Test in Crucible Local Server

The fastest way to judge a map is to walk it. Crucible Local Server runs a real Rust dedicated server on your own PC, loads your .map, and lets you join it and look at the thing you built with a player’s legs rather than an editor camera. This page is the hand-off: what to hand over, and what to look for once you are in.

Before you start

• Crucible Local Server, installed and updated (its install page).
• A saved map from Creator: the .map and the sidecar file beside it.
• The server extension, but only if your map uses trigger volumes, IO wiring, loot, vending or NPC profiles, or ziplines. Without it those do nothing, and everything else in the map still works.

Add the map to your library

The steps in this section follow Crucible Local Server’s own documentation. Where the two disagree, his page is the authority.

There are three ways to get a .map into the shared maps library:

1. Drag the .map file onto the application window.
2. Press Scan and then Import. Scan looks for Crucible Heightmap’s exports in its shared output folder, so for a map saved out of Creator the drag, or the folder below, is the direct route.
3. Click Custom maps to open the library folder and put the file there yourself.

The library is shared across every server you have configured, so a map you add once is available to all of them.

Assign it and start the server

1. Open the Map tab.
2. Assign your custom map to the server.
3. Start the server.

Stop the server to change its map. It loads the world once, at startup, so swapping the file under a running server changes nothing.

The chips at the top of the Map tab choose how the map is delivered: Local (file://) reads it straight off your disk and is the default, LAN host serves it over your network while the server is up, and Hosted URL points at a copy you host online. Local is right for testing alone; anyone joining you over the network needs one of the other two.

Join it

Launch Rust, open the console with F1, and connect to your local server on port 28015. The exact console line is on Drizzza’s test-locally guide, along with what to change if you want a friend to join.

What to look for once you are in

This is the half worth being systematic about, because the editor cannot show you any of it.

Look at	The failure it catches
Cliffs and rock faces, from below	A rock floating clear of the ground, or one buried to its waist. The editor’s camera rarely sits where a player’s eyes do.
Monument edges, walking in	A monument sitting proud of the terrain, or sunk into it, so a door opens into dirt.
Where you spawn, several times	A map with nowhere valid to spawn looks perfect until somebody joins it.
Roads and rails, followed end to end	A road that stops, a rail that does not meet the ring, a bridge deck you cannot walk onto.
Trees, ore and animals, in each biome	Bare ground. Rust spawns these at runtime from your biome and topology layers, so bare ground is a layer problem, not a missing prefab. See Rust biomes and topology explained.
Ziplines, ridden	One that does not connect, which the editor draws as if it does.
The extension’s boot lines, in the server console	Wiring, loot or spawners that did not apply. Search the log for [RustCreator.Ext] and check skipped=0.

Fix, then test again

1. Go back to Creator and fix what you found.
2. Save.
3. Give the file a new name, or clear the cached copy, before you re-import it. Both the server and the Rust client cache the map they loaded, so an edited map under the same name can come back as the old one. A new name (yourmap_v2.map) is one step and always works.
4. Stop the server, assign the new map, start it again.

Testing once is not testing. A map gets walked several times before it is worth publishing, and the build order puts in-game testing before the last two steps for exactly that reason.