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.

The map is drawn from your server’s world, which CerebRUST reads by itself from the map file Rust publishes a few minutes after a wipe — procedural and custom maps alike. It needs plugin v1.3.0 or later and server.autouploadmap left on (Rust’s default). Until the world has been read the page says so, and live players and cupboards are still listed below it.

Across the top of the map:

2D / 3D — the same live markers, flat or on the terrain at their real height.
Layers folds the rest away so it does not cover the map, and remembers whether you left it open. Inside it:
- Monuments, Guide and Grid — the guide shows recyclers first as you zoom in, then benches and vending machines, then every puzzle’s numbered steps in their keycard’s colour.
- No-build, Tunnels and Heatmap — the zones Rust will not let anybody build in, the train tunnel network (the map fades to black around it), and where a resource or animal spawns, in purple. The cargo ship’s route is always drawn.
- Players, Sleepers, Dead and Cupboards — switch Dead off to keep the living and the sleeping on the map without the markers of players who died.
More layers holds the rest: world entities, NPC bases, player density and buildable spots.

Every choice is remembered in your browser, so the map is set up the way you left it.

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 toolbar
NPC base	A standing NPC base, named. Only if you run them

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

The NPC bases chip only appears when there is something to show — the mod is on, a base is standing, and you have left Show on the live map switched on in its settings. It is drawn on top of the buildable-spot squares rather than under them: a candidate is somewhere a base could go, and there are hundreds of those, while a standing base is a thing a player can act on now.

Clicking a player

Click any player marker and you get the last 48 hours of what they have been doing — the same summary as the player page, without leaving the map — plus their recent path drawn over the map, and a ring around wherever they are now.

The path is drawn in pieces, not as one continuous line, and the gaps are deliberate. Position history is thinned as it ages, so yesterday’s samples are two minutes apart — far enough for a player to cross half a grid square between them. Joining those up would draw a sprint across whatever lies in between and make it look exactly as reliable as the accurate part of the same path. Where you see a break, CerebRUST does not know how they got from one point to the other.

The line fades with age, so the bright end is where they are now.

Close the panel to actually look at it. The path stays on the map after the card is out of the way — a bar along the bottom of the map tells you whose it is, with Details to bring the card back and × to clear it. Clicking a different player switches to theirs.

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. The same panel opens from the Top up button on the Bases page.

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 More layers 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 More layers 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

The search reads the terrain and its topology from your server’s world, so it 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.

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: 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 world, the same data the 3D map uses. If it is greyed out, CerebRUST has not read your server’s world yet — usually a few minutes after a wipe.

The map background

The picture comes from your server’s world, drawn by CerebRUST from the map file itself — your server never has to render anything, so nobody online ever sees it hang. It appears a few minutes after a wipe, once Rust has published the map and CerebRUST has read it; until then the Live feed says there is no map yet and still lists live players and cupboards below.

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.

Seeing it in 3D

The More layers 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: what you see is now. For where one player has been, click them — see Clicking a player.

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.