A hole in the world is the same class of problem as an invisible wall, turned inside out. Instead of solid ground where nothing is drawn, you have something drawn with no solid ground underneath it.

The world you see and the world you collide with are two separate sets of data. They usually agree. When they stop agreeing, you get a hole — and the game will not tell you, because as far as it is concerned nothing has gone wrong.

The three causes, and how to tell them apart

One — a removed building left a gap

Someone deleted a structure to make room for a new one, and the ground that was part of that structure went with it. Very common where a custom interior has replaced a default building.

How it looks: the hole has straight edges and roughly matches the footprint of a building. You fall a long way.

Two — two maps disagree about the same ground

Two add-ons both supply the collision for one area. Only one of them can win, and the winner does not include the piece you are standing on.

How it looks: the hole has an odd shape that does not correspond to anything visible, and it often appears near where a custom map meets the default world.

Three — the collision file never loaded

The map is drawing, but the file describing its solid surfaces is missing, misnamed, or in a resource that is not being started.

How it looks: you fall through everything in that map, not one spot. If a whole interior is passable, stop reading about holes — the resource is not loading its collision at all, and that is a different fix.

Pin down where it is

Stand at the edge of the hole, as close as you can get without falling, and record your coordinates. Then walk the perimeter and record two or three more points. You want to know how wide the gap actually is, because you are about to fill it and a patch that is slightly too small is indistinguishable from one that does not work.

Note the height too. You are filling a gap in a surface, so you need the level the surrounding floor sits at — not the level you land on when you fall.

Check whether it is yours at all

Before assuming an add-on did this, confirm the area is one your server actually modifies. Read your server.cfg and list the map resources that really start — remembering that a commented line does nothing, and that a bracketed folder starts everything inside it.

If nothing you run touches that part of the map, you are not looking for a conflict. You are looking at either a base-game quirk or something a script is doing at runtime, and neither is fixed by changing load order.

Closing the gap

Once you know it is yours, you have two honest options.

Fix the cause. If two resources are fighting, decide which should win and change the order so it loads last, or stop the one you do not need. This is always better than patching over the symptom, because it also fixes everything else those two resources disagree about — and there is usually more than one thing.

Or patch the hole. Sometimes the cause is a building that is genuinely gone and should stay gone. Then the correct fix is to add a piece of invisible solid ground where the missing floor used to be: a collision volume with no model attached, in its own small resource, loaded last.

Do it in its own resource. Never edit the map add-on itself — the next update from its author will silently undo your work, months later, when you have long forgotten you did it.

Getting the patch the right size

This is where people lose an afternoon. A patch has to be:

  • Wide enough to overlap the good floor on every side. Butting it exactly against the edge leaves a seam players will find within a day.
  • At the right height. A few centimetres too high is a step people trip on; too low is a dip they fall into. Match the surrounding floor.
  • Thick enough not to be passed through at speed. A paper-thin surface can be skipped straight past by a fast-moving player or vehicle.
  • Oriented to span the gap. A panel that is correctly sized but turned ninety degrees leaves the hole exactly as open as it was.

Test it like a player, not like an admin

Restart the server, then fully quit the game and rejoin — collision is cached on the client, and a simple reconnect will happily show you the old world and convince you the fix failed.

Then attack it. Walk across slowly, sprint across, drive across, and try to reach the middle from underneath. A patch that survives a walk and fails a car is a patch you will hear about from a player.

Leave a note for yourself

Whatever you build, name the resource something you will recognise in a year, and write one line somewhere saying what it patches and why. The person who has to understand this later is you, and by then the reason will be completely gone.