Base Radar: free raid alerts for vanilla Rust

Modded servers have had base alerts for years through plugins like AlertSystem or RaidNotify. The catch: those plugins require Oxide or Carbon, which immediately makes the server non-vanilla. Players who actually want vanilla rules — the slower progression, the real economy, the EAC-enforced parity with official servers — had to live without alerts entirely.

That bothered us. There's nothing about a server-side radar that requiresmodifying the game binary. Rust's RCON protocol already exposes positions and TC auth lists for admins. We just plug into that — out-of-process, on a separate machine — and forward the resulting events to Discord. The game stays vanilla; admins gain a feature. More on the vanilla definition here.

When triggered, you receive a Discord DM titled "⚠️ Intruder near your base" containing:

• The intruder's in-game name and current grid coordinate (e.g. K12)
• Approximate distance from your TC, rounded down to the nearest 0.1m
• The grid coordinate of the TC they triggered — helpful if you own multiple bases
• A direct link back to the live map view on the site

In our testing the DM lands within 3 to 5 secondsof the intruder breaching the radius — usually before they've finished placing their first ladder.

Three loops run server-side:

1. Position poll (every 3s): RCON playerlist gives the X/Y/Z of every online player.
2. TC inventory poll (every 5 min): We enumerate every tool cupboard and query its auth list (the Steam IDs hammered to it). This is the same data the game uses internally to decide who can build.
3. Intrusion check (every position tick):For each TC, we compute the 3D distance to every online player. If a player is within 50m and they're not on the auth list, we start a dwell timer.

The dwell timer is the key anti-noise mechanism. A player has to stay inside the radius for at least 30 seconds before we alert — that filters out everyone just running through. A per-visit cooldown means the same TC won't spam you with alerts; but if the intruder leaves and re-enters (e.g. a scout returning with a raid party), the dwell timer resets and re-arms.

When an alert fires, the event is queued in PostgreSQL and a separate Discord bot drains the queue, looks up your linked Discord ID, and sends the DM. The bot logs every attempt — dm.sent kind=intrusion on success, dm.failed reason=Forbidden if your DMs are blocked — so we can tell instantly if something broke.

This was the first thing we considered. The radar tells you about players entering your base'simmediate vicinity. It doesn't expose anyone else's position, doesn't work outside your base, and doesn't track players on the open map.

In other words: it tells you when someone is at your front door. You could have figured the same thing out by looking out a window. The radar just means you don't have to be sat at your PC at 3am to know it.

The alert delay (3-5s + 30s dwell = ~35s) makes it almost useless for tactical PvP — by the time you read it and log in, the intruder has either committed (raid in progress) or moved on (was just passing through). Its real value is the window of warning, not real-time hunter awareness.

• Caves and tall bases: distance is 3D, so a player 40m above your roof still triggers.
• Teammates and authed allies:excluded from alerts on the TCs they're authorised to.
• Scientists, animals, helicopters: not players, never trigger.
• Discord DMs blocked or muted: the bot detects the failure and the panel on /map shows your alerts as broken with a "Reverify" button.
• Server wipe: your link persists across wipes. New base, new TCs — the radar picks them up at the next TC poll (within 5 minutes of placement).
• Backend restart or daily reboot:queues drain to PostgreSQL where possible, but a small window of alerts during restart can be lost. We restart at 04:00 UTC deliberately because that's the quietest part of the European day.

You opt in. Without linking, nothing is sent and your Discord account isn't known to the server. After linking, the only data we store is your Steam ID, your Discord ID, your Discord username (for the UI), and a boolean for whether DMs work. That's it. You can unlink any time with one click — the row is hard-deleted from PostgreSQL.

No one else can see your linked Discord. Alerts are DMs only — never posted to a channel. Full privacy notice here.

1. Open /map.
2. Click Sign in with Steam. Steam's OpenID flow runs — no password, no permissions beyond your public Steam ID.
3. Click Link Discord. Discord OAuth asks for the identify scope only (your Discord ID + username, nothing else — no email, no servers, no friends).
4. Within 5 seconds, you receive a "✅ Base alerts linked" DM from MistyWisp-Rust.
5. From that point on, you'll receive intruder DMs automatically. Toggle alerts off any time from the same panel.

If the test DM doesn't arrive, your Discord server-DM setting is blocking it. Right-click the MistyWisp Discord server → Privacy Settings → enable "Allow direct messages from server members".

• Move loot.If you can't defend in person, you have 5-15 minutes (typical drill time) to move anything precious to an external hidden stash.
• Call your duo. One alert into your shared Discord and your duo logs in.
• Bait the raider. If your base is hardened, logging in and letting them see you online sometimes makes them walk away.
• Record evidence. Every intrusion is logged in our internal panel along with the harvested combat log, so if anything suspicious happens (cheat behaviour, glitching), you have a paper trail to attach to a report.

See our companion guide on offline raid defence for what to do with that window once you have it.

Things we're considering but haven't shipped:

• Per-TC alert toggles — so you can mute alerts for that one roam base in the snow but keep them on for your main.
• Aggregate "raid in progress" detection — if explosives are detonating + multiple intruders within radius + walls are being damaged, escalate the alert.
• In-game push (RCON say) to authed teammates if the base owner hasn't logged in within 60 seconds of the alert.

All optional. Vanilla rules stay vanilla.