Troubleshooting

The headings below are the messages Creator actually puts on your screen, so you can search this page for the words you are looking at. Content sync is the biggest source of trouble, so it comes first. If none of this covers it, report it: at this stage, confusing counts as a bug.

Content

”loaded but expose NO renderable prefab meshes”

The full message names the folder it tried and the fix. Creator refused the load on purpose, and there are two causes.

1. You pointed at a dedicated server install. Rust’s server bundles pass every existence and load check but ship the world prefab roots with their render meshes stripped. Nothing is renderable, no monument places, and terrain comes out untextured. Creator checks before drawing anything, because the alternative is a silently broken map that looks like a Creator bug.

   Fix: point the sync at the CLIENT install, …\steamapps\common\Rust\Bundles\Bundles, and not at anything under a Server\ folder.

2. Steam is mid-update. Patch-day hotfixes briefly leave the client bundles incomplete.

   Fix: let Steam finish updating Rust, then sync again. A sync waits for Steam by itself (see the next heading), so this cause only reaches you through an old snapshot.

Both are covered step by step in Sync your Rust content.

”Rust is updating in Steam; Creator will continue when it finishes.”

Steam is downloading or applying a Rust update. Nothing is wrong and nothing is lost: a sync waits, checks again every few seconds, and starts copying the moment Steam is done. CHECK AGAIN looks straight away and CANCEL stops it with nothing changed. Your current content keeps working the whole time. More in When Steam is updating Rust.

”Rust’s game files are incomplete in Steam”

Steam says Rust is installed and idle, but the client Bundles file is missing. The sync waits for it. If it does not clear, trigger a validation (Steam’s Verify integrity of game files, or steam://validate/252490 in your browser); the sync carries on once the file is back.

”Rust changed in Steam while Creator was copying it”

A Rust update landed during the copy, so Creator threw that copy away rather than keep a snapshot with files from two Rust versions. It copies again once Steam has finished. Your content is unchanged.

”Rust has updated since this version of Creator was tested”

The Rust you have installed is newer than the build this Creator release was tested on. Most things work, and you can keep syncing. If something looks wrong on the newer build, report it. The message shows once per Rust build.

-synccontent shows only a progress screen

That is the copy running. The window shows the phase, a bar and the gigabytes and files left, and Player.log gets the same line every 5 %. Leave it open until it exits (code 0 when done, 25 if Rust was still updating in Steam after an hour).

”Creator needs a copy of Rust’s game content before it can render anything.”

Nothing is synced yet. Set RUST INSTALL on the start screen (DETECT finds it) and press SYNC. CREATE BLANK works meanwhile and gives you plain terrain with no Rust art.

”is behind your Rust install” or “does not match your Rust install”

Your snapshot is from a different Rust build than the one you have installed. Nothing is broken: the snapshot keeps working exactly as it did, and monuments or prefabs added since it was made are simply missing until you sync, which is expected. Press SYNC when you want the newer content, and read what a re-sync changes first.

”re-sync to pin the world generator”

That snapshot was made before Creator started pinning Rust’s world generator alongside the art. It keeps working; a re-sync adds the pin, after which a Rust update cannot change what a seed generates.

I re-synced and my map generates differently now

Expected, and the reason the snapshot exists. New Rust content moves monuments and adds props, so the same size and seed produce a different world on a newer snapshot. A seed is only reproducible against the snapshot it was generated on. The older snapshot is still on disk (Creator does not delete them) and can be made active again.

Generation

It looks frozen

Look at the loading screen: it shows the current pass name, its position in the ladder, a progress bar and an elapsed timer. If the pass name and the counter are moving, it is working, not hung. Large maps take a long time and most of it is placing prefabs rather than computing terrain.

If you minimized the loading screen it collapsed to a pill. Click that to reopen it.

It is slow

It is. Generation speed is a known open issue rather than a solved problem, and the first generation after launching is often slower than a second one in the same session. If you are learning the tools rather than building a real map, generate at a smaller size. If memory is tight, restart Creator between large generations: see System requirements.

Opening and saving a map

Opening a map shows the loading screen

Loading a saved map uses the same loading screen as generating one. It comes up as soon as you pick the map and walks through reading the file, building the terrain and water, applying the ground textures, extracting the prefabs the map uses and placing them (with a count), and it stays until every prefab is placed. The extracting step can hold for a minute on a large map. WATCH LOADING shrinks it to the same pill, so you can watch the prefabs appear.

”That map could not be opened.”

The file was not loaded, and the message names why in square brackets: what Creator expected, what it found instead, and what to do.

