How to create an empty map for practice in Dota 2

William Davis Published 16/01/2022

An empty Dota 2 map is still full of possibilities.

Practicing in Dota 2 is a lot harder than it has to be. The last hit trainer and demo mode leave a lot to be desired, especially if you’re interested in the more niche parts of the game. Vision and jungle strategies are pretty inaccessible in the standard practice environment. Luckily for studious players, you can make your own lab environment with a little know how. Here’s how to create an empty map for training in Dota 2.

How to spawn an empty map in Dota 2

To spawn an empty map in Dota 2, click on the play button in the bottom right corner. From that menu, click the custom lobby option near the top and choose create. Select the edit menu in the bottom right to bring up the menu. Change the server location to local host and the game type to all pick. Lastly, be sure to click the enable cheats options.

When you load into the game, you should see a completely empty map. Lane and jungle creeps will still spawn as normal and the game will continue to run while you do whatever you want to do. If you want to max out your hero to get to the testing, open up chat and type in the following commands.

-lvlmax
-gold 99999
-wtf

Those three will automatically max out your level, increase gold to the maximum, and get rid of all cooldowns and mana costs on your spells and items. Those are only possible if you enable cheats in the lobby menu beforehand.

What is an empty map used for in Dota 2?

Having an empty Dota 2 map may seem useless, but it actually provides a much better training environment than demo mode. In the standard training area, there are no neutral creeps and only a small section of the middle lane. There’s no way to test things against different towers of neutral units. On an empty map, you can test your theories in a much more useful way.

For example, heroes like Chen and Enchantress make special use of neutral creeps. It’s impossible to test out Enchant or Holy Persuasion in demo mode without using some specialized console commands. The act of tabbing between your jungle creeps can take some time to get used to, but an empty Dota 2 map is literally free from distractions.

Another good use is testing out ward ideas. The demo mode map is only a small slice of the actual map, which makes it pretty useless for trying different ward combinations. An empty map has all the important spots needed to see what observers can spot and sentries can block. In a metagame where blocking jungle camps is extremely important, an empty map can be used to test out all the important angles.

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