docs/modules/rust-dryrun.md

module-rust — a dry run

Phase 3's fourth acceptance criterion (../website/MODULE_SYSTEM.md §2.7). A written design for a module serving a Rust (Facepunch) community, taken far enough to find out whether the contract generalises past the game it was extracted from — and deliberately not implemented. A contract validated only against the module it was carved out of has not been validated.

The exercise is honest if it finds something. It found four things, one of which is a gap in the contract that a real second module would hit on its first day. They are in Findings at the end; the design comes first, because a finding is only worth anything with the design that produced it.

Rust was chosen because it is unlike Ultima Online in the ways most likely to break assumptions: it wipes every month, a community runs several servers rather than one shard, its identity is Steam, and its server speaks a protocol nobody has to write — RCON over WebSocket, built in. If the contract survives that, "game-agnostic" means something.

Nothing here re-specifies the contract. ../website/MODULE_API.md is normative; this document only uses it.

---

1. The manifest

{
  "id": "rust",
  "name": "Rust",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "coreApi": "^1.3.0",
  "server": "server/index.js",
  "client": { "entry": "client/dist/entry.js" },
  "schema": "server/db/schema.sql",
  "purge": "server/db/purge.sql",
  "mounts": {
    "public": ["/rust"],
    "admin": ["/rust"],
    "player": ["/rust"]
  },
  "extensions": ["admin.users.detail"],
  "capabilities": ["servers", "wipes", "leaderboards", "map", "killfeed", "teams"]
}

One prefix per tier, named for the module rather than for a feature — the opposite of module-uo's /shard + /atlas + /uo-link, and the better choice for anything new. Module-uo's prefixes are what they are because §1.2 froze the URLs core already served; a module written today has no such debt and should claim one obvious segment. It also sidesteps the collision surface entirely: /shard is a word a second game might want, /rust is not.

2. The server half

module.exports = function register(ctx, api) {
  core.init(ctx)

  const publicRouter = require('./router/public/rust.router')
  const adminRouter  = require('./router/admin/rust.router')
  const playerRouter = require('./router/player/rust.router')
  const userExt      = require('./router/admin/usersRust.router')

  api.registerRoutes({
    public: { '/rust': publicRouter },
    admin:  { '/rust': adminRouter },
    player: { '/rust': playerRouter },
  })

  api.registerExtension('admin.users.detail', userExt)

  api.registerNotificationStreams([
    { id: 'rust.wipe', label: 'Server wipes',
      description: 'A server wiped — new map, new seed, everything reset.',
      personal: false, requiresLinkedAccount: false },
    { id: 'rust.raid', label: 'Base raided',
      description: 'Your base took damage while you were offline.',
      personal: true, requiresLinkedAccount: true },
  ])

  api.registerAnnounceLeg({
    leg: 'rust.ingame',
    label: 'In-game chat',
    dispatch: (post) => rcon.say(`[NEWS] ${post.title} — ${ctx.site.baseUrl}/news/${post.slug}`),
    classify: (result) => (result.ok ? { outcome: 'done' } : { outcome: 'retry', error: result.error }),
  })

  api.onBoot(async () => { await rcon.connectAll() })
  api.onShutdown(async () => { await rcon.closeAll() })
}

Everything above is a call the contract already has, used the way module-uo uses it. Two details are worth pointing at:

• rust.wipe and rust.raid are namespaced, with no grandfathering request. Module-uo's seven bare stream ids are allowlisted because they were in notification_subs before the rule existed (§6.5); a new module gets the rule, and the rule is exactly right.
• The announce leg goes to in-game chat over RCON, which is a one-shot delivery with retry — registerAnnounceLeg, not registerPostHook. The distinction §2.4 draws holds up on a game that has nothing in common with the one it was drawn for.

Tables

rust_servers, rust_wipes, rust_players, rust_player_stats, rust_teams, rust_events, rust_bans, rust_maps. All rust_-prefixed, all in one idempotent schema.sql fragment.

