River City St. Louis: A Massive, Memory-Soaked Sandbox Enters Playtest

Playtest Launches on Dec 1, 2025

If you’ve ever wanted to wander a living, breathing St. Louis inside a survival sandbox, Rive City St. Louis is about to hand you the keys. Launching its public playtest on Dec 1, 2025, River City is a sprawling, land‑locked 20480×20480 map that recreates St. Louis, Missouri, East St. Louis, Illinois, and the surrounding metro—split by the Mississippi and stitched together with equal parts fidelity and nostalgia.

Built on near street‑for‑street layouts derived from Google Maps, River City fuses present‑day neighborhoods with lost landmarks: places like Crestwood Mall and other long‑gone shopping centers return as explorable spaces, letting you navigate the city as it was and as it is. It’s an urban time capsule you can actually play—familiar interstates and bridges, iconic corridors and corners, and vanished destinations resurrected to tell their story through geometry, sightlines, and loot.

What makes River City different

• Scale that feels like a real metro: At 20480×20480, the map’s footprint is big enough to support true urban traversal—river crossings, multi‑neighborhood routes, and those long “just one more block” detours that turn into full‑on expeditions.
• A mix of eras: Modern streets sit alongside reconstructed, retired sites, creating a layered city that rewards both memory and curiosity. Veterans will recognize the bones; newcomers get a rich, dense sandbox to learn and own.
• Attention to place: This isn’t an impressionistic “inspired by” map. The team’s street‑for‑street ethos gives the city a grounded feel—landmarks anchor navigation, and neighborhoods carry distinct identities you can sense and leverage.

Playtest realities: rough edges, constant updates

This first month is about stress‑testing the world and tightening the screws. Expect unexpected server restarts, crashes, and frequent updates as issues are discovered and fixed. Custom houses and structures are being wired up so their proxies properly spawn loot; that work is ongoing and will roll out over the next few days.

The playtest will run for at least a month (and likely longer) while the team brings the “Playtest 1” area to a standard they’re happy with. In practice, that means iteration—pathing tweaks, spawn adjustments, performance tuning, and polish passes as player behavior reveals what the city needs.

How to jump in

• Start date: Dec 1, 2025
• Server: RDS RiverCity (1PP|Official)
• Address: 63.143.63.82:2302
• Perspective: First‑person only (as the server tag suggests), which suits the map’s grounded, urban feel.

Drop in, pick a neighborhood, and start learning the city. River crossings make for tense runs; malls and commercial strips offer risk‑reward loops; residential grids are perfect for small‑team scavenge routes. The best way to play is to treat River City like a real place: plan, move with intent, and let the geometry teach you.