Island Stamp

The Island Stamp puts one of Rust’s four Deep Sea tropical islands into your map. It writes the island’s own height, ground textures, biome and topology into the map’s layers and places the island’s palms, rocks and cliffs on top, so the island is part of your map’s terrain rather than scenery floating on the sea. A stock Rust server with no mods shows it as a real island you can walk on.

Pick Island Stamp on the tool rail or in the TOOLS menu. The status bar then reads:

Move to preview · LMB stamps here · [ ] turn (Shift: 1 degree) · Shift+LMB pins · Drag the ring to turn a pinned island · Enter stamps the pin · Esc unpins

Stamp an island

1. Choose the island in the Island list on the right.
2. Move the pointer over the sea. The preview follows it: the island’s coastline, and a rectangle with corner posts around the ground the stamp can change.
3. Turn it with [ and ] (15 degrees a press, 1 degree with Shift), or drag the Rotation slider.
4. Click where you want it. The island is stamped right there.

A press that turns into a drag stamps nothing, so if you press in the wrong place, drag away and let go.

The whole stamp is one step in the undo history, so Ctrl+Z takes the terrain, the textures and the palms back together.

Place it carefully

When you want to settle the position and the turn before anything is written:

1. Shift+click to pin the island. The preview stops following the pointer and a ring appears around it.
2. Drag the ring to turn the island. It follows the pointer; hold Shift to turn it in 15 degree steps. [ and ] and the Rotation slider work here too.
3. Press Enter, click STAMP ISLAND, or click inside the pinned island’s rectangle.

Esc or UNPIN lets the preview follow the pointer again. A click outside the pinned rectangle stamps a new island where you clicked instead, and drops the pin.

The four islands

Island	Tile	Land above the sea	Highest point
Tropical 1 (Horseshoe)	1024 m	1.64 ha	16.1 m
Tropical 2 (Blob)	512 m	3.17 ha	27.9 m
Tropical 3 (Round)	512 m	0.88 ha	8.6 m
Tropical 4 (Line)	512 m	0.91 ha	3.1 m

Each island ships in the game as a small square of terrain whose outer edge sits 64 m under the sea. The panel shows the footprint the stamp can change for the island you picked, which is smaller than the tile.

What the stamp writes

Layer	What happens
Height	The island rises out of your seabed. The stamp only ever raises ground: an island placed against a shore merges with the land already there, and where your sea is deeper than the island’s own 64 m floor, your seabed stays as it was around it.
Ground textures	The island’s own sand, rock, dirt and grass. Where your existing ground stays higher than the island, your textures stay too.
Biome	Arid, which is what the islands themselves carry. With the map set to Semi-Tropical, Tropical ground with Arid underneath (see below).
Topology	The island’s own beach, cliff, field and ocean markings, so the server knows where its shoreline is. Your map’s tier zones under the island are kept.
Palms, rocks and cliffs	The island’s own art, placed at sea level and turned with the island. Turn Place the island’s palms, rocks and cliffs off to stamp the terrain alone.

Holes (alpha) and the water layer are not touched: the island stands in your sea.

The Tropical look

The panel carries the map’s Tropical biome control: two checkboxes, Semi-Tropical and Fully Tropical, both off by default and never both on. It is the same control HELP, MAP DATA and Paint: Biome show, and it belongs to the map, not to the tool. Tropical biome explains both modes in full. What each one means for the stamp:

Mode	What the stamp writes
Both off (the default)	The island’s biome is Arid and its white sand is written as ordinary sand, which looks right on any server.
Semi-Tropical	The island is written as Tropical ground with Arid underneath, and its white sand as ordinary sand (slot 2), which reads as desert sand from outside and white sand inside.
Fully Tropical	The white sand stays in the texture slot the mainland uses for snow, which the whole-map tropical look shows as white sand.

Fully Tropical saves this line into the map’s Deep Sea settings:

deepsea.terrain_everywhere true

The server extension applies it for you, and without the extension you paste the .server.cfg file Creator saves beside the map into the server’s server.cfg (see Run your map on a server). Changing the mode is one undo step.

Caution

A beach stamped with Fully Tropical on shows as snow on a server that does not run deepsea.terrain_everywhere true. Keep the setting with the map when you move it to a server.

When a placement is refused

The preview turns red, the readout’s last line says why in red, and a click or STAMP ISLAND says why instead of stamping, when:

• the island’s footprint leaves the map (move it further in, or turn it), or
• the footprint lands on a monument that is already on the map (move it clear).

The readout also tells you how much of the island’s land lands on ground that is already above the sea. That is allowed: your higher ground keeps its height there.

On a server

The island is part of your map’s own layers, so the server’s own height, water, spawning and building checks all see it. The palms, rocks and cliffs are ordinary static prefabs: they carry no Deep Sea entity, so the game’s Deep Sea cycle never removes them. The Deep Sea itself, off the edge of every map, is not changed.

Two things are not yet confirmed on a live server: whether the island prefab’s own ground mesh also draws on players’ screens where the stamped terrain is (it sits at the same height), and how the island’s grass and ground cover look without the Deep Sea look turned on.