You’ll want to grab rustedit first, its pretty straightforward to set up once you get your installation files sorted out. I’ve spent quite a bit of time playing around with it, and the terrain tools are actually pretty fun to work with once you get the hang of it.

For your first map, i’d definitely suggest going the procedural route, its way easier to start with something generated and then tweak it to your liking. Manual creation is cool and all, but it can be pretty overwhelming when youre just starting out. The built in tools do most of the heavy lifting, which is nice.

The fun part comes when youre placing all the important stuff down, like where players spawn in and where all the good resources are gonna be. Just make sure you spread things out nicely, nobody likes running forever just to find some stone nodes. I usually start with the monuments and roads first, then work my way down to the smaller details like caves and resource spots.

Before you upload anything to your server, definitely test it locally first. Trust me, its way better to catch any weird terrain issues or resource problems before your players do. Once youre happy with everything, getting it on your server is pretty straightforward, just need to mess with your server config file a bit and adjust some settings. The whole process might seem like a lot at first, but its actually pretty chill once you get into it. Just start small and work your way up to the fancy stuff, thats what i did and it worked out pretty well.