docs/modules/rust/PLAN.md

module-rust — the plan

Status: approved in outline 2026-09-15, not started. Eighteen decisions of record, no open questions. Audited against the whole contract, not just the game-facing chapters (§7); the event and engagement catalogues are §9 and §10; §11 is a second pass over MODULE_API.md itself.

The dry run designed this module on paper and deliberately did not build it. This is the document that builds it. Where the two disagree, this one is later and wins — but the dry run's four findings still stand, and one of them (identity) has moved from a footnote to the critical path. §2 says why.

Nothing here is normative. MODULE_API.md is the contract, MODULE_SYSTEM.md the system, EVENTS.md the event design of record, and the Integration Kit is the teaching text this plan follows chapter by chapter. This document is a schedule and a set of decisions, not a specification.

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1. The shape, and what is already settled

Three new repositories, mirroring the three the platform already has for Ultima Online, plus the optional fourth part that lives inside the module:

Part	Repo	Mirrors	What it is
Website module	RunicGateway/Module-Rust	Module-uo	Routes, schema fragment, prebuilt client chunk, nav
Sidecar	RunicGateway/Rust-Link	link	Owns the game connection and the durable copy
Oxide bridge plugin	RunicGateway/Rust-Plugins	servuo-plugins	C# inside the game, dials out, never blocks
(event capability)	—	—	Declarations inside Module-Rust (kit ch. 5)

All three were created empty on 2026-09-15. The module is built from integration-kit/template/, which CI holds against a pinned core — currently MODULE_API_VERSION 1.10.0.

The repository name is not the module id. Module-uo ships a module whose id is uo; this one ships rust. §2.1 of the contract requires id to equal the directory core loads it from, which is modules/rust/, and it is the prefix of every table and every mount — so the capitalisation in the repository name reaches nothing inside the bundle.

Settled before this document and unchanged by it (dry run, org lead, 2026-08-19):

• One server, one sidecar, on that server's own host. A community with six servers runs six pairs; the module holds six clients and core never learns there is more than one.
• The plugin dials out. Rust's server is a binary, so the way in is Oxide's published hook API rather than source — and the shard-dials-out invariant survives that change of footing unchanged.
• No RCON. It was the original design and it was overruled.
• wipe_id on every table that holds gameplay data. It is the whole shape of the game in one column, and it is the first thing a UO-shaped mental model gets wrong.

2. Decisions of record

R1 — identity is an in-game link code for v1

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). A player proves account ownership by typing a command in-game; the plugin issues a one-time code; the website confirms it through the sidecar. Exactly the shape module-uo uses.

This is the dry run's finding 1 answered for now rather than closed. There is still no registerAuthProvider in the contract at 1.10.0 — verified against MODULE_API.md §2.4 on 2026-09-15 — so "Sign in with Steam", which every Rust community expects, is not reachable from a module today. The link code is one screen worse and needs no core change, so it is what v1 ships.

What changed since the dry run is the stakes, not the options. The dry run rated this survivable because the module only read: a site that renders a leaderboard does not need to know which account owns a Steam ID. R2 makes the site the author of who may do what in the game, and R3 makes it the thing that hands out loot. Both are grants against a Steam ID. A weak identity link is now a privilege-escalation path, not a missing convenience — so the code must be single-use, short-lived, rate-limited, and issued in-game to the player who will own it.

Adding registerAuthProvider properly stays the first candidate for a future MODULE_API bump. It participates in session creation, which is the one part of core a module must never be able to weaken, and it must inherit core's existing policy: SSO is link-only, identities are never auto-provisioned. Specified deliberately, not bolted on. It is out of scope here.

R2 — site-authored permissions are mirrored into Oxide's own permission store

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). The website is the author of record for groups and grants. The bridge plugin applies them through Oxide's own API (permission.GrantUserPermission / RevokeUserPermission), so Oxide is an enforcement cache and the site is the thing that remembers.

The alternative — the plugin keeping a private table only our own features consult — was rejected because it cannot reach any third-party plugin, and reaching them is the point: a grant authored on the site has to gate Kits.