What you see	What it means
[empty-file], [truncated-header], [truncated-body]	The file is cut short. A copy or download was interrupted, or a disk filled up mid-save. Use a backup, an autosave or a crash copy.
[unknown-version]	The map was written by a newer Rust build than this Creator reads. Update Creator.
[not-a-map]	The first bytes are not a map header at all. It is a different kind of file, or one that was renamed.
[damaged-body]	The compressed data inside is damaged: the file has been altered or partly overwritten.
[missing-height-layer], [non-square-height-layer]	The map read far enough to open, but its terrain grid is gone or malformed. There is no map to show.
[world-size], [prefab-count], [path-count], [decompressed-bytes]	The file claims more than Creator’s safety limits allow, which usually means it is damaged or hostile. If you genuinely have a map that large, launch with -nomaplimits.

”That map opened with N parts missing or ignored.”

The map did open, and this is a warning about what was not in the file: a missing ground-texture layer (the terrain opens untextured), a missing biome, topology or water layer, a height grid that does not match the map’s declared size, or prefabs with broken ids or NaN positions.

Nothing is deleted. Creator carries whatever it could not read through to the next save, so opening a slightly damaged map and saving it does not make it worse.

One thing Creator cannot catch: the .map format carries no checksum over its contents, so a single flipped bit inside a value is a wrong number rather than a detectable error. If a map opens but looks wrong in a way you cannot explain, suspect the file before you suspect the editor, and compare it against a backup.

”That map was not saved.”

Creator checks the map in memory before it writes, and refuses rather than replacing a good file on disk with something nothing can open. Your file on disk is untouched and your work is still in the session. Use FILE > Save Map As… to write it somewhere new, then read what the message named.

”Autosave is failing, so your work is NOT being backed up.”

The rotating autosave could not be written, usually a full disk or a permissions problem on the autosave folder. Every edit is still in memory. Use FILE > Save Map As… now, somewhere you can reach, then fix the folder.

After a crash

”Creator hit an unexpected error”

Creator writes a crash report next to your autosaves and, if you had unsaved work open, tries to save that work on the way down. The message says where both went. Attach the report when you report the bug.

”Creator did not shut down cleanly last time.”

Start Creator again and read the prompt. Creator checks for recoverable work at startup and, when it finds some, tells you what it is before anything loads: which map, when it was written, how many edits it holds, and which file it came from. You do not have to go hunting in a hidden folder.

There are two kinds of recovery copy, and the prompt says which one it found.

• A crash copy. Creator hit an unexpected error while you had unsaved work open and saved that work on the way down, into emergency_<date>-<time>.map beside your autosaves. This is the good case: it holds everything up to the moment things went wrong.
• An autosave. Creator was killed outright (Task Manager, a power cut, a graphics-driver reset), so nothing got a chance to run and the newest autosave is the best copy that exists. That means you can lose up to one autosave interval, 5 minutes by default. Shorten it in Preferences > GENERAL if that is more than you are comfortable with.

The prompt gives you four choices, and none of them touches your saved map until you say so:

Choice	What happens
RECOVER	Opens the copy, aimed at your own map file. The unsaved dot stays on, so nothing is written until you do a real FILE > Save Map.
KEEP BOTH	Opens the copy aimed at a NEW file beside your map (<name>.recovered.map), so your saved map cannot be touched at all. Offered when the map has been saved somewhere before.
DISCARD	Deletes the recovery copy. Use it when you know your saved map is already newer.
GO BACK	Decides later. The copy stays on disk and Creator offers it again next time.

Whatever you choose, open the map and check it before you save over anything.

To work with the files directly, they are all in the Autosave folder listed in Where your files live: emergency_*.map are crash copies, autosave_*.map are the rotating autosaves, and each has a small .meta.json beside it naming the map it came from.

”UNSAVED CHANGES”

Creator asks first, however you close it. The title-bar X, Alt-F4 and the taskbar’s Close all stop at the same prompt the FILE menu’s Quit uses: SAVE, DON’T SAVE or GO BACK. If you have a prefab open in the workspace as well as a map, the prompt says so and SAVE saves both. The start screen asks too: a prefab you left open with unsaved changes after CLOSE WORKSPACE is still covered when you close Creator from there. Nothing closes silently with unsaved work in it.

Leaving it editing overnight (the soak)

To find out whether Creator stays healthy over a long editing session without sitting there doing it yourself, launch it with -soak=<minutes>:

RustCreator.exe -generate=4000 -genseed=1 -soak=60

It generates the map, then drives itself: random brush strokes across every terrain tool, splat, biome, topology and alpha painting, undo and redo, placing and deleting prefabs, path edits, and a periodic save-and-reload plus a full-map resample. It never touches your own map files; the save-and-reload cycle writes to a scratch file of its own and deletes it at the end. When the time is up it writes Desktop\RustCreatorDiag\soak-<stamp>\report.txt and quits.

Read the first line of that report. STATUS: OK means nothing raised an error, memory leveled off and the undo history stayed inside its budget. STATUS: SUSPECT names every check that failed, and the rest of the report shows the memory reading every 30 seconds so you can see where it went wrong. Add -soakseed=<n> for a different run, or repeat the same number to run exactly the same sequence of edits again.