Crater

"Fight in Dare's sunken crash-site."

— Bungie.net

Crater is a Firefight map in Halo 3: ODST, based on Dare's crash site in Tayari Plaza , set in the city of New Mombasa.^[1]

Layout

Crater is a relatively small map, with elevated outer edges surrounding a center area placed considerably lower than the rest, creating a crater shape. In this map, Covenant spawn from Phantoms which drop enemies at the side of the map adjacent to the player spawn point, as well as so called "Monster closets", which enemies spawn through placed on the left and right sides of the map. (from the spawning player's perspective).

The player's spawning area consists of two connected parallel tunnels which lead out to a small elevated area. Enemy access to this location is provided by two staircases on the left and right sides of the player area, which also contains a turret in the center. The machine gun turret has a broad field of fire, and is capable of shooting at almost any point on the map, but the location is greatly exposed.

There are two versions of this map, one taking place during the day, and the other taking place at night. The night version contains Engineers, while the day contains Jackal Snipers, who are a very long distance from your starting point, making pistol counter-sniping difficult.

Strategies

There are a few good ways to stay alive for a long time on this map: One is to stay in the spawning base at all times, and pile some pistols in the second floor (if you want to snipe from there). However, when the Chieftains come simply have one player "guide" him up the stairs while having another assassinate him. The second way is to clear the walkways to your left and right as soon as possible, and having 2 players stay there to hold the two places, and have another engage in sniping from the second floor, or using the turret.
Either keep the turret mounted or conserve ammo for Chieftains, Hunters, or Engineers.
Be careful using the turret during rounds with Catch enabled:
- Grunts and Brutes can easily stick the turret and kill the gunner from the pit below.
- The turret falls off its mount as if you had picked it up (thus making it have limited ammo) if a grenade, a Gravity Hammer, a Fuel Rod gun, or any weapon with splash damage is used near it.
There are three potential landing sites for Phantoms, the Pit, ahead of the spawning zone, and to the left of the spawning zone. Grunts can easily be picked off in earlier rounds when dropping from the ledges above for massive streaks early in the game.
There are three ammo spawns for the Sniper Rifle.
On the far side of the map, there are two small bus shelter-like structures with one glass wall which provide an excellent safe view, and are good for running around to avoid rockets, hunter shots and hammer chieftains. The only potential downside is that every second wave has half of the units drop down from a phantom basically right beside that location. It is also far from health packs. This general area has a better vantage point to see all incoming units, and is closer to the frequent snipers shooting at you in day mode.