Three properties fall out, and they are the reason this shape is worth its cost:

• Every third-party plugin honours site-authored grants with no adapter, because they all already call permission.UserHasPermission.
• A wipe stops being a data-loss event for permissions. The game forgets; the site does not, and re-pushes the whole set on the next connect.
• Hand edits are reported, not overwritten. Somebody typing oxide.grant at the console is drift, and drift is surfaced to an operator — the same posture a lease's restore() takes when it finds a value a human has moved (kit ch. 5).

Phase 0 exercised all three against the real store and they hold — but it found four rules the push path has to obey (§12.2). The one that would have cost the most: permission.GrantUserPermission silently no-ops when the permission is not registered. It returns void, throws nothing and logs nothing; the grant simply does not happen. A permission is registered by the plugin that declares it, so every grant naming an unloaded, renamed or uninstalled plugin's permission disappears without a trace — and since R2's whole recovery story is "the site re-pushes the full set on connect", a re-push into a server missing one plugin is a silent partial. The push must check PermissionExists (or register the name itself) and report the difference as drift rather than assuming a write landed.

This is a direction the Integration Kit has no chapter for, and that is a finding. Chapters 3 and 4 are the read path — data leaving the game. Chapter 5 is one-shot commands with a ledger and a teardown. This is neither: it is continuously reconciled state where the website is authoritative, and its nearest relative in the contract is the Team provider inverted — instead of core asking the module what the game knows, the module tells the game what the site knows. The mechanism it borrows is chapter 4's: every board's current state has exactly one producer, and it runs on connect, pointed the other way. Whether this deserves a sixth chapter is a question for phase 19, after it has been built once.

R3 — the Kits reward action registers always and refuses with a reason

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). Kits is required for event rewards, but "required" means the action always exists and fails honestly where it cannot work — { ok: false, retry: false, error: 'Kits plugin not installed' } — rather than vanishing from the authoring form or refusing to boot the module.

Two details from kit ch. 5 that this depends on and are easy to get wrong:

• The reason must be in error. Core reads exactly ok, retry and error off a failure envelope; a message under any other name is dropped and the operator sees a bare "<action id> refused".
• retry: false has to be reachable. Core's dispatcher enforces budgetMs and classifies a budget timeout as retry unconditionally — so if the sidecar client's timeout is longer than budgetMs, our own retry: false is unreachable code. Derive one constant from the other and assert the inequality in a test. The first module this project shipped had exactly that pairing.

R4 — Rust reaches an operator through the existing installer, behind --game

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). Not a second binary and not a shared-core refactor: the shipped installer grows a game dimension, --game servuo|rust, and keeps one release stream, one doctor, one update, one uninstall.

The shape of the work is set by where the coupling already is. The reusable half is already game-agnostic — src/service.rs and src/main.rs mention ServUO zero times, and net.rs, diff.rs, paths.rs and ui.rs barely more. The UO-specific half is concentrated in four files — install.rs, doctor.rs, overlay.rs, tier.rs — plus the bundle manifest, where OverlayComponent and ServUoCompat name the game in the schema itself.

So the change is: make the bundle's game payload a variant rather than an overlay, and ServUoCompat a per-game compat block. That is a schema change on the published bundles branch, and it is the part to design before touching code.

The Rust payload is much simpler than the UO one, which is what makes this affordable: no source tree to overlay, no patches/, no opt-in patch tier — a Rust install is a .cs file dropped into oxide/plugins/, plus the sidecar and its service, which the installer already knows how to do. What it gains instead is a prerequisite check: is Oxide installed, and is its build current enough. That is doctor's shape, not a new concept.

The protocol pairing check generalises unchanged. servuo-plugins/overlay.toml declares the protocol the overlay speaks and the installer refuses to pair a disagreeing sidecar; rust-plugins needs the same declaration under whatever name the variant gives it, and the refusal is the same refusal.

R5 — Teams come from Rust's first-party clans; the uMod Clans plugin is the richer tier

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). Basic functionality is built on Rust's own clan system; the third-party uMod Clans plugin is an optional layer for a much richer experience, and lands in phase 17 rather than phase 9.

