Weeks away from the release of Halo 5: Guardians, 343 Industries has finally lifted the lid on Halo 5’s Forge mode. A new post on the Halo Waypoint blog from studio head Josh Holmes and Forge lead designer Tom French describes Halo 5’s Forge mode as a “giant leap forward” and “the biggest evolution of the feature since the original was released with Halo 3.”

“The creativity of the Forge community knows no bounds and our goal was to give them more power and control than ever before,” writes Holmes. “We wanted to remove as many constraints as possible so they can create high quality maps that rival the ones that we are shipping with the game.”

The post contains a lot of detail covering Forge’s new and refined controller-based editing and the ability to group, duplicate, and stamp down items. Grouped items can also be welded together to a “parent” object (French’s examples are a soccer ball with traffic cone spikes that rolls around, or a weapon pad attached to a larger animating object). Halo 5’s Forge mode contains over 1,600 objects, including a host of new object types. Check out the in-depth post for much, much more detail.

Halo 5’s Forge mode won’t be included in the game itself when its released on October 27 but Holmes confirms it will arrive in December, “just in time for the holiday break.”

“From there, we’ll be running Forge as an ongoing (free) service for Halo 5, taking feedback from the community and delivering new features and content on an ongoing basis,” he writes.