Retention

Monitor → Retention. The players-online chart on your overview answers “how many are on right now”. This page answers the other question, the one that decides whether a server grows: do the same people come back?

Nothing to set up. It reads the connection history CerebRUST already keeps, so it fills in by itself once your server has run a wipe with players on it.

Sticking around

The curve shows, of everybody who joined during a wipe, how many were still playing a given number of days later — counted from each player’s own first day, not from the wipe start. Somebody who found you on day 9 of the wipe is measured from day 9.

Three numbers are pulled out above it:

Reading	What it tells you
After 1 day	Whether the server made a first impression
After 7 days	Whether it survived a week of somebody’s attention
After 14 days	Whether it has become their server rather than a stop

“Still playing” means they were around on that day or later — not that they logged in on exactly that day. People play every other evening, and a curve that counted exact days would show them leaving on Tuesday and coming back on Thursday, which tells you nothing about your server.

Note

The line stops before the end of a running wipe, on purpose. Somebody who joined yesterday cannot have “stayed a week”, so they are left out of the day-7 reading rather than counted as having left. Once too few players have been around long enough for a day to be worth asking about, the line stops. That is the sample running out, not your players.

Pick a different wipe from the dropdown to compare.

Wipe by wipe

The table underneath is the longer view: who turned up each wipe, how many had never played on your server before, and how much of the previous wipe’s crowd came back.

Column	Means
Players	Distinct people who connected during that wipe
New	Their first-ever session on this server
Returning	They had played here before, on any earlier wipe
Came back from the previous wipe	How much of last wipe’s roster you kept

A regular who skips a wipe and comes back is returning, not new. “New” is measured against your server’s whole history, so it stays an honest count of people you actually reached for the first time.

The first wipe on record shows a dash in the last column rather than 0% — there is no earlier wipe for anyone to come back from.

Why you sometimes see counts instead of percentages

Below ten players, CerebRUST shows the two numbers (“3 of 7”) rather than a percentage. On a cohort that small one person moves the figure by more than ten points, so the percentage would be telling you about that person rather than about your server.

It is not hiding anything — the counts are the same data, and the percentage appears on its own once there are enough people for it to mean something.