can watch in Creator. Claude checks on it rather than waiting, so nothing times out.

Claude can also tell which screen Creator is on, whether its request is still waiting for your click (a card nobody answers expires after ten minutes), and whether that card is actually on screen. It sees nothing else of your screen. If it changes its mind while a card is up, it can take its own request back: the card closes, Creator says so, and nothing changes. Taking a request back never stops work you have already approved.

Standard Mode and Creator Mode from Claude

The recipe Claude builds with you is in one of the two modes the Procedural Generation panel has.

• Standard Mode is Rust’s own generation for a size and a seed, with the game’s own percentages and filters. A new recipe starts here.
• Creator Mode is everything beyond that: generating on a heightmap of your own, leaving monuments out, pinning a monument to an island, and bridges with one road around a group of islands. Ask for any of those and the recipe switches to Creator Mode on its own, and the tool’s answer tells Claude it did, so Claude can tell you.

Claude can see which mode the open map and the draft are in, and it can set the mode directly if you ask.

Choosing monuments. Claude can list every monument your Rust content carries, one row per monument with its family, and leave any of them out of the recipe, or a whole family. It means exactly what unchecking the monument in the panel means: a monument left out is never placed, and the ones left in are still placed by Rust’s own rules.

Monument names. Claude can name a monument the way the list shows it (for example Launch Site) in any of the recipe’s four monument lists, and a name that matches no monument is refused at once with the closest names. The table of what each list matches is on Connect Claude Code. One rule matters most: monuments.set means only these monuments. Anything in it limits the map’s monuments to what it names, and rocks, trees, road furniture and everything else still generate normally; the whitelist is the list that filters every prefab. A recipe whose monument lists would leave the map with no monument at all is refused before the confirm card, with the list that did it and the fix.

A heightmap from a file. Claude can point the recipe at a .raw heightmap, but only one inside Creator’s own folders: the Creator maps folder in Documents, the folder of the map that is open, the recipe library, or Creator’s data folder. A path anywhere else is refused, and the refusal names the folders. To use a file from somewhere else, move it into one of them, or import it yourself in the panel’s LAND section.

The confirm card. A Creator Mode generation’s card carries the CREATOR MODE badge and opens with the same sentence the panel’s own confirm does, “Creator Mode: this map will not be a vanilla generation.”, followed by the land, how many monuments are left out, how many are pinned, and whether bridges are on. A Standard Mode card is unchanged.

The token changes every time the server starts

Creator mints a fresh token each time its server starts, and stopping the server makes the old one useless immediately. That is deliberate: a token that has been stopped can never be revived.

So after you restart Creator you have to give Claude Desktop the new token:

• If you installed the bundle, open Claude Desktop’s settings, find the Creator extension and paste the new token into its Session token field.
• If you use the config file, paste the new token into CREATOR_MCP_TOKEN and restart Claude Desktop.

If you would rather not do that every session, launch Creator with the Launch line the CONNECT tab shows:

RustCreator.exe -mcp -mcptoken=<token>

The tab fills in this session’s token, so relaunching with that line brings the server back with the same token every time and the token you gave Claude Desktop keeps working across restarts; the connector reconnects by itself once Creator is back. You can also put in a long string of your own in place of <token>. Treat it like a password: anything on your PC that knows it can drive your editor. If you chose a different port in the CONNECT tab, the tab’s line adds -mcpport= for it.

If you use Claude Code as well, its page has the two lines that add Creator there: remove the old entry first, then add, then type /mcp in Claude Code.

The stop button

Preferences > CONNECT > STOP is the kill switch. It closes the server and voids the token in the same moment, so every client holding it is refused from then on. Use it whenever you want the door shut, and remember that closing Creator does the same thing.

The CONNECT tab also lists the last 50 tool calls, with the time, the client, the tool and the size of what moved. It deliberately does not record the contents of anything, so your map’s data never appears in a log.

Troubleshooting

Claude Desktop shows no creator connector. Quit Claude Desktop completely and restart it; the config file is read only at startup. Then check the file’s syntax (a trailing comma or a single backslash in the path will stop the whole file from loading) and that the path to creator-mcp.exe is absolute. Claude Desktop’s own logs are in %APPDATA%\Claude\logs, where mcp-server-creator.log holds this connector’s messages.

The connector is listed but every call fails. Creator’s server is probably not running. Open Preferences > CONNECT and check that it says it is listening. You can test the link on its own from a terminal, which prints the server’s name and one line per tool:

creator-mcp.exe --selftest --port 8790 --token <token>

• It exits with code 3 and says it could not reach Creator: nothing is listening on that port. Creator is closed, its server was never started, or it is using a different port than the one you passed.
• It reports 401: the token is wrong. Creator has restarted since you pasted it. Copy the current one from Preferences > CONNECT.
• It reports 403: the request did not come from this machine. Creator refuses anything whose origin is not local, which is what stops a web page from driving your editor.

Creator will not start its server: “port in use”. Something else on your PC already holds port 8790. Type a different port into the Port field in Preferences > CONNECT, click START, and update the port in Claude Desktop to match.

Creator says a tool cannot run right now. Some tools need a map open, and none of them will start while a generation is still running. The tool’s own answer says which of those it is.

You can generate as many times as you like in one session. Generating while a map is already open replaces it, so that confirm card says in as many words that an unsaved world is destroyed: save first if you want to keep what is on screen.

---

Claude Desktop’s own steps (the settings path, the config file location, its log folder and how bundles are installed) were checked against Anthropic’s documentation on 2026-09-15: Connect to local MCP servers and Desktop extensions.