Connecting your game panel

If your host runs Pterodactyl or Pelican, CerebRUST can do things no in-game plugin ever can: restart the server, tell you whether it is actually running, and change the world settings that live in the panel rather than in server.cfg.

Find it under Configure → Integrations → Game panel. Like the SFTP credential, connecting one is owner-only — it is a credential for a machine you pay for. Using what it unlocks is admin.

Create a subuser first

CerebRUST will not accept your account API key, and that is deliberate.

An account key reaches every server on your panel account — including ones CerebRUST has never heard of, and ones you might add next year. A subuser key reaches this one server, does exactly what you ticked, and you can revoke it without touching anything else.

Pterodactyl only lets an account create its own API key, so there is one unavoidable step where you sign in as the subuser. It takes a minute, and you never have to do it again.

The five steps

1. Create the subuser. On your panel, open this server → Users → Create user, and tick the ten boxes below.

   Use a plus-address on your own email — you+cerebrust@yourdomain.com — and the invite lands in your normal inbox rather than needing a second mailbox.

2. Set them a password yourself. Go to your panel’s admin area → Users, find the account you just created, and set a password on it. This skips waiting on an invite email, and works even if your panel’s outbound mail is not configured.

3. Sign in as them, once. Use a private / incognito window — otherwise you will be signed out of your own admin session and have to log back in.

4. Generate the key. As that user: Account → API Credentials → create one. Copy it straight away; the panel shows it once and never again.

5. Paste it into CerebRUST and press Test. Then close the private window — you are finished with that account for good.

Why the password step

Step 2 looks like a detour and is actually the shortcut. Creating a subuser normally sends an invite email that the new account has to accept, which needs your panel’s mail to be working and needs you to have access to that inbox. Setting the password from the admin side skips both.

Tick exactly these ten

This is everything CerebRUST needs for full functionality. Nothing on this list is optional for the feature it enables — but every line is optional in the sense that leaving it unticked just means that feature does not appear. Nothing breaks.

file.delete is new, and this page used to promise the opposite

Until August 2026 this page said “CerebRUST never deletes a file”, and that was true. It is not any more: Save hygiene clears out the map files each wipe leaves behind on your server, and that needs permission to remove them.

We are telling you rather than quietly adding a tenth box, because you may have granted access on the strength of the old sentence. Two things bound it: CerebRUST only ever deletes from a list it has shown you and you have confirmed, and the only files it will ever put on that list are the .map and .sav files of maps you have already wiped away. Your current map is not eligible and cannot be made eligible.

If you would rather it never had this, leave the box unticked. Everything else keeps working.

Permission	What it gets you
file.read	Lists your server’s files, so CerebRUST can find server.cfg.
file.read-content	Reads server.cfg, and checks which plugin version is installed.
file.create	Creates server.cfg on a server that has never had one.
file.update	Edits server.cfg, and updates the CerebRUST plugin.
file.delete	Clears out old map files on the Save hygiene page — nothing else.
control.restart	The Restart button.
control.start	The Start button — bringing back a server that has fallen over.
control.stop	The Stop button.
startup.read	Reads the world size, seed and level your server actually boots with.
startup.update	Changes them.

The one that catches people

file.read and file.read-content are different permissions. The first only lets CerebRUST list a directory; the second is what lets it actually read server.cfg. Tick both, or the config editor will connect happily and then fail when you open it.

Why file.create?

Rust never writes a server.cfg of its own — the file only exists if somebody made it. So a freshly installed server has none, which is exactly the server you are most likely to be configuring. Without file.create, CerebRUST can edit an existing config but cannot start one.

Press Test after connecting and the page marks each box ticked or not ticked, and names any that are still outstanding. You do not have to guess.

What CerebRUST never asks for

Everything else on the panel’s permission list, and the page will show you the full set with a reason for each. The ones worth stating plainly, because Pterodactyl’s own documentation flags them as dangerous:

• backup.download — would let CerebRUST read every file on your server.
• backup.restore — would let it delete all of them.
• settings.reinstall — would let it wipe the server.
• user.* — would let it create subusers, including ones with more access than it has.

Also never: control.console (CerebRUST runs no console commands — the plugin’s allow-list is the only way it reaches your game, and it is deliberately not a passthrough), file.archive, allocation.*, database.*, schedule.*, settings.rename, startup.docker-image and activity.read.

If you tick more than the ten, CerebRUST will not use them.

What it unlocks

Press Test and CerebRUST tries each thing rather than assuming it can. The Integrations page then lists exactly what your subuser actually granted, so a missing tick shows up as a missing permission rather than as a button that fails later.

• Power — start, stop and force restart, from the server’s Overview page. It also reads the live power state, which is the one thing a plugin inside a stopped server cannot report. ⚠️ These are the last resort, not the way to restart your server — see below.
• World settings — on most panels, server.worldsize and server.seed are passed on the startup command line, and command-line settings beat server.cfg at boot. So on those hosts editing the file does nothing and silently reverts on restart. With the panel connected, CerebRUST writes them where they actually take effect.
• Files — the same server.cfg editing and plugin updates SFTP offers, over the panel instead. If you have both connected, CerebRUST uses SFTP for ordinary file edits and the panel for world settings, because that is where each one is actually read from.
• Save hygiene — clearing the map files left behind by past wipes. SFTP grants this too; you do not need a panel for it.

Restarting: use the Restart card, not the panel

Do not use the panel’s Force restart as your normal restart

A panel restart is a power cycle. It signals the game and then kills the process if it has not stopped in time. Rust does not take that well: everything since the last save is gone — bases people placed, blueprints they learnt, what was in their inventories — and nobody gets a warning.

The Restart card on your server’s Overview page is the one to use. It runs Rust’s own restart command, which:

• gives everyone a countdown they can see in game, with your reason if you write one,
• forces a save before it goes down,
• shuts the game down cleanly, and
• can be cancelled right up until the server goes down, if you change your mind.

It works on every server running the CerebRUST plugin. It needs no panel and no SFTP — if you have neither connected, this still works.

Your host is what brings the server back afterwards. Pterodactyl, Pelican, LinuxGSM and every managed host do this automatically; that is what their “auto-restart” setting is for.

So what is the panel’s power section for?

Two things, and neither is an ordinary restart:

• Start — a server that has fallen over cannot restart itself, and no plugin inside it can tell you it has fallen over. This is the only way back, and it is the reason the panel integration is worth having.
• Force restart / Stop — for a server that has stopped responding, where nothing in game can hear you any more. Accept that you are losing whatever has happened since the last save.

The button says sent, not restarted: the panel accepts the signal and the server comes back when it comes back.

There is no kill button. It is a hard stop with no save at all, and losing an hour of everybody’s progress should not be one mis-click away.