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, index.json is rebuilt on main and the map is in the game.

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

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 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
index.json	what the game and the website read: name, description and their translations, size, seats, author, downloads and a thumbnail per map; generated, never edited by hand
tools/check.mjs	validate one map or all of them
tools/build-index.mjs	rebuild 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.

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.