R1's identity flow, in the shape the UO bridge already proved: the player asks in game, the plugin mints a one-time code and hands it to them, and the website confirms it back through the sidecar. The site is the author of record; this plugin holds no link at all. **`/link` is chat, not console, and the reply is private** (D21). Both frameworks consume a `/` command rather than broadcasting it and `SendReply` addresses one player, so neither the request nor the code reaches anybody else — a code read off a stream is a code somebody else can spend. **Pending codes live in memory and nowhere else** (D22, matching module-uo): six characters from an alphabet with no O/0/I/1, five-minute TTL, a thirty-second cooldown per player, one outstanding code each, and a purge timer because an unconfirmed code is never looked up. A plugin reload drops them — phase 7b's config editor will do that routinely — and the cost is typing `/link` again, which is cheaper than a credential living in a second process. **The code is deliberately NOT in `account.link.requested`.** That event exists so an operator can see linking being used; the code travels through the player, which is what makes typing it proof they are the one who asked. `/unlink` emits rather than deletes, because there is nothing here to delete. It is the escape hatch that makes the site's refusal to move an already-linked Steam id safe: a player who linked the wrong account walks to a computer they are already sitting at. `link.confirm` consumes a code on the FIRST lookup whether or not it turns out to be expired, so a code cannot be probed twice. `unknown` and `expired` stay separate in the reply — an operator wants to know whether codes are being guessed or going stale — and the website says the same sentence for both. `checkPlugin.js` gains a check for the new surface, because a chat command binds by reflection exactly like a hook and fails the same silent way. It asserts the signature, the void return and the absence of duplicates, and — like the hook parser before it — a test reads the real plugin so a regex that matches nothing cannot pass. Verified by breaking it five ways. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016wDDVXWMDz82WqE1i969r4
Rust-Plugins
The in-game half of the Runic Gateway bridge for Rust: one Oxide plugin that dials out to a rust-link sidecar and speaks newline-delimited JSON over it.
It is the mirror of
RunicGateway/servuo-plugins, which
does the same job for Ultima Online — and it inherits that plugin's threading contract wholesale,
because the reason for it is the same on both games.
The threading contract
Everything else in this repo depends on these three:
Emitis called from the main thread. It formats nothing, blocks on nothing, and touches no socket. It enqueues and returns. A slow, wedged, or absent sidecar cannot stall the game.- One link thread owns the socket. It connects, drains the queue, and reconnects with backoff. A single writer keeps event ordering intact.
- A reader thread parses inbound lines and hands each to the main thread via
Interface.Oxide.NextTick. The reader touches no Unity object, noBasePlayerand noConVar— every one of those is main-thread-only, and reading one from the reader is the kind of bug that presents as a crash somewhere else entirely.
The outbound queue is bounded, drop-oldest. On overflow the oldest record goes and is counted, because telemetry is worth less than the server's memory.
Loopback is the trust boundary
There is no token on the game link. The plugin and the sidecar share a host, and the sidecar binds
127.0.0.1 — that is the authentication. Pointing Host at anything routable puts an
unauthenticated command channel on the network.
Installing it
overlay/oxide/plugins/RunicGateway.cs → <server>/oxide/plugins/RunicGateway.cs
Oxide compiles and loads it on the write, and writes oxide/config/RunicGateway.json on first load:
{
"Host": "127.0.0.1",
"Port": 7799,
"QueueCap": 5000,
"ServerId": "main"
}
ServerId is this server's stable identity across wipes and restarts, as the website knows it. It
is deliberately not derived from the hostname: an operator renames a server for a season, and
the site must not lose its history for it.
That is the developer's loop. An operator uses the installer, which syncs the released overlay tarball and installs the sidecar alongside it.
Prerequisites
The bridge itself needs nothing but Oxide. The features that follow it read four third-party plugins
an operator installs from uMod — Clans, Kits, PopupNotifications and ZoneManager. They are
listed in overlay.toml so the installer's doctor can report a missing one by name rather than
leaving the site quietly short of a feature.
Diagnosing it
rg.link
from the server console or over RCON. It reports the link's own counters:
protocol=1 serverId=main connected=True depth=0 sent=3 dropped=0 received=2
connects=1 writeErrors=0 bootId=boot-20260915T194502Z
This is the first thing to ask for when the website says a server is offline — it separates "the plugin is not loaded", "the plugin cannot reach the sidecar" and "the website cannot reach the sidecar", which look identical from the site.
bootId identifies the server PROCESS, not the plugin load. It is the process start time, so
oxide.reload RunicGateway does not change it. That matters more than it looks: the website watches
this value to tell a game restart (everything an event put in the world is gone) from a bridge
reconnect (nothing is lost), and a plugin reload is the second kind.
The protocol is a contract
ProtocolVersion in the plugin and protocol in overlay.toml must agree with the sidecar's
PROTOCOL_VERSION and the module's own constant. The installer refuses to pair an overlay and a
sidecar that disagree, so a bump landing in one repo and not the others fails to compose rather than
half-deploying.
The canonical spec is
docs/rust-link/PROTOCOL.md.
Licence
GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.md.