The live map

The Live feed page is the map on the left, chat on the right. It is the page most moderators leave open.

What is on it

Marker	Is
X marker with a name	A player, awake and online
Sleeper	A player who is logged out
Tool cupboard	A base. Click it for detail
World entity	Tracked objects — the things worth knowing the position of
Monuments	Named landmarks, labelled on the map; toggle them off in the map settings

Players update roughly every 2 seconds while awake, and every 60 seconds while sleeping.

The grid

The overlay draws Rust’s standard 146.3 metre grid, so grid references on the map match what players call out in chat. When someone says “roof camping at H12”, H12 on the map is the same H12.

Getting around

• Drag to pan
• Ctrl + scroll to zoom
• Layer toggles to hide marker types you do not care about — turning off sleepers on a busy server helps a lot

Tool cupboard detail

Click a cupboard for its owner, grid reference, exact position, entity ID and remaining upkeep.

Upkeep comes from a snapshot taken every five minutes, so it is near-live rather than exact. Placement, destruction and auth changes report immediately.

What is in the cupboard

Servers running plugin v0.11.0 or later also show the cupboard’s contents — every item in it, with how long each upkeep resource lasts on its own.

The useful part is the resource marked “Runs out first”. A base holding 40,000 wood and 200 stone shows three hours of upkeep left, and nothing about that number tells you the fix is stone. This does.

A cupboard only accepts a short list of items, and not all of them pay upkeep. The ones that do not — low grade fuel, animal fat, bone fragments, cloth, leather, scrap — are listed too, in a dimmer style. They are not clutter: they take up slots, which is often the reason there is no room to add more upkeep.

The panel says how old the reading is (“as of 4 min ago”). If you have just put wood in the cupboard in game, wait for the next snapshot before expecting the panel to agree with you.

Adding upkeep

Server owners and admins get an Add upkeep button on the cupboard panel. Each press tops the cupboard up by up to 24 hours of upkeep.

It only adds what is actually short. Upkeep runs out at the pace of whichever resource runs out first, so a cupboard holding plenty of stone and barely any metal fragments gets fragments only — topping up the stone would not buy a single extra minute. The panel lists exactly what will go in before you press.

Two more things worth understanding:

• It creates the resources. Nothing is taken from anywhere — the items appear in the cupboard. It is an admin power, not a transfer, so treat it the way you would treat handing out VIP.
• You may get less than 24 hours. The button tells you the real number before you press it — “Add 18h upkeep” means 18 hours is all that will fit in the free slots. If it says the cupboard is full, clear some space in game first.

The change is applied by the plugin a couple of seconds after you press the button, not instantly, and the panel refreshes itself once it lands.

Moderators without admin rights do not see the button. Neither does anyone on a server running an older plugin — if it is missing and you expect it, check the plugin version first.

Player density

The map settings panel has a Player density section with three buttons — Active, Sleeping and Both. Pick one and the map shades where people actually spend their time.

• Active is where players are while they are online: fights, farm routes, monument runs.
• Sleeping is where they log off, which in practice means where the bases are.
• Both is everything.

Density is weighted by how long people stayed, not by how many position records exist. That distinction matters more than it sounds: position history is thinned as it ages, so recent positions are recorded far more often than old ones. Counting records would draw you a map of the last hour and call it the wipe.

The legend runs Quiet → Busiest, and the scale is deliberately not linear — one raid or one spawn beach can be an order of magnitude busier than anywhere else, and a linear scale would paint the entire rest of the map as “quiet”.

What it is not showing you

The panel says this under the legend, and it is worth understanding:

• Positions are kept for 7 days. On a month-long wipe the map shows the recent past, not the whole wipe. There is no way to see further back — the older data is deleted, not hidden.
• Players who swim past the map edge are dropped, and the panel counts them. They are not pushed back to the nearest coast, which would draw a bright false line right around the island.
• It is one number per square. A cell where one person sat for six hours and a cell where six people fought for an hour each look identical.