The distinction matters more than the names suggest, so it is worth stating precisely:

• Rust's first-party clans are seven hooks in HOOKS.md — OnClanCreated, OnClanDisbanded, OnClanMemberAdded, OnClanMemberKicked, OnClanMemberLeft, plus colour and logo — each handing you a LocalClan. All seven are "no return behavior", which is exactly what a read-only bridge wants: there is nothing to abstain from, so kit ch. 4's return-null-from-every-veto rule has no work to do here. They need no plugin, and the rig is already running them (D:\rust\server\server1\clans.287.db).
• Rust's first-party Teams are a different system — twelve hooks, mostly vetoable — and are the transient in-game squad, not the persistent organisation. They are not what core's Team provider should be fed. Clans is the right choice and this is why.
• The uMod Clans plugin's API is not in our mirror. HOOKS.md is the game's 477 hooks; a plugin's own API is its own documentation. It is reached through [PluginReference] and is null when absent, making it an R3-shaped dependency that must refuse with a reason.

Reading that plugin's source settled R5 far more firmly than the reasoning above did, and in a direction worth stating plainly: for Teams, the plugin is worse than first-party, not richer. Clans v0.2.10 (k1lly0u, MIT, 2,692 lines) publishes fifteen [HookMethod]s and every one of them is a mutation — CreateClan, JoinClan, LeaveClan, KickPlayer, PromotePlayer, DemotePlayer, DisbandClan, and the eight alliance verbs. There is no read API whatsoever: no GetClan, no GetClanOf, no GetClanMembers, no GetAllClans.

Corrected in phase 0 (§12.3). This paragraph continued "it raises exactly three hooks — OnClanCreate, OnClanChat, OnAllianceChat — none of which is a membership transition", and concluded that the plugin cannot answer core's provider questions at all. That was a grep artefact and it is wrong. Clans 0.2.10 raises nine hooks. The missing six are invisible to a search for CallHook("OnClan… because the name is a const at the call site:

const string HOOK_NAME = "OnClanMemberJoined";
Interface.CallHook(HOOK_NAME, tag, ulong.Parse(joining), RustMemberList);

They are OnClanMemberJoined(tag, joining, members), OnClanMemberGone(tag, leaving, members), OnClanDisbanded(tag, members), OnClanAllianceCreated, OnClanAllianceDissolved, and OnClanUpdate(tag). The first three carry the full member list, so the plugin can answer "who is in this clan" without any read API, and OnClanUpdate fires on promote and demote — the exact transitions first-party lacks.

The decision does not change, but its reason does. First-party remains the Team provider's source because it is the system the game maintains and every server has it; the plugin is an optional install that not every shard will run, and feeding a provider from something optional makes Teams conditional on a mod. It is no longer true that the plugin cannot answer the questions — only that it should not be the one asked. Feeding the Team provider from first-party clans is still permanent, not a first step.

What the plugin genuinely adds is alliances and clan/alliance chat — richer in features, not in roster data. That is what phase 17's adapter surfaces, and it sits beside the Team provider rather than under it.

One route is deliberately not taken: the plugin persists to its own files under oxide/data/, and a determined integration could read those directly. That is reaching into another plugin's private storage, not using an API — it breaks without warning on any upstream refactor and is not a contract anybody owes us. If phase 17 wants roster data from the plugin, the honest path is an upstream pull request adding a read method, not a file reader.

R6 — the required base set: Kits, Clans, PopupNotifications and ZoneManager

Named 2026-09-15 (org lead), extended the same day by R17. All four are MIT; three are k1lly0u's and BetterChat's author differs only in the optional tier. All fetched at plan time:

Plugin	Version	Released	Source
Kits	4.4.9	2026-06-04	https://umod.org/plugins/Kits.cs
Clans	0.2.10	2026-05-06	https://umod.org/plugins/Clans.cs
PopupNotifications	0.2.1	2026-08-09	https://umod.org/plugins/PopupNotifications.cs
ZoneManager (R17)	3.1.14	2026-09-02	https://umod.org/plugins/ZoneManager.cs

Every one has a direct .cs download, so phase 0's install step is four curls into oxide/plugins/ and no manual retrieval. Pull them fresh rather than using the copies staged in Downloads, which are an older vintage.

