From Crucible Heightmap to Creator

Crucible Heightmap shapes the land. Creator finishes the map: it opens the .map Heightmap exports, renders it with Rust’s own art, and gives you the monuments, roads, rails, rivers, prefabs and wiring that turn a terrain into a world. This is the hand-off between the two.

Export from Crucible Heightmap

Export a Rust .map file, not a .raw. His All layers export is the default and it is the one you want: it carries your heights, biomes, topology, ground textures, lakes and cliffs, and Creator reads all of them. See Crucible Heightmap’s export.

The .raw route exists and Creator supports it, but it is bare terrain only: no biomes, no topology, no ground textures. Use it when the height shape is all you want to carry. Import a heightmap is that route.

Open it in Creator

1. On the start screen, paste or BROWSE to the exported .map under LOAD MAP.
2. Press >> LOAD + BUILD <<.

Creator loads the terrain layers and builds the world out of your content snapshot. What you see is the island you shaped, with Rust’s own ground textures and water on it.

Run only the passes your island does not already have

This is the whole skill of the hand-off, and getting it wrong doubles things. Creator now does most of it for you:

1. Open TOOLS > Procedural Generation… and switch the panel to CREATOR MODE (it opens there by itself, with a line saying why, when your land is not shaped like Rust’s own island). Creator Mode is the mode for generating on land you shaped yourself, and because your island has terrain of its own, the LAND section has already picked This map’s terrain.
2. Read the pre-flight card under it. It measures your island before anything runs: how much of the map is land, whether any land touches the map edge, and, if you shaped more than one island, each island and the straits between them. If land reaches the map edge, SINK THE MAP EDGE lowers the margin to the seabed in one undo step.
3. The panel has also looked at your island and marked everything it can see in it as Already Generated, with those rows unchecked. On a typical All layers export that means the Terrain / Splat rows are already off and the Monuments and Paths / Roads groups are on, which is the setting the table below asks for. Check the panel against the table.
4. Choose your monuments in MONUMENTS if you want to leave any out, and, for a group of islands, check the bridge settings in BRIDGES. Then press >> RUN IN CREATOR MODE <<.

This map’s terrain keeps your height and your water and builds everything else from them. That is the point of the hand-off: the biomes, the topology, the ground textures and the monument sites are all worked out from the island you shaped rather than from a shape Rust invented. The biome, topology and splat rows keep what your export already carries when they are unchecked, and generate it when they are checked.

The Creator Mode sections are described in full on Procedural generation.

The details of the marks, the confirm and what each terrain row keeps are on Procedural generation.

Group	On a Crucible Heightmap export
Terrain / Splat	Leave it off. These passes author the heightmap, biomes, topology and ground textures, which is exactly the work you just did in Heightmap.
Monuments	Run it. This is the main reason to bring the map into Creator.
Paths / Roads	Run it. Roads, rails, rivers and powerlines, laid against your terrain.
Rocks / Decor	Your call. If Heightmap already generated cliffs, running the cliff and rock passes gives you a second set on top of the first. See below.

The cliffs, and not ending up with two sets

Crucible Heightmap can generate cliffs and lakes as part of its own world layer. Creator’s Rocks / Decor group generates cliffs and rocks too. Run both and you get both: two overlapping populations, intersecting each other, which reads in game as a mess of rock faces growing through one another.

Pick one side:

• Keep his. Leave Coastal Cliffs, Cliffs Hills, Rock Formations, River Rocks, Rocks and Icebergs unchecked. His cliffs are already placed and already in the map.
• Use Creator’s. Delete the cliffs and rocks that came in with the export first, then run the group. Select them in the viewport and delete, or select by prefab in the prefab browser and work through them; either way do it before you generate, not after, or you will be picking the two sets apart by eye.

If you are unsure, keep his and run nothing in that group. Adding rocks later is a small job; separating two interleaved sets is not.

Undo works on a generation, but save first anyway

A run you start from the panel is one undo step: Creator stores a copy of the map first and Ctrl+Z puts it back. The confirm dialog says whether it did, and on a very large map it sometimes cannot. Either way undo is per session, so save before you run anything, under a name you are happy to go back to. See Undoing a generation.

Then carry on as normal

From here the map is an ordinary Creator map, and the rest of the work is the build order: a first sweep over the terrain, monuments and their masks, then roads, rail, dressing, and testing it in game.

Two things from the Heightmap side are worth a look on the first sweep:

• The seams where his terrain meets the map edge. Look at the shoreline all the way around, from a low camera. Sculpting fixes what you find.
• The topology under everything you place. Rust decides what spawns from your biome and topology layers, not from what looks like forest. Drizzza’s Rust biomes and topology explained is the reference, and how Rust builds a map is what Creator’s passes are doing to those layers.

Going the other way

You cannot take a Creator map back into Crucible Heightmap and keep the monuments, wiring and prefabs. His tool is a terrain tool; the monument and prefab layer has no home in it. So the hand-off runs one way: shape in Heightmap, finish in Creator, test in Crucible Local Server.

If you only want the height shape out of a Creator map, the Sculpt tool’s Save Raw Heightmap… writes a 16-bit .raw that any terrain tool reads. That is on Import a heightmap.