Curation, Commissions, and More

Changes to the Map Curation Program

We’re excited to announce several upcoming changes to the curated map program. Any change here is obviously going to be substantial – and is subject to change – so we wanted to lay out some of our plans early on.

If you’re not familiar with the program—we began promoting community-made maps alongside the game’s official maps in 2017. This simple way of adding extra content to the game has since grown into something much larger over 8 years. You have likely played on one of the amazing maps created by talented mappers for the program.

Very early into 2024 we realized the need to revise how this program works. We had many goals in mind: from opening the program to a wider variety of creators and maps, to reducing obstacles that scared away less experienced creators.

We explored ideas such as commissioning maps or even switching to a contest-based system! However—we realized many ideas wouldn’t achieve our goals or were just way too convoluted. Instead? We are streamlining the program. Simplifying the process from guidelines to acceptance.

Creating Maps

Modding is a cornerstone of Unturned 3.x. Tons of amazing content is available from the Steam Workshop that isn’t curated! We want to promote fun content—whether it’s by someone already accomplished and well-known in the community, or a less experienced creator getting their foot in the door.

Our streamlined program starts with you simply publishing a map to the Steam Workshop. It would look something like this:

  1. You create/publish a map to the Steam Workshop.
  2. We occasionally reach out to authors of popular, high-quality Workshop maps when preparing for certain events (e.g., an end-of-year update).
  3. Legal agreement for a smooth transition and ensuring the map can get across the finish line. (Reducing infighting or extraneous issues between authors, establishing revenue share between co-authors, etc.)
  4. You make any minor changes necessary (if any) for us to curate the map.
  5. We commission artist(s) (or create ourselves) the contents of store bundles. (Mappers won’t need experience with creating these!)
  6. Several new curated maps are added to the game.

We’re hopeful about these changes fixing many common obstacles. Chiefly – mappers can now share their projects with the entire community whenever they want. Feedback can be gathered from a wider number of players during the map’s development simply by publishing it to the Workshop. This should also afford more flexibility to authors—particularly solo developers or less experienced creators. Maps can be accepted at any time after being published, so authors can create content without worrying as much about other people’s projects.

Other Notable Changes

Some additional things:

We’re updating the Documentation pages for curated maps to provide more information. Some guidelines may change as part of this, but things like “no copyright infringement” and generally matching the game’s art style will not.

A big issue that many new players face is understanding the difference between official and curated content. As we begin to accept even more curated maps, we’d like to improve this experience. If you have any ideas (as a player who may have faced those issues) we’d love to hear them! One change under consideration is revamping the single-player menu to better display these maps.

As part of revising the program, we were also considering additional ways players could optionally support their favorite maps. For example: a cosmetic that adds a small badge or some other effect next to the player’s name when they’re playing on that map.

This is all – to some extent – still subject to change. We’d love to hear feedback from players regarding this direction.

FAQ

Q. Are there any maps planned to release under the OLD program?
Yes. There’s several maps which predate these changes. We believe most will be released throughout 2025.

Q. When’s the earliest we could expect to see maps releasing under this NEW program?
Since there’s already several maps in the pipeline for this year, we think the earliest would be end-of-year or sometime in 2026. If you were already creating a Workshop map, consider sharing it with players!

Q. Can Workshop maps still be featured outside the curated program?
Yes. We’re actually interested in featuring more maps (such as on our ongoing Community Blog). If you know a cool project that someone is working on—or if you’re working on a cool project—let us know and we may highlight it on the blog!

Q. Could multiple maps be released at the same time under this NEW program?
Yes. We’re considering accepting multiple maps at once, under the new curated map program. Players have often voiced wanting to see more community-made content accepted into the game, and more frequently.

Q. Would curated maps still need to follow the vanilla game’s art style?
We’d like for any curated experiences to still look and feel like Unturned.

Q. Are these changes set in stone?
No. While the curated program will be changing, all of the changes described here are subject to change further. Regardless, we’re hoping this paints an idea of the direction we’re moving towards, and is exciting to the mapping community.

Commissioning Official Content

Last year, we teased our intent to commission more official content for Unturned. While we aren’t planning on commissioning any new official maps at this time, we have begun the process of reaching out to a longtime creator we haven’t collaborated with before.

And as mentioned with the curated program changes, we may also commission artists to create the bundle contents (including new mythical effects) for any curated maps that release under this program!

Releasing Unturned’s Source Code?

We’ve also teased our desire to release Unturned’s source code. We won’t cover that topic here. We’re still in the very early stages of figuring out what this would entail, but you can expect to hear a little bit more news about this next month!


6 Likes

oh so its more similar to valve’s system? thats much better id say. good work with this new system

also source code release mention? :eye:

interesting changes, though I do want to point out this one in particular;

This point is a little confusing to me. Does this mean map makers won’t get to make cosmetics for their maps anymore? It seems a little weird to take that away with the changes if so.

