Following the release of the new Trade Workshop Template and "Angkor Wat And The Khmer Legacy", various people asked more info about the origin of the extra Gaia Rocks I put there, and how I managed to "unlock" them using RoR. Since we had several newcomers in the last months, I think it's good to revamp this topic.

First of all, these rocks are innovative only for AoE. They are actually an everday sight in RoR scenarios.


This is the well-known standard set of Gaia Rocks available with AoE:

However, there are these three rocks which are buried within the graphic.drs and never come into use.

These rocks were part of the beta version of AoE, and for some reason were excluded from the scenario builder in the final release. Finally, they showed up again in RoR.

However, they can be "unlocked" and used with AoE. To do this you need RoR. Simply generate a blank grass map and save it in .scx format, then exit from RoR and rename your map as .scn. It will perfectly work with AoE.

You need to make a grass map because:

- Your map will automatically feature these rocks.
- Beach articles will not show up: they crash the game if loaded into AoE.


Obviously it's easiest to download the Template, because you won't need to delete trillions of undesired rocks. The drawback of every Template is that you're forced to respect its mapsize, while by following the RoR/AoE exchange method described above it's possible to have those rocks on any map format. The true target of my Template are the few AoE designers who still don't have RoR or the Gold Edition.