Map editor and community maps

Steel Tide ships a map editor, and every map painted in it is played exactly as painted: no generator, no carving, no tidying you did not ask for. A map is one small file, .steel-tide-map, and the same file goes into a Conquest match, a Breakthrough match, a multiplayer lobby, and the public registry that Community maps… on every setup screen lists.

The editor

Map Editor on the home menu opens it. The map is in the middle; what you paint with is down the left and what the map is down the right.

• Terrain: grass, sand, snow, road, rubble, mud, marsh, lava, shallow and deep water, forest, mountain, and the four cliff faces. A swatch is the tool; the brush has three sizes and an eraser. Forest, mountain and cliffs block ground vehicles, ships need water, and only grass, sand, snow and road take a building, so a base wants open ground under it. The terrain page has the whole table.
• Props: telegraph poles, water towers, palms, tents, hangars, bunkers, derricks and the two sunken freighters, placed one at a time with a ghost under the pointer. They stand in the way like a building does.
• Deposits and spawns are two more swatches on the props palette. A spawn is where a faction's headquarters lands, drawn with the 4×4 it takes; a map seats exactly as many factions as it has spawns. A deposit is an ore field an extractor is built on.
• Forces: units and buildings a faction opens with besides its headquarters, placed for the faction lit in the row at the top of the pane. R turns the unit in hand an eighth of a turn. They are laid in Conquest; a mission and a Breakthrough match lay their own opening.
• The map pane: the name, a description of a line or two (what kind of fight it is: it is what players read beside the map), the size (the four sizes the random generator draws, 72×64 to 168×140 tiles; a map may be anything from 16 to 256 a side once imported), a grid, and a readout that lists only what would stop the map playing or look wrong. Under Translations the name and description can be given in the game's other languages; a player sees the map in the language their game is in.
• Tidy shorelines puts a beach along every coast the way the game's own maps have one. It is a button, never automatic.

The map in hand is kept as a draft, so closing the game loses nothing. Ctrl+Z undoes a stroke; the wheel zooms; the right button pans.

Playing it

Export writes the file. On the Conquest or Breakthrough setup screen the map grid's last card takes it (Upload map…, or drop the file on the grid), and the seats are capped to the spawns painted. In a lobby the host uploads it the same way and every guest sees its thumbnail. In Breakthrough the chain of checkpoints is laid by driving distance from the first spawn.

The editor never checks connectivity: a spawn or a deposit painted behind a wall of mountain is unreachable in the match too, and the readout does not look for it. A test match is the real check.

Publishing

The registry is the public repository steel-tide/maps: one file per map under maps/, and the game lists what is there under Community maps…, the most-taken first, with the author's name and a download count on every card. There is no account in the game and nothing leaves it on its own; publishing is a pull request there, which takes a GitHub account.

1. Give the map a name of its own and a description, and paint at least two spawns. The editor's Publish button runs the registry's own check first and says what is missing.
2. Copy and open GitHub: the file goes on your clipboard and GitHub opens a new file in the registry with the name filled in (sign in if asked). If the contents are not already in the editor, paste them.
3. Propose new file, then Create pull request. CI runs the same check; once the request is merged the index is rebuilt and the map is in Community maps for everyone.

The check asks for a name that is not Untitled, a description, two spawns, a file under 512 KB, and a name no other map in the registry has. To update a map, replace the file in a new pull request: its download count carries over. A map is published under CC-BY-4.0 and belongs to its author.

The whole flow is written out for coding agents too: the registry ships a tools/check.mjs that prints every error the game would, and node tools/build-index.mjs shows what the map's entry in the index will be.