Finding flat ground

The map settings panel has a Buildable spots section. Press Find flat ground and CerebRUST searches this wipe’s terrain for the open, level places a base would actually sit, and ranks the best twelve — biggest first.

Each result tells you the map square, how big a base fits, and how much the ground falls across it:

G14 · 64 × 64 m · 21 × 21 foundations · 0.4 m fall

Click a result to highlight it on the map, where each spot is drawn as the actual footprint square rather than a pin — so you can see it against the terrain. Copy TP copies a teleportpos command you can paste straight into the F1 console to go and look.

The footprints tested are 12, 24, 40, 64 and 96 metres — roughly 4×4 up to 32×32 foundations. Each size is measured at its own scale, which matters more than it sounds: a gentle hillside is flat across 12 metres and definitely not across 96, so a spot only claims the largest size that genuinely passes. Anything with more than 2.5 metres of fall across the footprint is rejected, as is anything inside a monument or at sea level.

What it excludes

On a server running plugin v0.17.0 or later, CerebRUST samples the server’s own terrain topology alongside the heightmap, so the search knows what the ground actually is. Roads, rail, monuments, cliffs and water are excluded using that data rather than guessed at.

Roads matter more than they sound. Rust flattens the terrain along a road, which makes a road some of the most perfectly level ground on any map — and completely unbuildable. Before topology sampling, roads were exactly the thing the search liked best.

Beaches and roadsides are deliberately not excluded. Building on both is legal and common, and the strip beside a road is some of the most sought-after ground on a map.

Note

On an older plugin the search falls back to approximating monuments with a circle, and cannot see roads or rail at all. The panel says which of the two you are looking at.

It still finds candidates, not guarantees

Rocks are not detected. They sit on the terrain rather than being part of it, so a result that is genuinely flat and genuinely buildable can still have a boulder in the middle of it.

The one exception, on plugin v0.20.0 or later: large god rocks are on the map, marked like a monument and named Large God Rock. Those are the big hollow formations people build inside, so they are drawn as somewhere to go rather than somewhere to avoid — the flat-ground search treats them as buildable, exactly as it does an ice lake.

Two smaller limits worth knowing:

• Exact footprints. Terrain is sampled roughly every 4 metres against a 3-metre foundation, so treat “64 × 64 m” as the size of the area, not a promise that a specific base plan fits.
• Blocked volumes have edges. Building-blocked zones are checked by the game with real collision shapes; this is a grid. Expect the boundary to be a few metres out either way.

Go and look at the spot in game before you promise it to anybody.

When it is unavailable

The button needs this wipe’s terrain, which is the same upload the 3D map uses. If it is greyed out, the plugin has not sent it yet. Terrain uploads once per wipe.

If you update to plugin v0.17.0 mid-wipe you do not have to wait for the next wipe to get topology — CerebRUST notices the terrain it holds predates the field and asks the plugin to sample once more, which takes about six seconds and happens on its own.

The map background

The map image only uploads when nobody is online — it is a large upload and the plugin waits for a quiet moment. Until then, markers work but sit on an empty background.

A fresh image is uploaded when the world changes, i.e. at wipe.

Markers do not line up

Alignment is worked out from your world size and needs no setup. The rendered map has a fixed band of sea around the playable area, so the playable part covers a different fraction of the image on every map size — the dashboard accounts for that on its own.

If the markers are wildly wrong, the background is probably from a previous wipe — check it has re-uploaded since.

Note

Older versions had a Map fit slider for this, saved per browser. It has been removed — the alignment is now correct without it.

Seeing it in 3D

The map settings panel has a View in 3D button, which opens the same server as a flyable 3D landscape with players and bases at their real height. See The 3D map.

History

The map is live only. Scrubbing back through time is built but not currently enabled, so what you see is now.

Privacy

The live map is a moderator tool. Players cannot see it — not their own position, not anyone else’s. Anyone you grant server access to can see everybody’s position; see Staff and access.