Rust server MOTD, chat commands and scheduled messages

Vanilla Rust has no welcome message, no timed announcements and no !pop. Most servers get them from a handful of Oxide plugins. rustd.xyz does all four from one page, over plain RCON, so they also work on a server with no Oxide installed.

Where the settings live

1. Open your server in the panel and pick Messages in the left menu.
2. Change what you need in the four sections below.
3. Press Save messages. The server picks up the change within about 30 seconds, with no restart and no reconnect.

Set a welcome message (MOTD)

The welcome message is sent when a player joins. Tick Enabled and type the message, up to 200 characters. {player} becomes the joining player's name; the default is Welcome to the server, {player}!.

Choose Private to send it only to the player who joined, or Public to send it to everyone. Private messages need the RustdMap plugin (1.3.0 or newer) on the server, which is how the panel whispers to one player. Without it, a private message is sent publicly rather than not at all.

Schedule broadcasts

Scheduled broadcasts are rotating announcements: your Discord invite, the server rules, a reminder to report cheaters. Write one message per line. The panel sends the first line, waits, sends the next, and starts again from the top after the last.

• Send one every (hours) sets the gap, from 1 to 168 hours (a week).
• The first message goes out as soon as the panel connects to the server. If the connection drops and comes back, the rotation restarts from the first line.
• Broadcasts only go out while the server is up and connected to the panel.

Turn on !pop, !wipe and !help

With Chat commands enabled, players can type these in game chat:

• !pop answers with players online, the player limit and sleepers, for example Players online: 42/100 | Sleepers: 310.
• !wipe answers with the time until the next scheduled wipe and its date in UTC, taken from your wipe schedule. With no schedule it says No wipe is scheduled.
• !help lists the commands.

Each command has its own Private/Public reply setting, with the same RustdMap requirement as the welcome message. The panel answers at most one command every 3 seconds, so a player spamming !pop cannot flood chat.

The /pop forms work too, but only with RustdMap 1.3.0 or newer installed: Rust never passes a message that starts with / to chat, so without the plugin the panel never sees it. The ! forms work everywhere.

!verify is listed on the same page but is not an info command: it links a player's Steam account to your Discord, and it works whether or not the other commands are enabled.

Add a kill feed

Tick Announce PVP kills to post a line in chat whenever one player kills another. The default message is {killer} killed {victim}. There is no weapon placeholder: Rust's kill log names the killer and the victim but not the weapon.

Tick Also announce NPC and environment deaths to announce a player killed by a scientist, an animal, a fall or the cold. That message uses {victim} and {cause}. Suicides are never announced.

Placeholders

A placeholder the message does not support is left as typed, so a mistake shows up in chat rather than vanishing.

Talk in chat yourself

The server's Overview page shows game chat live in its activity feed, and the box under the feed sends a message to game chat as the server (up to 200 characters). If you have connected Discord, chat can be relayed to a Discord channel and admins can reply from Discord with /say.

If you already run Oxide plugins for this

The panel sends every message with the server's own say command, so it does not replace or switch off any plugin. If a plugin already sends a welcome message, timed announcements or a kill feed, players will see both. Pick one source for each kind of message and turn the other off: untick that section here, or unload the plugin from the panel's Plugins page.

Plugins and the panel can sit side by side for different jobs, for example a chat-format plugin alongside the panel's broadcasts. The one plugin the panel itself uses here is RustdMap, which it can install for you from the Plugins page; it is what makes private replies and the / command forms possible.