steel-tide-maps

The public registry of maps for Steel Tide, the browser RTS. A map is one .steel-tide-map file, painted in the game's Map Editor and played exactly as painted, and every file under maps/ here is listed in the game under Community maps… on the Conquest, Breakthrough and multiplayer setup screens.

• Play one: in the game, on a setup screen's map grid, Community maps… → pick it. Or download the file from maps/ and Upload map….
• Make one: the game's Map Editor (home menu → Map Editor). Give it a name and a description, at least two spawn points, and Export. Under Translations you can give the name and description in the game's other languages too; a player sees the map in the language their game is in.
• Publish one: the editor's Publish button copies the file and opens a new-file page here with the name filled in; Propose new file opens the pull request. Or fork, add maps/<slug>.steel-tide-map, run the check, open a pull request yourself.

Adding a map

maps/<slug>.steel-tide-map    the file the editor exports; <slug> is lower-case
                              letters, digits and single hyphens (two-fords)

node tools/check.mjs maps/<slug>.steel-tide-map   # what the game will say about it
node tools/build-index.mjs                          # what its entry in the index will be

The check is the game's own parser plus what the registry asks: a name of its own (not Untitled), a description (a line or two on what kind of fight it is: it is what players read beside the map), at least two spawn points, a slug for a filename, under 512 KB, and a name no other map here has. CI runs the same check on every pull request; once merged, the catalogue is rebuilt on main and the map is in the game.

To update a map, replace the file. Its download count carries over.

When renaming a published map, add its old and new slugs to tools/map-renames.mjs. The release sync renames the existing asset and transfers its stored count and hash to the new slug, preserving download history. The index builder also recognizes old slugs in cached counts.

Download counts

There is no database. Every map is attached as an asset to the rolling registry release, GitHub counts downloads of release assets, and the game fetches a map's asset URL when a player takes it. tools/sync-release.mjs keeps the release in step with maps/ (a new file is uploaded, a changed one replaced with its count carried, a removed one taken down) and tools/build-index.mjs bakes the counts into catalog.json and index.json, nightly and on every push. The release is not for people: the game reads the file from main.

What is here

Path	What
maps/<slug>.steel-tide-map	one map each
catalog.json	what the game lists: name, description and their translations, size, seats, author, downloads and the name of its thumbnail per map; generated, never edited by hand
thumbs/<slug>/<hash>.json	a map's thumbnail (its terrain at up to 64 cells a side, spawns and deposits), named by its content's hash and fetched only when its card is drawn; generated
index.json	every entry with its thumbnail inline, in one file, for released games that read it; generated
tools/check.mjs	validate one map or all of them
tools/build-index.mjs	rebuild catalog.json, thumbs/ and index.json (CI does this on main)
tools/sync-release.mjs	the release the maps are counted on (CI)
tools/steel-tide-map.mjs	the game's own map code: the parser, the check, the index entry and its thumbnail, bundled from the game repository; do not edit here

The file

A .steel-tide-map is JSON: format (steel-tide-map), v (1), name, description, translations (the same two in other languages, by language code: {"en": {"name": …, "description": …}}; name and description are the author's own words and what any reader without a translation of their own falls back on, after English), w and h in tiles (16 to 512 a side), terrain (the tile grid run-length coded, base64), deposits and spawns (tile coordinates), and decor (the props standing on it). The editor writes it; nothing needs to be written by hand.

Map source credits

• Middle East (middle-east), by YYY: the original submission credits 铁锈盒子 as the base-map source and includes the source label 末忆铁锈.

• Two Coast Lanes (2v2, 3v3 and 4v4): inspired by the Rusted Warfare maps Across the Shore (隔岸之争) and Coastline (海岸线).

• Ice Lake (ice-lake-by-hxyy), submitted by YYY: the original title credits hxyy.

• Japanese Archipelago (japanese-archipelago): generated with the game's China/Europe geography pipeline from Natural Earth 1:10m vectors (coastlines, islands, rivers, lakes and the continental shelf), its country outlines and populated places, and NASA's GEBCO elevation raster. Uses an Albers equal-area projection at about 4.7 km per tile, covering Hokkaido through the Ryukyus and the Izu–Ogasawara chain; remote Minami-Tori-shima is outside the frame. Roads, clearings, resource deposits and narrow straits are adapted for play.

• Indonesia (indonesia): generated with the game's geography pipeline (pnpm -C game/core map:indonesia) from Natural Earth 1:10m vectors (coastlines, islands, rivers, lakes and the continental shelf), its country outlines and populated places, and NASA's GEBCO elevation raster. Uses an Albers equal-area projection opened almost to a cylinder (7°S and 8°N about 118°E) at about 10 km per tile, covering Weh to the Papua New Guinea border and the Natuna Islands to Rote. Roads, clearings, resource deposits and the Bali Strait are adapted for play; Madura joins Java at Surabaya, where the strait narrows to the Suramadu bridge.

• Antarctic (antarctic): generated from Natural Earth 1:10m vectors, research-station coordinates, and NASA's GEBCO elevation raster. The ice-shelf layer is based on the 2003–2004 Mosaic of Antarctica; it does not depict current or seasonal ice extent. Byrd Surface Camp's coordinates come from the USAP 2019–2020 science plan. Uses a South-Pole-centred Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection at about 11 km per tile. Starting clearings sit near the reference stations; resources, snow passes and camp props are adapted for play.

Licence

The tooling is MIT. Each map is published under CC-BY-4.0 and belongs to its author. By opening a pull request you confirm the map is yours to publish under that licence.