The four base plugins use three different conventions for their callable API, which is worth knowing before someone goes hunting for the wrong one: Kits uses [HookMethod], BetterChat uses API_-prefixed methods, and ZoneManager uses plain private methods resolved by name. All three are reached the same way from our side — [PluginReference] plus Call() — but only the first is greppable as a declared API.

Clans is listed by uMod as a Universal plugin rather than a Rust one — it is written against Covalence, and its API takes IPlayer rather than BasePlayer. That is the portable half of the uMod surface, and it is why the same plugin serves several games.

Kits is the opposite of Clans and is a genuinely good dependency. Twenty-three [HookMethod]s, including the three things the event work actually needs:

• GiveKit(BasePlayer player, string name) — the reward action's call;
• GetKitNames(List<string>) / GetAllKits() — the option source for the authoring form, so an operator picks a kit from the live server instead of typing an identifier from memory;
• GetKitInfo / KitDescription / KitImage / KitMax / KitCooldown / GetPlayerKitUses / GetPlayerKitCooldown — form metadata and per-player eligibility.

It also raises OnKitRedeemed(BasePlayer player, string kitName), which the bridge can listen on to report a redemption as an ordinary event, whoever triggered it.

Two traps in GiveKit, both found by reading it rather than by reasoning about it.

R16 moved these off the critical path. The reward action no longer calls GiveKit — it grants the kit's RequiredPermission and the player redeems it themselves. Both traps are kept here because the second one is why R16 is the better design, and because anything that ever does call GiveKit directly — an admin "give this player a kit now" button, say — walks straight into them.

GiveKit returns null on a failure path, and null is Oxide's idiom for "no opinion". The first line is if (!player) return null;. Everywhere else in this ecosystem a null return means abstain, so the reflex — treat null as fine — reports a reward as delivered when there was no player to deliver it to. The success value is the literal true; a refusal is a message string, which drops straight into chapter 5's error field. So the mapping is result is bool ok && ok for success, a string for a refusal reason, and null is a failure, not a success.

GiveKit takes a BasePlayer, so the player must be connected. There is no offline grant in this API. An event that rewards participants at two in the morning rewards only whoever is online at that moment, silently. The choice this forced was: accept online-only and say so in the action's description, or keep a persisted pending-grant queue in the bridge and redeem it on next connect — a second at-most-once store with its own idempotency, which is not free.

R16 took a third option and it is the right one: stop granting items. Grant the entitlement instead. An entitlement waits without a queue, because waiting is what an entitlement does. The problem was not hard to solve — it was the wrong problem, produced by an action declared around the wrong noun.

PopupNotifications is small and does exactly one thing: CreatePopupNotification(string message, BasePlayer player = null, float duration = 0f), where a null player makes it global. That is the server-side notification surface, and it needs no more than that.

The one gap to design around: the seven first-party hooks carry created, disbanded, added, kicked and left — but no promote or leader-changed event. Core's provider requires getTeamLeaders, so leadership is read off LocalClan at snapshot time rather than tracked from transitions. That makes phase 9 partly snapshot-driven where the dry run predicted it would be fully event-driven — a small correction to that document, recorded here rather than silently.

Phase 0 verified the seven against agent/hooks.tsv and the gap is real. It also found that the Clans plugin closes it — OnClanUpdate(tag) fires on both promote and demote (§12.3). That does not move the provider off first-party, but it does mean phase 17's adapter can offer event-driven leadership on servers that run the plugin, over a snapshot baseline on servers that do not. Design phase 9's snapshot so phase 17 can sharpen it rather than replace it.

R7 — the notifications and engagement set ships in v1

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). registerNotificationStreams, registerEventTriggers, registerAudiences and registerEngagementSeeds are all in the first release, plus registerAnnounceLeg and registerPostHook.

They are a matched set, which is why they are one decision and one phase: a trigger declares the payload contract and the widest audience a rule on it may ever be given, an audience resolves people over module data, and seeds ship the bodies and the rules that use them. Three rules from the kit that this phase lives or dies on:

• ceiling is required, has no default, and is not a ladder. A staff ceiling does not permit owner, because "one person" for a cheat-detection event is the player it was detected on. Fewer people is not less exposure.
• subjectKey must name one of your declared variables — it is what the cooldown keys on. Core refuses the module at boot if it names nothing, which is the good failure; the bad one it prevents is every subject sharing undefined.
• A rule group is offered once, per group key. A rule appended to an existing group reaches fresh installs only — so a rule that must reach existing deployments takes a new group key.

