I've already made my map but don't know what I need to do to function in a mod folder, I doubt I can just zip it. I tried making a copy of the world to try out different things but when loading it up all the textures were gone.
Hello...? Please upload the mod file, then we can look at materials file and fix it for you to have textures in your map
Your mod is now in the 0.23/levels, right? If so, your edited map is a "west_coast_usa" folder, but you can't upload a folder on this site, so make a zip/rar archive of that with Winrar then upload it here. Then we can pack it for you