Rust Server Listing Builder

What players see before they join

In the Rust server browser, a player decides in a few seconds. They see your server name, your tags (wipe rhythm, difficulty, region, style), the number of players, the map, and once they click, your description, your header image and your website link. Everything else is a guess until they load in.

The builder above shows that listing as you type, checks it against the limits Rust applies, and writes the two pieces your server needs: the server.cfg lines and the startup line.

A name that does its job

Rust server names are limited to 64 bytes. Emojis and accented letters take more than one byte each, so the counter above counts bytes, not letters.

The names that work tell a player three things before anything else:

• what kind of server it is: vanilla, 2x, 5x, modded, PvE, solo/duo/trio;
• when it wipes: monthly, weekly, biweekly, or the wipe day;
• where it is: EU, NA, OCE…

Keep the brand short and put it first. Many owners also put the last wipe date in the name after each wipe, so the listing looks fresh.

A description players actually read

The description holds up to 1,600 characters. Line breaks are kept: in server.cfg they are written as \n, which the builder does for you. Put the essentials at the top (rates, wipe schedule, team limit, rules in one line), then your links (Discord, website, store).

Browser tags: how Rust reads them

Tags are what players filter on, and Rust is strict with them:

• 4 tags at most: Rust keeps the first four it knows.
• One tag per group for wipe (weekly, biweekly, monthly), difficulty (vanilla, hardcore, softcore) and region (eu, na, sa, wa, ea, oc, af): only the first of each group counts.
• Style tags (pve, roleplay, creative, minigame, training, battlefield, broyale, builds, tut, premium) can be combined, within the limit of 4.
• modded, oxide and carbon are removed: Oxide and Carbon mark the server as modded on their own.
• pve is added for you when server.pve is on.

The server tags guide goes through every tag and what players filter on.

server.cfg or startup line?

A Rust server reads its settings from two places, and they are not interchangeable:

• The startup line sets what the server needs before it loads the world: +server.identity, +server.port, +server.level, +server.seed, +server.worldsize, +rcon.port, and +rcon.password. The RCON password is only read from the startup line; an empty password, or the word password, leaves RCON off. The map seed and size are not saved by server.writecfg: the startup line always wins.
• server.cfg, in server/<identity>/cfg/, holds the listing: name, description, website, images and tags. It is read at every start.

You can also change the listing live from the console or RCON (server.hostname "…"), but mind what survives a restart: server.writecfg only saves the settings Rust marks as saved, into serverauto.cfg. The tags and the images are among them; the name, description and website are not. Keep those in server.cfg.

The convars reference lists the other settings, their defaults and where they belong.

Change your listing without a restart

With Servycore, the listing has its own page in the Control Center: name, description, website, images and tags, with the same tag checks as this builder. Saving sends the settings to the server over RCON, so the change is live at once, without a restart. After each wipe, the Auto-wipe system can also put the wipe date in your server name for you.