System requirements
Creator is a Windows application that reads your own installed copy of Rust. Two of the numbers below are measured and one is not, and this page says which is which: an unmeasured requirement is written UNKNOWN rather than guessed.
What you need
Section titled “What you need”| Operating system | Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Creator is built and tested on Windows 11; Windows 10 is expected to work and has not been tested here. |
| Rust | Installed through Steam (app 252490) and finished installing, not mid-update. |
| Disk | Room for a content snapshot, about 50 GB per Rust build you sync, plus the app itself. |
| RAM | 32 GB recommended if you intend to generate maps at 4000 or larger. 16 GB is not enough for those sizes. Measured, below, as a range per map size. |
| CPU | UNKNOWN. No minimum is published, and the reason is below. |
| GPU | UNKNOWN. No minimum is published. Creator draws with Rust’s own shaders, so a machine that runs Rust is the sensible starting point, but nothing here was measured across GPUs and we will not guess a floor. |
Creator does not ship Rust’s art. It reads the models, textures and monuments from your Steam copy and keeps a private snapshot of them, which is why Rust has to be installed and why the disk figure is what it is. It never modifies your Rust install: it reads.
Disk, in more detail
Section titled “Disk, in more detail”A content snapshot lives at %LOCALAPPDATA%\RustCreator\content\<buildid>\ and is roughly 50 GB.
Creator keeps one per Rust build you have synced, so two or three of them add up quickly. Keeping the
old one is deliberate (a seed only reproduces against the snapshot it was generated on), and removing
one you are not using is safe. See
Reclaiming disk space.
RAM, measured
Section titled “RAM, measured”These are measurements, not estimates, all taken on the reference machine (128 GB of RAM, a 20-worker CPU) while generating a map. The peak varies from run to run, so each size is a range: the low end and the high end come from two different ways of measuring, both described below.
| Map size | Peak memory | Objects placed |
|---|---|---|
| 6000 | 20.3 GB (size sweep only) | |
| 5000 | 15.3 to 19.9 GB | about 45,700 |
| 4500 | 14.6 to 14.9 GB | about 36,100 |
| 4000 | 13.5 to 16.3 GB | about 30,400 |
| 3500 | 12.9 GB (size sweep only) | |
| 3000 | 10.6 GB (size sweep only) | |
| 1000 | 7.9 GB (generation profile only) |
Plan around the high end of the range. The two measurements are:
- The generation profile (the low end). Creator’s own reading of its peak memory while the generation passes run, on one seed. It starts once a content snapshot is open and ends when the last pass finishes.
- The size sweep (the high end). Three seeds per size, each launched from scratch and run until Creator exits. The reading is the larger of Creator’s own peak and an outside check of the whole process every 10 seconds, so it also covers the work before and after the generation passes, and the table keeps the highest of the three seeds.
Even a small map needs several GB because much of that is not the generation itself: Creator already holds about 3.9 GB with a content snapshot open before the first pass runs, and the rest grows with the number of objects the map places.
Windows itself usually wants another 2 to 4 GB. So on a 16 GB machine even a 4000 map can run out of room, and a 5000 map does not fit: it pages to disk, which makes generation far slower, and Creator can be killed outright. 32 GB clears every size in the table with headroom.
Generating repeatedly without restarting raises the peak. A second 4000 generation in the same session measured 14.4 to 14.5 GB by the generation profile, so restart Creator between large generations if memory is tight.
What these numbers do not cover
Section titled “What these numbers do not cover”Stated plainly, because the gaps matter as much as the figures:
- Map sizes below 3000 other than 1000, and sizes between the rows above, were not measured. Where a row names only one measurement, the other was not taken at that size.
- No 16 GB or 32 GB machine was tested. The advice above is arithmetic against measured peaks on one large machine, not a run on a small one.
- Editing after generation and the undo history are not included in either measurement.
CPU, and why there is no number
Section titled “CPU, and why there is no number”Generation is mostly single-threaded with a few parallel parts, and every measurement above comes from one 20-worker machine. We do not know how a 4-core or 8-core machine behaves, so we will not publish a floor we did not measure. Treat generating a large map as something you start and walk away from, and watch the pass ladder rather than a clock: It looks frozen explains what progress looks like.