The Beginner’s Guide to ETS2/ATS Mapping (Don’t Panic!)

By SecretImbecile (Jack Kelly), forked and extended by RootlessAgrarian (De Clarke)

What’s a Map Editor?

This guide hopes to become a comprehensive and openly editable collection of resources for the SCS game engine map editor, used by Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator. It is intended for real beginners (rank newbies to map editing) as well as being a reference/reminder for those with some experience.

The Guide is very much WIP and changing daily/weekly, sometimes hourly. Expect to see a lot of stubs and incomplete stuff. The “Fundamentals” section is almost complete as of Jan 2018. Some very basic non-map modding is also discussed, since map modders may also want to introduce custom models. Truck skinning is not covered.

For further reference see

The last 2 PDFs are from a few years ago and some editor features have changed, but they are still worth reading!

Contents

In a hurry? Click here for a WIP FAQ – most commonly asked (and answered!) questions from the SCS and ProMods forum. If you are a n00b then your early questions/problems will probably be on this list.

Fundamentals (pretty much complete!)

  1. Before You Begin (important!)
  2. Basic Editor Setup
  3. Creating a simple map
  4. Loading and testing your map
  5. Decorating your map
  6. Preserving the illusion
  7. Basic Tips and Tricks
  8. Shortcuts and HotKeys

Intermediate Tutorials (marked with “-“ means outline only, “+” means some useful content but incomplete)

  1. Editing in the Fast Lane: skip the repackage step while editing
  2. -Roadworks Ahead: doing more with roads
  3. -Signs and Portents: road signage
  4. -Bright Lights, Big City: urban areas
  5. -A River Runs Through It: rural areas & natural features
  6. -Roadside Attractions: walkers and movers
  7. -Interactive Gizmos: garages, fuel stations, ferries and more
  8. -A Field Guide to Map Objects
  9. -The Rules of the Game: special areas, AI behaviour, speed limits etc
  10. -Debugging: Finding It, Fixing It
  11. -Power Mapping: Some Advanced Topics
  12. +Intermediate Tips and Tricks

Advanced Tutorials (items 1 and 2 are complete)

  1. Editor backgrounds for custom modules (Part 1)
  2. Editor Backgrounds (Part 2)
  3. How to add to the Europe (or USA) module

Distributing Maps

  1. New module checklist
  2. Europe/USA extension checklist

Non-Map Mods

  1. Basic Concept
  2. How To
  3. Why
  4. Example

Would you like to write an article—including or in addition to those proposed above? see below.

Sharing and Contributing

License

A number of tutorial resources have been written for the SCS game engine map editor, but it’s been difficult to build upon these efforts due to their lack of license, or restrictive license.

The contents of this guide are permissively licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, meaning you’re encouraged to repost the contents of this guide without seeking permission. This includes posting completed guides back to the official SCS software modding wiki. (hint hint)

Attribution is a requirement of the license wherever you redistribute or modify the guide, a link back to this repo AND the original github repo will suffice. This version is a fork of that original repo: the original author no longer wishes to maintain&update, so the torch has been passed.

Contributing

Outside contributions will be paramount to making this guide comprehensive. If you’re experienced with the ETS2/ATS map editors, your assistance in creating these guides would be greatly welcomed! You should contribute in one of the following ways

Errors & Corrections

If you spot typos or factual errors in these guides, but don’t plan on making large contributions, please PM RootlessAgrarian on either the SCS or ProMods forum, or make a note in the Issues here.

Content Contribution

If you wish to write a large contribution to the guide, contact me (as above) to become a Contrib, pull your own copy of the repo, etc.

Co-authors are more than welcome, they are desperately wanted.