Rust Settings and Gameplay Rules

The Rust Settings page is where you decide what players see in the server browser and what rules they play by. It writes to server.cfg for you and applies most changes to the running server straight away, so you never edit that file by hand.

1Open Rust Settings

• Log in to your game panel and click your Rust server.
• Click Rust Settings in the left menu under GAME SERVER.
• Each block has its own Edit button, and the panel on the right shows how your server will look in the in-game browser as you type.

2Server Identity

• Server name, description, website and max players.
• The name is what players scan in a browser full of thousands of servers, so put the things people filter for in it: the rate, the wipe cycle, the region.
• The description is where rules, rates and your Discord invite belong.

3Images

• Upload a header image and a logo. The panel hosts them for you, so you do not need to find somewhere to put the files and hope the link still works in six months.
• The gallery keeps what you have uploaded, with explicit Header and Logo buttons so you can swap between them without re-uploading.
• The logo is also what the Rust+ app shows for your server.

4Server Browser Tags

• Tags are what the in-game filters actually read. A player looking for a weekly 2x PvE server filters on tags, not on your name.
• Pick from the grouped chips, or add your own. The page shows the resulting server.tags line if you want to copy it.
• See how to add tags for what each one means.

5Gameplay

This is the block that changes how the game plays. Everything here is written into server.cfg and applied live where Rust allows it.

• PvE turns off player versus player entirely. The single biggest decision about what kind of server you are running.
• Max team size caps how many people can be in a team. This is what a "duo" or "trio" server means, and it belongs in your tags too.
• Decay and upkeep decide whether bases rot while people are offline. Softening these is the usual first step on a friendly server.
• Radiation and building stability can be switched off for a more relaxed or creative server.
• Instant crafting removes craft timers, which is what most modded servers do.
• Player list decides whether players can see who else is online.
• Item despawn and corpse despawn control how long dropped loot and bodies stay in the world. Lower values are kinder to performance on a busy server.

6Automatic Restarts

• A daily restart keeps memory and lag down, and doubles as a keep-alive because an offline server gets started at the scheduled time.
• Set up to eight times a day, warn players in chat beforehand, save the world first and announce it in Discord.
• Full walkthrough: how to set up automatic restarts.

7Advanced

Thirty-odd less common server.cfg convars, grouped and searchable, each showing its plain-English meaning, the convar name and Rust's default.

• Performance: tick rate, entity rate, save interval, anti-speedhack tolerance.
• Players: join queue limit, idle kick and its mode, global versus local chat, combat log delay, and the message shown when someone joins.
• Survival: bleeding damage and the chance of recovering while wounded.
• World: day and night length, rain and fog chance, resource density.
• Anti-cheat: Facepunch's anti-hack, how strict it is, whether violations are printed, and terrain protection.
• Events: patrol helicopter, Bradley, cargo ship, cargo plane, Chinook, the airdrop player minimum, the master switch for random events, and the seasonal ones.

Leave a field empty and it is removed from server.cfg, so Rust uses its own default. Use the search box rather than scrolling: typing airdrop or idle finds the setting faster than reading six groups.

One to leave alone: Log chat to console (chat.serverlog). The panel's chat log and flagged words read from it, so turning it off silently disables both on the Players page.

8Discord Notifications

• Two webhooks: announcements for things your players should know, and a moderation log for what your staff does.
• Each has a test button, so you can confirm the channel works before you rely on it.
• Once connected, wipes announce themselves and every moderation action from the Players page is recorded.

Good to Know

• Your own server.cfg lines are kept. The page writes the settings it manages and leaves anything else you put in that file alone.
• Most of it applies live. Rust accepts many of these over RCON while the server runs. A few take effect on the next restart, which the page tells you.
• Tags and name do different jobs. The name is read by humans, tags are read by filters. Do both or you will not be found.
• You can delegate this. A subuser with rust.settings can change these without any other access to your server. See how to share access.

Finished

Your server looks and plays the way you meant it to. If it is configured correctly but still not appearing for players, read why your Rust server is not in the server browser.