IMO it makes sense if i.e. the developers aren’t able to create those themselves for whatever reason or prefer to get someone else to make them, which I think would be valid. But if they prefer to create the bundles themselves, they should be able to. I’m assuming that was the intention with the change? If so the wording was a bit odd.

And also

:eyes:

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I am deeply worried at the thought of 2 maps being released at the same time. I believe it takes away from the grandness of a curated map and also might cause unnecessary conflict between developers and players.

My point about grandness stems from the whole communities excitement being centralized into one experience. This grandness would be divided among two projects where players would have to read a synopsis on the map and choose which ever one intrigues them more.

This has its upsides and downsides. Upsides is that players get more content at once and potentially two different experiences. The downsides is that conversations/general discussion on the two maps will obviously be split on who played what map on release and the upcoming months after release. Which isn’t really ideal due to the community being already very divided when it comes to the way we all play.

Another downside is general communal discovery being split as well. What I mean by this is when a map is released usually the community doesn’t really know what to do and as time goes on eventually the collective becomes more refined and understands a map. This would greatly be diminished if the time spent to learn stuff were to be divided by two maps.

Last downside that I can see is putting content creators in a hard position. As of now everyone will make videos on the one new map release and play it. That’s how its been. But if two maps were to release at once you would have a content creator have to ask themselves “What map is more popular”, “What map has more content”, “Should I wait to see the reactions from the community before I make something on it” , ext. Content creators become more strained to capitalize on the hype of two maps being released at the same time which obviously trickless down to less concise and more strategical placement of time/labor to make content which could overshadow a map over the other.

Due to these decisions that everyone makes will lead to a sour taste in the mouths of map developers. I can see a situation where a solo developer makes something just for them to release at the exact same time as a whole dev teams map which completely overshadows them and buries them in the collective consensus. That isn’t fair and If I were the developer I would be definitely be more demotivated because another project could just swoop up the collective conscious. We saw this problem with previous maps to a lesser extent but this problem will be heavily exemplified if this were to become the way the system works going forward. You have to give maps space to breathe.

Lastly I can definitely see a more divided scene go back and forth on what map is better in the moments following a release of two maps. We already see this divide happening with the current maps and due to the general nature of people picking what they prefer I foresee more heated debated on the maps with less knowledge of how they play in these discussions.

The whole point of this is to say this will only divide us. And I feel like you can infer a lot of the problems that stem from this decision that I didn’t even mention.

Players want more content but I believe that desire stems from also not knowing when they will be getting more content. I like the idea of picking out maps from the workshop for curation. And if that’s the way it works going forward I suggest making a schedule for when a map is released. Imagine a scenario where we got a new map every four months. Three maps in a year + potential updates for those maps. That’s a decent amount of content and would be give people something to look forward to. And along with maybe if a project has been continuously worked on it could be cycled into curation again due to having a lot of additions/new content.

I hope this all somewhat made sense. Thanks for reading.

1 Like

I think these are good, positive changes for maps with longer development times. Something I would like to ask is that for projects that want to build more surprise and have a sudden, big drop, would the new system still be able to support that? Though I suppose that’s maybe too much like the old system.

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I’m not sure this will be a problem depending on the kinds of map releases. If there were more experimental or arena maps getting accepted along side a more standard curated map, I’m not sure there’d be much debate (and is debate even a bad thing in this context?)

I’m pretty excited about open source (if it actually happens), but I’m wondering, will we be able to create our own iterations of Unturned and publish them on Steam as mods?

Ravenfield did something like this:

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My concern is that its not clarified. Nor does suggest that. If an arena map were to release with a regular map then I think it would be alright. But the fact is we havent had a currated arena/deathmatch map in so long that suggests that its not even in the cards. Given that knowledge you can see why my concerns arrise with potentially two survival maps dropping at the same time.

2 Likes

You control the game, just tell Nelson to not go through with it.

Yeah. Imo, they shouldn’t release more than one at a time. They should accept more than one at a time, but they need to reduce the time between curated releases instead of putting more maps on one release date. It’d both give more consistent content and allow each curated map to shine individually

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Will this be posted in the Unturned official discord? It’s just that the last post was over “upcoming changes to curated map list” and I feel this post should be better shared to the community, not in a negative way, but a more positive way to ensure it reaches well… the community. This way more people can give feedback over the new changes.


:eyes:

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Not to be negative or something but I believe putting like about 8 words at the end of a long line of text probably isnt the best way.

Okay perhaps it doesnt apply to everyones screen
image
but still putting more emphasize on the point would be better than wrapping it up with the community blog post.

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It is also mentioned and linked within the blog post itself?