The base water level is raised, NOT the sea level.
this can flood many low lying areas including underground monuments, making some maps useless
or causing defects where you appear to be underwater then suddenly you are not... (sewer branch)

Hi, sorry you're having an issue with Tides. I think the issue you're having is cause by how the ocean/sea works in Rust, combined with very low points in your map that are too close to "sea-level". I don't understand the distinction you're making between sea level and base water level, there is only one Ocean Level, then there are rivers and maybe lakes. To illustrate, the next two pictures show what it looks like under my custom map when the ocean level is normal vs when it is really high.




The ocean around your island does not stop at the shore of your island, it continues in all directions as one continuous plane. When you raise the ocean level, you're raising the whole plane, there is no way around that.

To resolve this issue you can lower the maximum tide height in the plugin to meet your needs:

1. Unload the Tides plugin
2. Go to the lowest spot on your map, sewer branch, etc.
3. Using Rcon or in your server console (not in-game), use the env.oceanlevel command to find a maximum tide height that doesn't interfere with the low points on your map.
4. Put the tide height from step 3 into the Tides config
5. Reload Tides

You can also use a map that doesn't have such a low elevation, but that's not as helpful to point out.

Merged post

The other issue is there is something like a transparency layer (alpha), which lets you see through the ground (cave entrances are basically fancy entrances over the ground which has some transparency applied to it so you can go through the ground into the cave below) or if you're technically below the ocean level in a cave or monument the transparency layer keeps you from seeing the water. These layers are agnostic of ocean levels, and in some cases are specifically meant to prevent the ocean from interfering with those areas.

This causes the issue with momentarily being in water and then when you swim down farther you're somehow on dry land in sewers or something. You've passed through a transparency layer, which are at entrances for those.

Yep there is nothing you can do about it.....
My point is that  the "ocean", is the base water level that sits under the map, but on many maps  some monument entrances sit just above the base sea level...
you change the sea level, it effects the whole map, flooding any areas in this zone

Thanks, I've edited the description to include this under Known Issues so it's more clear to new users of the plugin.