PlayRust - Rust Extreme Basics: Servers, which ones are best for you.

Back to the Guide Menu.


Connecting to servers.

There are a few options for servers to play on.  Official servers, Community servers, and Modded servers. Your play style may differ, so read here for help on choosing the server that is right for you.

Official Servers:

Official Rust Servers are hosted by Facepunch studios specifically for Facepunch.  They often use these servers for testing loads, server configurations and updates. 

Official servers are often full or at high capacity.  Most people just starting out try to play on official servers and this may lead to frustration. There are so many people playing on these servers, including hard core gamers and hackers, your survival chance as a newbie naked is ridiculously small. You will be killed on sight, the map is too small to hide, there is nowhere you can safely go from other players.

Official servers present the unique difficulty that is best mitigated by playing with friends in groups.  If you are a solo player, I suggest avoiding Official servers or any server with more than 20 people playing.  On the other hand, if you are a hard core gamer that revels in the unique masochistic challenge and onslaught of endless perilous dangers from other players, official servers are for you my Steely Balled friend. May your bloody path to success be carved out of the dead you leave naked behind you. 

Community Servers:

Community Rust Servers are hosted by Facepunch Studios' approved game server rental companies and run by the person who pays for the service.  These kinds of servers form the bulk of available servers in your list. They range from highly moderated multi-admin servers to empty and waiting for any kind of connection.  They can be small 50 connection servers or huge 300 connection servers.  The rules and game mechanics are the same as the official servers. 

On the Community Servers, you can find a decent place to play, with few players, that you can use to learn the mechanics of the game and ease yourself into the full onslaught of larger traffic servers. This is a good place to start if you are new to the game as there is a much greater chance that other players of the server will assist you in your learning curve. 

Modded Servers:

Modded Rust Servers are Community Servers with modified game rules.  Most commonly, the absence of sleepers, higher rates of supply drops, faster resource respawning, and faster crafting.

These servers are the best for people wanting to practice their building and strategies, as they provide the ability to progress faster than regular servers.  If you want to practice that perfect house/fortress build, find a server with high resources, low users, and instant crafting. You will have the materials needed to start practicing your builds in no time.

Tips for finding and connecting to servers:

1. Many community servers and descriptions of the servers can be found on the Steam Play Rust forum, and the Facepunch Studios Play Rust forum.

2. After starting the game, press F1 to bring up the console, then type "net.connect [00.00.00.00:0000]" where the zeros represent the server's address and port, then hit enter.  Then hit F1 again to remove the console.

3. If you find a server you want to play on in the game's server list, double click it to connect.  Sometimes this doesn't work as intended.  Just keep clicking quickly on the desired server's name and it will eventually connect.

4. Servers you have visited will be in your history.  Use the history to go back to servers you don't remember the connection details of. 

5. If you find a server you enjoy playing on, hit F1 after connecting and copy the address and port somewhere you won't lose it.  This way, if the server is removed from your history after a patch, you can just net.connect to it directly.

 Back to the Guide Menu.