Every table that holds gameplay data carries a wipe_id. That is the whole shape of the game in one column: a leaderboard means "since the last wipe", a base means "on this map", and a player's stats are per-wipe with an all-time rollup kept separately. It has no bearing on the contract — core replays the fragment and never looks inside — but it is the first thing a UO-shaped mental model gets wrong, and it is worth writing down for whoever builds this.

Talking to the game

A thin sidecar. Rust ships RCON over WebSocket, so rust-link is small: it holds the RCON connection to each server with the token an admin saved, and presents the website the same shape uo-link does — a bearer-authed HTTP + WebSocket API in front of a SQLite store. The module talks only to it, never to a game server.

The store is the reason it exists even though the game is already remote-controllable. RCON is a live channel with no memory: what it tells you while nobody is listening is gone. So the sidecar appends every kill, wipe and chat line, keeps the latest snapshot of each server's state, and answers the website's reads from disk — a website that is down, restarting or mid-deploy loses nothing, and a leaderboard renders the last thing the server said rather than an error. It also keeps the RCON token, the reconnect loop and the per-server fan-out out of an Express process, where a stalled socket is a stalled request handler.

wipe_id makes the durable copy load-bearing rather than a nicety. A wipe is the moment the game forgets; the sidecar is the only thing that remembers the shape of the map that just ended.

Correction, 2026-08-12. This section originally concluded "No sidecar" — the module dialling RCON directly — and offered it as evidence that core has no opinion about how a module reaches its game. That was overruled by the org lead when Phase 5 (§2.11.1 d3/d4) settled the kit's stance, and the prohibition is now contract: ../website/MODULE_API.md §2.7, as of MODULE_API_VERSION 1.4.0, a module does not open a connection to a game server from the website process. The original reasoning was not wrong about ServUO — the shard-dials-out invariant in ../link/PLAN.md really is a property of an engine with no remote-control surface — but it mistook that for the whole reason a sidecar exists. The other reason is durability: the website is not the right place to hold a game connection, because it is the process most likely to be restarted and the one facing the internet. The finding is left in view rather than edited out; what a dry run concluded is worth more than a tidy document.

3. The client half

registry.registerRoutes('rust', {
  public: [
    { path: 'servers',            element: <Servers /> },
    { path: 'servers/:id',        element: <ServerDetail /> },
    { path: 'servers/:id/map',    element: <MapView /> },
    { path: 'leaderboards',       element: <Leaderboards /> },
    { path: 'wipes',              element: <WipeSchedule /> },
  ],
  player: [
    { path: 'account',            element: <LinkedAccount /> },
    { path: 'stats',              element: <MyStats /> },
  ],
  admin: [
    { path: 'servers',            element: <AdminServers />, gate: { roles: ['admin'] } },
    { path: 'ops',                element: <AdminOps />,     gate: { roles: ['admin', 'moderator'] } },
  ],
})

registry.registerNav('rust', {
  area: 'public',
  items: [
    { label: 'Servers',      to: '/rust/servers',      group: 'Play',  order: 10, icon: ServerIcon },
    { label: 'Leaderboards', to: '/rust/leaderboards', group: 'Play',  order: 20, icon: TrophyIcon,
      feature: 'leaderboards' },
    { label: 'Wipe schedule', to: '/rust/wipes',       group: 'Play',  order: 30, icon: CalendarIcon },
  ],
})

registry.registerFeatureProvider('rust', 'rust', useRustFeatures)
registry.registerExtension('rust', 'admin.users.detail', LinkedSteamAccounts)

Play is a group core does not have; §3.3 appends an unknown group rather than dropping the items, so this works and lands at the end of the nav — where an operator can move it, because a module row is an ordinary row once it is interleaved.

The pages need PublicLayout, PageHeader, the three PageState components, useAsync and useAuth: six of the kit's seven members, and the seventh (useSite) on the wipe-schedule page for the site's timezone. A second game, unrelated to the first, wanting exactly what the kit contains is the strongest evidence available that §3.4 was curated at the right altitude.

The map view is the one page that wants something the kit does not have — a pan/zoom canvas. It bundles one, which is the answer §3.4 already gives ("everything else a module bundles itself"), and it costs the chunk about 40 KB.

