We run Beer-UK on a hand-picked RustMaps map instead of Shockbyte's default procedural generation. Here's what we look for, and the gotchas we hit getting Shockbyte to actually load it — written for other admins, not players.
Monument count that matches the world size — too few and there's nothing to fight over, too many and it's chaos. Land percentage in a sensible range (we aim ~45–55%) rather than a map that's mostly ocean. And a scan of the heatmap for dead zones — big empty stretches with no monuments or resources nearby.
Shockbyte's Config UI has a dedicated "Custom Map Link" field under Rust Server Settings. Set it, save, restart — and the server still generates its own procedural map anyway. That field doesn't actually reach the launch command by itself.
The fix: open Config → Startup Parameters and add +server.levelurl <your RustMaps .map download URL> directly into the custom parameters box, then restart. That's the only thing that reliably works.
The same bug pattern affects the dedicated Header Image and Logo Image fields too — if you use those, they need to be duplicated into Startup Parameters as +server.headerimage and +server.logoimage as well, or they silently drop out of the actual command. If a Shockbyte "dedicated field" maps to a Rust server.* convar, don't assume it reaches the server — verify it.
Don't trust the "Start Command Preview" box right after saving — it can show stale values for a while even when the save went through fine. The real test is the server console after a genuine restart: look for the map image upload line (something like Rust.MapCache-Images: Image uploaded to backend...) and check the filename matches the map you set, not a fresh procedural hash.
Your server references the map by URL on every boot — if RustMaps has an outage or your account has an issue, that link can go dead. Download the .map file from RustMaps and keep a copy somewhere you control, so you're not solely dependent on their servers being up at boot time.
Our own map page runs a small scheduled job that logs into the server via RCON once a day, reads the live seed and world size, and looks the map up on RustMaps automatically if it's changed — no manual updating needed after a wipe. Worth building something similar if you're maintaining a public map page yourself.
Come ask in the Discord — happy to compare notes with other admins.