Sculpting

Sculpting changes the terrain’s height. Press C, pick a mode, drag on the ground: the stroke applies as you drag and lands on the undo stack as one step when you let go. A single click is a stroke too: it lays one dab and is one undo step, and Ctrl+Z pressed while a stroke is still in progress undoes that stroke, never the step before it. Sixteen modes share one brush, so the size, shape, falloff and filters you set carry across all of them.

The brush, once, for every mode

Control	What it does
Size	The brush radius in meters, 1 to 500. The slider is logarithmic: an equal move of the handle multiplies the size by the same amount, and the default 25 m sits in the middle. [ and ] step it by a percentage, so the step stays useful at any size
Strength	How hard one dab pulls, 0 to 1. The slider gives most of its length to the small values sculpting uses: the default 0.03 sits in the middle, each quarter of the bar is about six times stronger than the one before it, and 1 is still at the right end. , and . step it along the same scale
Brush Style	The footprint: twelve built-in shapes (soft and hard circles, squares and diamonds, plus Gaussian, Ring, Star, Cross, Speckle and Cloud), and any grayscale PNG you drop in the brushes folder
Falloff	Smooth, Linear, Sharp or Plateau: how fast the brush weakens from its center to its rim
Rotation	Turns the footprint, 0 to 359 degrees, which matters for squares, diamonds and custom shapes
Spacing	How far apart dabs are laid along your stroke, as a fraction of the size, 0.05 to 1 on a logarithmic slider with the default 0.25 near the middle

The box beside each slider always shows the exact value, and a value you type there is used exactly as typed; the handle moves to wherever that value sits on the scale.

Alt and drag inside the view sets size and strength at once, left and right for size, up and down for strength, moving along the same scales the sliders use, without going to the panel. M cycles the mode, and Esc during a stroke cancels it: the terrain goes back to how it was and no undo step is recorded.

Strokes are laid at a fixed distance along your pointer’s path rather than once per frame, so the same gesture paints the same result whatever your frame rate, and a fast drag leaves no gaps. The cursor ring on the ground traces the real footprint of the shape you picked, and the inner ring sits where the brush is at half strength, which is the honest picture of the falloff you chose.

Brush Presets saves everything above under a name, in a file beside your other settings, so a brush you tuned survives closing the app. Save, load and delete are the three buttons in that section.

The sixteen modes

Mode	What it does to height	Its own controls
Raise	Pushes the ground up
Lower	Pulls it down
Flatten	Pulls the ground toward one height. Ctrl and right-click in the view picks that height off the terrain	Target (m)
Smooth	Averages each point with its neighbors
Sharpen	Amplifies local detail, both ridges and valleys	Detail
RidgeErode	Sharpens ridge crests only and leaves valleys alone	Sharpness
SlopeFlatten	Pulls the footprint toward its own best-fit plane, so it flattens while keeping the average slope	Detail
Smudge	Smears the height in the direction you drag
Pinch	Pulls the surface toward the brush center. Hold Shift to bulge it outward instead	Amount
Twist	Rotates the height pattern around the brush center	Amount
Terrace	Quantizes the footprint into flat steps	Count, Corner Weight
ErodeHeight	Takes material off anything standing above its neighborhood, for a weathered look	Detail
Bridge	Click a start point then an end point: the corridor between them is graded from one height to the other	Spacing, which quantizes the ramp into discrete supports
Clone	Shift and click sets a source, then drag to stamp that terrain elsewhere	Clone Heights, Clone Splat, Aligned movement, Offset (m)
HydraulicErosion	Runs a droplet simulation inside the footprint and blends the result in, feathered by the brush	Inertia, Capacity, Erode, Deposit, Multiplier, and two auto-paint toggles
Stamper	Presses a height pattern from your stamp library onto the ground. Ctrl inverts it	Stamp grid, Stamp Mode, Scale, Height (m)

Two of those deserve a note. HydraulicErosion can paint as it works: Paint bedrock as Rock puts the Rock ground texture where it stripped material and Paint sediment as Gravel puts Gravel where it dropped material, and the height and the paint are one undo step. And Stamper’s footprint is its own Scale, not the brush size, so its cursor ring is drawn at that scale instead.

Stamps

A stamp is a reusable height pattern: a crater, a ridge line, a whole hillside.

1. Pick Stamper as the mode.
2. Click a stamp in the grid, or use Import stamp (.raw / .png)… to add one.
3. Set Stamp Mode: Additive and Subtract raise or lower by the pattern, Set blends the surface toward the pattern.
4. Set Scale for the footprint in meters and Height (m) for how much relief it presses in.
5. Click on the terrain. One press is one undo step.

Open stamps folder shows you where they live and Reload stamps picks up anything you have added there by hand. Grayscale PNGs and .raw heightmaps both work.

Brush Filters, which also gate sculpting

The Brush Filters section holds a Height Gate (m) and a Slope Gate (deg), each with its own Min and Max, and a stroke only touches a cell where every gate you have enabled passes. The two conditions on the painting inspector, by topology bit and by ground texture, gate sculpt strokes as well, so “only steepen the ground that is already forest” is two checkboxes rather than careful mouse work.

Whole-map height, and heightmaps

Advanced Options, at the bottom of the Sculpt inspector, holds the operations that are not a brush. Like every collapsible section it starts closed: click its heading to open it.

Control	What it does
Auto-Adjust Prefab Height	While on, prefabs standing on ground your stroke moves are carried with it, keeping their height above the surface
Height (m) with Add Height and Subtract Height	Raises or lowers the whole map by that amount, as one undo step
Run Erosion (K)	Runs the droplet erosion over the whole map at its default settings, as one undo step
Save Raw Heightmap…	Writes the current height grid out as a .raw, to a file you name in a save dialog
Import Raw Heightmap	Reads a .raw in, resampling it to your map’s resolution if the sizes differ
Bit Depth and Byte Order	8 or 16 bit, and PC (little-endian) or Mac (big-endian). Both apply to the export and the import

A .raw import replaces the entire height grid

It is one undo step, so Ctrl+Z gets your terrain back, but it is not a merge: everything you sculpted is gone the moment it lands. If the file will not read, the message names the byte count it saw, and the fix is almost always Bit Depth: a 16 bit file read as 8 bit is the wrong size and Creator says so rather than importing garbage. More on the round trip in Import a heightmap.

What sculpting does not move

Height is one layer of a Rust map among several. Sculpting a hill does not repaint the ground textures under it, does not change the biome, and does not move the topology bits that tell the game where the beach and the forest are. Those are painting, and a hill you raise out of a beach usually needs both.