Summoner's Rift Map Guide: What Every Area Is For

A tour of Summoner's Rift by what each part of it is for: the pits, the river, the buff camps, the bushes and the base. Every piece of the map, and the decision it exists to create.

League of Legends Guide

Summoner's Rift Map

Every Part of the Map

Summoner's Rift is small enough to memorize and detailed enough that most players never do. This tour works outward from the parts that decide games.

The River The Pits Buff Camps and Scuttle Jungle Camps Turrets and Bushes The Base

The river

The river is the only part of the map that belongs to neither team, which is exactly why every important fight starts near it. It connects the two halves of the jungle, it contains both objective pits, and it's the shortest path between a lane and anywhere else.

Everything about vision, ganking and objective control is really a conversation about who's allowed to stand in the river at a given moment. If you learn one thing about the map, learn to look at it before you walk anywhere.

The two pits

The dragon pit sits in the bottom river and the baron pit in the top, which is why bot lane's early game is loud and top lane's late game is. Both are small boxes with two entrances. Contesting them is dangerous because the fight happens in a place where nobody can spread out.

The dragon pit runs the whole game and permanently reshapes the map after two kills. The baron pit changes tenants three times (Voidgrubs, then Rift Herald, then Baron himself). Neither is a fight you take because a timer said so.

Buff camps and the scuttle crab

Blue and red sit deep in each jungle quarter and hand out the two crests that change how a champion plays for two minutes. They're also the reason invading has a payoff: a stolen buff is worth more than the camp (it moved from them to you).

The scuttle crab is the odd one out, patrolling the river rather than sitting in a camp and running away instead of fighting. It exists to make two junglers arrive in the same place at the same time (the shrine it drops is worth a lot more than its gold).

The jungle camps

Gromp, wolves, raptors and krugs: four camps in each half of each jungle, all pure gold and experience with no strings attached, and all on respawn timers that never stop running.

For some reason, laners badly underuse them. If your wave is pushed in and nothing is happening, the nearest camp is free money sitting fifteen seconds away, and taking it isn't stealing from your jungler if they were on the other side of the map.

Turrets and bushes

Turrets come off in order, carry five plates each, and take 80% less damage (true damage included) when there's no wave and no Rift Herald next to them. That last rule is why a lane you're winning still needs minions to convert anything, and it's why a Herald charge is worth more than the damage it does.

Plates don't expire any more. They used to disappear at 14:00 and that hasn't been true for a while, so a plate is still 120 gold to you and whoever is standing near you at any point in the game. All five plus the turret itself is 650. What does change is the turret: every chunk of health it loses hands it a stack of armor and magic resist that grows with the number of you standing in it, so the last plate is always the slowest one.

There are 39 patches of brush (41 once the Ocean Rift has formed and two more grow by the dragon pit), and every ambush in the game happens in one of them. Brush is fog of war, so anything that gives vision of it exposes whoever is inside. In practice a bush you've warded stops being cover for the rest of that ward's life.

The base, the inhibitors and the fountain

Three lanes and three inhibitors (one per lane), with two turrets in front of the Nexus. Break an inhibitor and that lane sends reinforced minions until it grows back, which is how the game turns a lead into pressure that plays itself. By the time you're inside a base most decisions have been made; the one that hasn't is whether to take the inhibitor or the fight, and it's usually the inhibitor, because it keeps working after the fight ends.

The fountain is the only genuinely safe square on the map, and time spent there is time nobody is playing. Every extra second is a wave you didn't meet and a camp that respawned without you.

---

The short version

The river decides who's allowed to move, the pits punish teams that arrive without setting up, and the parts of the map most players ignore are the ones sitting fifteen seconds from their lane.

For each piece in depth, our guides cover jungle camps, Baron, dragons, brush and turrets in far more detail than a tour can.

Spawn times and what every objective gives you are on our objectives guide.