Map Section Packs

Every classic TA map editor works the same way: you don’t paint terrain tile by tile — you place map sections, ready-made terrain pieces with their heights baked in (hills, coastlines, river pieces, whole mountains), and fit them together until the map looks right. The editors came with a handful of these worlds; the community made hundreds more over 25 years. This page collects 25,465 sections in 182 worlds, repacked into clean, editor-ready archives.

Downloads

Search a world, download its pack, drop it into your editor’s section folder. Each .hpi is self-contained: the section tiles, heights and preview minimaps travel with it.

How to use them (Mappy)

1. Create one dedicated folder for section archives, e.g. C:\TA-Sections — do not point the editor at your TA directory. The game’s own archives (totala.hpi, the GP3s, hundreds of map UFOs) contain no sections at all, and preloading them exhausts the editor.
2. Put the packs you want into that folder and add it as a search path under Edit → Preferences. Restart Mappy. The worlds appear in the section sidebar.
3. Loose .sct files are ignored — sections load only from archives (.hpi, .ufo, .ccx, .gpf, .gp3) with the internal path sections\World\Category\name.sct. The packs here follow that layout exactly.

Annihilator and Cavedog’s original TAE use the same section libraries.

What’s inside

• The official Cavedog worlds (Moon, GreenWorld, Lava, Mars, Metal, Archipelago, Acid, Crystal, Slate, Urban, Water and more) from the 1998 Map Section downloads and worlds.hpi on the Core Contingency CD
• Community world and transition packs: C_A_P (mixed tilesets, EG cliffs), TADS / UTAS / TS series, Evergreen, Zhon, Creon, Taros/Veruna, Desert Moon, Siberia, Military Base, Impact, Adamante, Neptune and many more
• Every section’s preview minimap renders exactly like the editors show it

Credits

Original terrain sections © 1998 Cavedog Entertainment (Map Section downloads, Core Contingency TAE/worlds.hpi). Community sections by their respective authors — C_A_P, the TADS/UTAS/TS teams and the tileset creators of File Universe / TAUniverse, preserved from the community archives. Repacked and catalogued by TA Archive. If you made one of these packs and want a different attribution — or want a pack removed — please use the contact in the Imprint.