Getting Started with Your Rust Dedicated Server

You've just picked up a Rust box and you want it online, named, and ready for your mates to join. Here's how I'd walk a brand new owner through it, roughly in the order I'd do it myself. If you haven't actually grabbed a server yet, you can sort that on our Rust hosting page and come back.

A quick note on terminology before we start: the panel you manage your server from is the LOW.MS Control Panel, which is our TCAdmin-based panel. That's where everything in this guide happens.

Finding your server in the panel

Log in at https://control.low.ms and click through to your Rust service. On the left you'll see the sidebar with everything you need. The ones we'll actually touch today are Service Settings, Configuration Files, Commandline Manager, Web Console, File Manager, Scheduled Tasks and Steam Update. Everything else (Mod Manager, Log Viewer, Cloud Backup, Backup Manager, Current Activity & Stats, Cloud Restore) is useful later but not on day one.

Before you touch anything else, start the server once from the top of the page and open Web Console — if you see Rust booting up and eventually "Server startup complete", you're in good shape. Stop it again before we start editing config, otherwise you'll be fighting a running process.

Giving your server an identity

This is the bit that trips up most new owners, because there isn't a magic "Settings" form with a box for server name. Rust reads its identity from server.cfg, and you edit that under Configuration Files. Open server.cfg and you're looking for (or adding) these lines:

server.hostname "My Community | 2x | Monthly Wipes"
server.description "Welcome to our server. Rules: no cheating. Wipes first Thursday."
server.url "https://yourdiscord.example"
server.headerimage "https://yourdomain.example/banner.jpg"

The header image is a URL, not an upload — Rust fetches it when players view you in the browser. 512x256 is the size I tend to stick to. server.description supports \n for line breaks, which is handy if you want a proper formatted rules block.

Player slots and a handful of other launch-time options live in Commandline Manager rather than server.cfg, because Rust takes them as startup arguments. That's also where you'll find world size and seed, which brings us to the next bit.

Picking a map

Rust's default is a procedural map, generated from a seed (any integer) and a world size between 1000 and 6000. For most community servers I'd stay in the 3000–4500 range — smaller than that gets claustrophobic, bigger than that and half the map never sees a footprint. Change the seed and you get a completely different world layout on the same size.

If you want to preview a seed before committing, rustmaps.com renders procedural maps for you, monuments and all. Very much worth a look before you lock in a wipe.

Two other options worth knowing about. Barren is a stripped-down procedural map with no monuments, roads, rivers or vegetation — it exists mainly for testing and benchmarking, not as a gameplay map, so don't pick it by mistake thinking it's a PvP variant. Custom maps are a real thing though: people build them in RustEdit and you point your server at the .map file. That's a whole rabbit hole on its own and probably not where you want to start on day one.

For deeper configuration knobs once you're comfortable, I've written up the options we get asked about most in the Rust server settings guide.

Admin, moderators and RCON

Before you join the server for the first time, grab your SteamID64 (steamid.io is the one I always send people to). Then, either from Web Console in the panel or from the in-game F1 console once you're on the server, run:

ownerid 7656119XXXXXXXXXX "YourName" "owner"
server.writecfg

ownerid gives you full admin. moderatorid with the same syntax gives someone the reduced set (kick, ban, teleport, that sort of thing) without the more destructive commands. server.writecfg is the one people forget — without it your changes evaporate on the next restart. status is the other command worth memorising; it lists everyone currently connected with their Steam IDs.

RCON itself listens on TCP 28017. You can drive it from the panel's Web Console, or if you'd rather a proper desktop tool, RustAdmin from rustadmin.com is the one I'd pick — it's a standalone RCON client, not an Oxide plugin, and it gives you a nice GUI for bans, chat and live players.

Connecting to your server

The fastest way in is F1 → console → client.connect <ip>:28015, then Enter. You can also favourite the server in Steam (View → Game Servers → Favorites → Add) or search for it by name in the in-game browser under Play Game → Community. I've got a longer write-up with screenshots in how to connect to a Rust server via IP if you want the full three-method tour.

The ports, for reference: 28015 UDP for the game, 28016 UDP for the Steam query, 28017 TCP for RCON. You shouldn't need to forward anything on our boxes — that's handled — but it's useful to know when you're configuring RCON tools.

First things to do once you're in

Once you're on the server as owner, I'd do three things in order. First, type status to make sure you're actually flagged as owner and not just a normal player. Second, double-check server.secure true is set in your config — that's EAC, you want it on, don't disable it unless you genuinely know why. Third, head into Scheduled Tasks in the panel and set a daily restart at a quiet hour. Rust servers get grumpy after a couple of days of uptime and a nightly restart keeps them honest.

When something does go sideways — and at some point it will — the Rust server crashes on startup or randomly article covers most of the common causes. Updates come through Steam Update in the panel; after a forced wipe day you'll want to run that before players can reconnect.

Wipes

Rust has a forced wipe on the first Thursday of every month. Facepunch pushes a game update that day — usually in the European evening — and every server has to update and wipe the map to match. There's no getting around it, but you can lean into it: plenty of servers advertise themselves as "monthly" and only wipe on forced-wipe day.

Plenty of others wipe weekly or bi-weekly on top of that, which is purely your call. Blueprint wipes are a separate thing: Facepunch occasionally forces one alongside a big update, but between those, whether you wipe BPs is entirely up to you. My advice is pick a cadence, put it in your server name and description, and stick to it — players will forgive almost anything except a surprise wipe.

That's the shape of it. If you're still shopping around or want to bump up your slot count, everything lives on the Rust hosting page. And if you want to go further with plugins once the basics are running, the Oxide plugins I'd actually install is a decent starting list.