In the early days, Rust only featured one map. An Experimental version of the game (which became the default launch option since Oct 2014) featured randomly generated maps known as Procedural. An alternative style of Procedural map was developed in 2016 called Barren, which removed visual features like grass in order to improve performance. Both Facepunch and the playerbase have produced custom maps. The majority of maps are islands, which have a survival/apocalyptic theme of the player having washed up on a beach. There's an argument that Rust maps are atleast partially designed for competition.

Part of the inspiration of Rust was the Arma 2 mod DayZ which used a large map called Chernarus that would take an hour to run across from end to end, offering a sense of adventure. Rust maps take around 14 minutes to run across (coast to coast), which is still quite large compared to the smaller maps in gRust that take about 2 minutes to cross, and Stranded that only take about 1 minute.

Custom maps
Map design
Map projects
Procedurally generated maps
Show ingame map

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