---

Findings

1. A module cannot register an identity provider — and Rust's identity is Steam

The gap. Module-uo proves account ownership with an in-game [link command that issues a one-time code; the website confirms it with the sidecar. Nothing about that needs core's auth layer, so nothing in api ever needed to touch it.

Rust's answer is Steam OpenID, and every Rust community expects "Sign in with Steam". Core has an SSO layer — authProviders, userIdentities, OAuth2/OIDC providers behind a registry — and MODULE_API.md §2.4 offers a module no way in. There is no registerAuthProvider, and §2.7 forbids reaching for one.

A Rust module can still ship: it can copy the UO shape, issuing a code in-game and matching it on the website. That works, it is one screen worse, and it leaves the community's obvious expectation unmet.

This is not a defect in what was built — it is the boundary of what was specified, found exactly where a dry run is supposed to find it. It is worth stating precisely, because whoever adds it has to answer a question the current policy already has an opinion about: SSO is link-only by design, an external identity must already be linked to an existing account, and identities are never auto-provisioned. A Steam provider a module registers must inherit that, not route around it. It is also not a small addition: an identity provider participates in session creation, which is the one part of core a module must never be able to weaken.

Recommendation: leave it out of v1 of the contract and record it here as the first candidate for MODULE_API_VERSION 1.4 or 2.0, specified deliberately rather than bolted on when someone needs it.

2. "One module, one game" is not the same as "one module, one server"

A UO community runs one shard. A Rust community runs four or five, wipes them on different schedules, and every page is a per-server view.

The contract is silent on this, and silence turns out to be right: multiplicity lives entirely in the module's own tables and route parameters (/rust/servers/:id). Core's mount prefixes, capabilities and state machine are per-module, and none of them wanted to be per-server.

Worth recording only because it looks like a problem until you try it — and because it is the shape that would have broken a contract designed around "the shard" as a singular noun. The phase-2 inversions that removed core's opinions about game content (the push catalog, the announce legs, mapEvent dropped) are why it does not.

3. The event catalog generalises; the retention assumption does not

rust_events is the twin of shard_events, and the ingest shape carries over unchanged.

What does not carry over is that a UO event log grows forever while a Rust one is truncated every wipe. That is module-internal — but it lands on something core does own: the schema fragment must not be where that truncation happens. §2.6's leading-verb allowlist (CREATE, ALTER, INSERT, UPDATE) already forbids DELETE and TRUNCATE in a fragment, precisely because the fragment is replayed on every boot and would empty the table each restart.

So a wipe is a runtime operation on a module route, not a schema one. The allowlist was written for a different reason — the phase-2 note says "the file replays every boot, so TRUNCATE/DELETE would empty a table each restart" — and it correctly forbids the first mistake this module's author would make. A rule that catches a case it was not written for is a rule at the right altitude.

4. capabilities earns its keep the moment there are two modules

With one module, capabilities reads like decoration — core never interprets one, and the SPA knows what it registered. With two, it is the only thing a client can ask.

The Android app is the case: it feature-detects against GET /api/v1/public/modules and must render a site whose module it has never heard of. ["servers", "wipes", "leaderboards"] tells it there is nothing shard-shaped here without it having to know what rust means, and §2.9's rule — treat an unknown capability as absent, never infer a route from one — is what keeps that from becoming a second, worse route table.

No change needed. Recorded because the design decision looked over-engineered with one module and is load-bearing with two.

---

Verdict

The contract generalises. A second game, chosen for how little it shares with the first, is served by the same module.json, the same seven registration calls, the same schema-fragment rules, the same client registry and the same UI kit — with one genuine gap (identity providers), one non-issue that looks like a gap (multiple servers), and two places where a rule written for one reason turns out to cover another.

The gap is worth having found before something was built on top of it, which is what a dry run is for. What it does not establish is that someone outside this org could build this module from the documentation alone — that is the Integration Kit's acceptance test (§2.11), and it stays untested until a person who did not write any of this does it.