Map Editor

The Map Editor lets you draw on RDR2’s own pause map and minimap: new roads and tracks, a railway, a state border, buildings, a lake, a place name, your server’s logo, or erase what is there. It rebuilds the game’s map tiles with your edits in them and downloads them as a RedM resource. Everything runs in your browser tab.

What it is for

Showing players the world your server actually has: a new town needs its streets and its name on the map, a closed road should vanish from it, a custom area can be marked with a border or a logo. The game draws its map from tiles, so changing those tiles changes the map for everyone who runs the resource, with no script at all.

Before you start: your own tiles

The page does not ship Rockstar’s map tiles. You bring them from your own game:

1. Open minimap_tiles.rpf from your RDR2 install with OpenIV, CodeX or a similar tool.
2. Export its .ytd files as loose files, not Oodle compressed, into a folder.
3. In the Your stock tiles panel press Pick a folder (or Pick files) and choose them.

You only need the tiles your edits touch; the Download panel names them. You can start drawing before you load anything: until then the page draws your edits over fivemad’s own map so you can place them, but it cannot export.

Your tiles stay in the tab and are never saved, so load them again on each visit.

Quick start

1. Pick Mainland or Guarma with the switch on the map.
2. Choose a tool in the toolbar (Ink, Buildings, Label, Picture, Erase) and draw.
3. Load your stock tiles (see above). The preview switches to Your tiles so you see the real tiles with your edits in them.
4. In Download, check that every changed tile has a pixel count and none says “not loaded”.
5. Press Build and download, unzip fivemad_map.zip into resources, add ensure fivemad_map to server.cfg and restart the whole server.

Drag to pan and scroll to zoom.

The toolbar

Also in the toolbar: Undo (Ctrl+Z) and Redo (Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z), the Grid overlay (its step follows the zoom and is printed in the corner), snapping to the Grid, snapping to Points of other shapes (on by default), and the preview switch Edits over map / Your tiles.

Ink

Pick a style from the chips, click to add points, then click the last point again or press Enter to finish. Esc drops the line you are drawing.

The road widths are matched to the line weights the stock map already uses, so a new road looks like its neighbours. Select a line to change its Style, its Half width (up to 20 m, 200 m for a river) or make it a Closed loop.

Buildings and water

Pick Building (drawn on Roads and coast) or Water (drawn on the Water layer), then Rectangle (click two corners, the default) or Polygon (click the corners, click the first one to close). Selecting an area lets you switch its Kind.

Label

Click where the label goes; it is created as “New label” and selected so you can edit it on the right.

Labels go on the Labels and borders layer.

Picture

Press Add a picture (PNG, WebP or JPEG), choose the layer it should land on (Roads and coast by default), then click the map to place it. Selected, it has Width (5 to 3000 m, the height follows the picture), Rotation and Ink comes from: The picture’s transparency (default, for a PNG with a transparent background) or Its dark pixels (for a dark drawing on white).

Erase

Choose the layer to erase from and the Brush size (2 to 300 m, default 20 m), then drag over what should go. The stock ink under the brush is removed and a road you cut ends cleanly at the brush. Erasing on the Water layer turns water into land. An erase stroke is a shape like any other: select it to change its radius, hide it or delete it to bring the ink back.

The layers

RDR2’s map is several sets of tiles, one per kind of content. The Your stock tiles panel lists them with how many of each you have loaded, and the eye button hides one in the preview.

Mainland:

Guarma:

Relief holds the contour lines and hatching shown in parts of the map you have not discovered yet. A tile is named row first: minimap_sdf_discovered3_17_15 is row 17, column 15.

Every selected shape has a Written to select, so you can move any shape to another layer, for example a picture onto Relief.

The preview

• Edits over map draws fivemad’s own RDR2 map with your changes on top: new ink in the map’s ink colour, removed ink in red.
• Your tiles draws the stock tiles you loaded with your edits merged in.

Neither is exactly what the game draws. The tiles hold line shapes, not colours, and the game inks them with its own map shader, so line weights and colours in game will differ a little from the page.

Download panel

Under it is the list of changed tiles with the number of pixels each edit changed. A tile you have not loaded is marked not loaded in amber, and Build and download stays off until you load it: the export merges your edits into your own copy of each tile, so it cannot write one it has not read. It also waits while tiles are still being rebuilt.

The download holds only the region you have open. Shapes keep their world positions when you switch region, but a mainland edit never reaches Guarma’s tiles, so make one resource per region.

What is in the zip

fivemad_map/
  fxmanifest.lua
  README.md
  map-editor-project.fmmap
  stream/<one .ytd per changed tile>

Each .ytd is named after the stock tile it replaces. A tile the game ships as an empty 4 x 4 stand in (nothing drawn there) is written at the full tile size so your edit has room, and the result line tells you how many there were. The manifest for a mainland map:

fx_version 'cerulean'
game 'rdr3'
rdr3_warning 'I acknowledge that this is a prerelease build of RedM, and I am aware my resources *will* become incompatible once RedM ships.'

name 'fivemad_map'
description 'RDR2 map edits (Mainland) built with https://fivemad.com/redm/tools/map-editor'
version '1.0.0'

-- Everything in stream/ is picked up by itself: a .ytd named like a stock map tile
-- replaces that tile. Nothing to script and nothing to list here.

Streamed files are read when the server starts, so restart fivemad_map is not enough: restart the whole server, and if the old map still shows, stop it, delete its cache folder and start it again.

Save and share

The open map is also saved automatically in your browser and comes back when you return. The zip carries map-editor-project.fmmap too, so you can always reopen a map you exported.

Tips

• Load the whole folder of tiles, not just the ones you think you need. An erase next to a tile you have not loaded cannot take that tile’s ink into account, and the page says so under the map.
• Turn on Points snapping (it is on by default) to join a new road to the end of another one cleanly.
• Use the Ruler to size a building or a label against the stock map before you commit to it.
• Keep a map’s edits in one resource. Two resources that stream the same tile names cannot both be in use, so one of them loses its edits in those tiles.

Limitations

• Not tried in RedM yet. The tiles follow the layout of the game’s own files and an unchanged tile comes out identical to the stock one, but nobody at fivemad has loaded one in game. The Blip Replacer ships the smallest test for every RDR2 texture the site writes; until that has been run, treat this resource as untested.
• Whether the game draws a tile that was a 4 x 4 stand in at its new full size is not known.
• Where the zoomed out roads set sits is taken from the zoomed out labels set, which has the same size. It was not checked against coordinates on its own.
• The preview colours are fivemad’s, not the game’s map shader.
• Your stock tiles are needed to export and are not kept between visits.
• Only the open region is exported.

Related tools

• Interactive Map
• Blip Replacer
• Blip Placer
• Folders to YTD