Transylvania Custom RUST Map Review

Venture Into the Haunting Realms of Transylvania

Transylvania is a Halloween-themed custom map for RUST, ideal for server admins wanting to provide their players with a spooky, adventure-packed experience. Spread across the 3500-sized map; players will discover many eerie locations and chilling experiences. From abandoned and crumbling buildings, graveyards and dark forests, and cultish villages frozen in time in the shadow of a looming castle shrouded in mist overlooking the entire map.

Designed by Gruber, an experienced map creator and well-known member of RUST’s map-making community, Transylvania boasts over 28 custom monuments and points of interest spread across the map, along with a robust set of procedural monuments. Fun Halloween symbols like ghosts, witches, pumpkins, and bats are imprinted on the map, using unique topographies and island shapes to generate a pleasingly spooky effect.

Map Trailer

Map Overview

• Name: Transylvania
• Size: 3500
• Game Mode: Vanilla
• Prefabs: ~51k
• Dependencies: Oxide.Ext.RustEdit
• Creator: Gruber

Newly spawning into the Transylvania map starts you off on the island’s southern side, a primarily desert-based region. As you open the game map, you’ll notice that most custom monuments and points of interest are focused in the center of the map, with a few exceptions.

The procedural monuments are placed on the outskirts of the island, which allows players to stay immersed in the Halloween-themed core of the map if they choose while also having the option to venture out to more familiar haunts.

Encircling the island is a functional railroad, train tunnels, and ring road, allowing players to access and explore all corners of the game world easily. If you choose, add Halloween festivity to the railroads using the Armored Train plugin by Adem.

We thoroughly enjoyed exploring the landscapes with the large assortment of custom monuments labeled on the map. As we moved through these haunted locations, there was a significant amount of variety in the rewards to be discovered, with risk strategically placed at every turn and over 207 NPCs.

Admins can provide additional challenges to the custom monuments using Better NPC, an optional premium plugin, with which the Transylvania map comes with pre-defined spawn location files. It’s an easy way to add variety to the NPCs present in the custom monuments spread across the map.

We liked crawling through the abandoned villages, sleuthing through dilapidated buildings and graveyards, exploring the Frankenstein castle, and finding loot tucked away in so many obscure areas. It was nice to be rewarded for exploration and not just monument hopping.

Few maps in the RUST community embrace the Halloween spirit and mood like the Transylvania map, making it a great option to celebrate the season with your players. This is especially true when combined with the Halloween convar being enabled, adding the creepy background sounds, which fit well with the ambiance of this map.

Resources, such as nodes and trees, are plentiful and well dispersed across the island, with fresh water sources never out of reach. The Fishing Village monuments have been modified to include marketplaces and recyclers, adding a bit of convenience.

Overall, the map’s terrain is exciting and provides eerie, hand-crafted aesthetics everywhere you turn. It looks like RUST, and yet, it doesn’t. As you explore points of interest and custom monuments, there’s a lot of intrigue, making you wonder what the story behind the locations may be. If we could make one request for an additional feature for Transylvania, it would add tidbits of lore to feed our curiosity about what the island’s story might look like.

Building space is also well distributed and often laid out in exciting locations regardless of what portion of the map you find yourself. The Transylvania custom RUST map works well for your typical vanilla gameplay experience for smaller to medium-sized servers but also works well for a PVE-style server.

After spending 10+ hours exploring the map, we encountered very few minor bugs, which we reported to the creator. Ultimately, we enjoyed our experience and are excited to see this map used across the RUST community. It will be interesting to see what unique modifications and edits server admins apply to their maps, and we hope for a chance to partake in those festivities!

Custom Monuments and Points of Interest

Procedural Monuments

• Abandoned Military Base
• Airfield
• Arctic Research Base
• Bandit Camp
• Fishing Village 1, 2, 3 (Modified)
• Ferry Terminal
• Giant Excavator Pit
• HQM Quarry
• Junkyard
• Large Harbor
• Large Oil Rig
• Launch Site
• Lighthouse
• Military Tunnel
• Missile Silo
• Outpost
• Power Plant
• Railway
• Ranch
• Roadside Monument
• Satellite Dish
• Small Harbor
• Small Oil Rig
• Stone Quarry
• Sulfur Quarry
• Sewer Branch
• The Dome
• Underwater Lab

Summary

Transylvania is a meticulously designed Halloween-themed custom RUST map that offers a spine-tingling and immersive gaming experience. The map provides players with a diverse and rewarding adventure with its array of custom monuments, points of interest, strategically placed NPCs, and abundant resources. The eerie, hand-crafted aesthetics and ambiance make this map a standout choice for celebrating Halloween and the season.