And the emit discipline: emit on the transition, not on the poll. Core's cooldown would hide a module that emitted "the server is still up" as news.

R8 — multi-server from the start

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). The server list is the landing page and everything else hangs under /rust/servers/:id. Every gameplay row carries a server id as well as a wipe_id, and the module holds one sidecar client per configured server.

This is the dry run's finding 2 taken at face value: "one module, one game" is not the same as "one module, one server". Retrofitting an :id segment through every route, table and page is the expensive version, and a Rust community runs several servers by default.

R9 — the live map, with every layer toggleable

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). The site offers a live map, and each layer is an operator switch set to public / players-only / admin-only through the existing visibility framework (SHARD_VISIBILITY.md).

The map is two problems and they take different paths, which is the thing to get right before building either:

• The map image is static content on the game host — proceduralmap.<size>.<seed>.<save>.map beside the world save, regenerated only on a wipe. That is exactly kit ch. 3 §2b's case, and it takes that shape: request/reply, never events (a sidecar that broadcast it would write megabytes into its own store and fan them at every client), one in flight with an explicit busy, two stages — what exists, then what changed, and a derivation version separate from the protocol so improving how we read the file invalidates a cached image whose source hash did not move. And no import on boot: a wipe is an event the operator knows about and the website does not.
• Everything moving on it is live state down the ordinary read path — monuments, cargo ship, patrol helicopter, airdrops, locked crates, and player positions.

The layer switches are a security boundary, not a preference. Public player positions in Rust are a competitive-advantage leak — anyone, including people who do not play on the server, could locate players and infer base positions. The default posture is monuments and world events public, player and base layers admin-only, and an operator opening one up is a deliberate act with the consequence stated on the switch.

This is the only asset-bridge work in scope. Item icons and the 2,590 workshop skin ids stay out of v1; kill feeds and kit lists render as text.

R10 — the Android app is in this workstream, capability-driven, trailing by one phase

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). Full Rust support in the app, not a degradation check. It decides which screens to show from GET /api/v1/public/modules — each started module's capabilities array — and each app leg lands one phase after the website surface it consumes is merged, so it is always built against a real endpoint rather than a planned one.

Two endpoints that are not this and are easy to confuse with it, both checked on 2026-09-15: /api/v1/public/status returns site mode plus a version block — the first-run probe and version-mismatch guard, not a feature manifest — and /api/health on the internal app is a liveness probe returning {status:'ok'}. Neither can say which pages exist.

§2.9's rule governs: treat an unknown capability as absent, and never infer a URL from one.

R11 — a small read-only set of Discord slash commands

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). Questions answered from data the module already holds — server status, wipe schedule, leaderboards, who is online. No write verbs, and the account link stays on the two surfaces R1 names rather than acquiring a third.

The trap to carry in from the Teams work: ephemerality is fixed at the deferral, so a command that might refuse must defer ephemeral or its refusal goes public in the channel. And the registries have no removal path, which is an argument for adding a command late rather than early.

R12 — per-wipe detail plus all-time rollups

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). Every gameplay row carries wipe_id; leaderboards default to the current wipe; a separate rollup accumulates per player across wipes so a returning player's history survives the monthly reset.

The truncation is a runtime operation on a module route, never a schema one — §2.6's leading-verb allowlist forbids DELETE and TRUNCATE in a fragment precisely because the fragment replays at every boot and would empty the table on each restart.

R13 — two extension slots: admin.users.detail and site.footer.status

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). An operator looking at a user sees their linked Steam identity, per-server stats and site-authored permission grants in core's own admin user page; the footer carries a shard-status indicator on every page.

One module per slot, so claiming them also reserves them. And the naming rule matters for anyone reading this later: a slot is named for a PLACE, never for a meaning — site.footer.status is "the status-ish spot in the footer", not core knowing what a game server is.

R14 — /rust on all three tiers

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). public, admin and player all mount /rust, exactly as module-uo mounts /uo. Sub-surfaces are path segments: /rust/servers/:id, /rust/map, /rust/clans.

Chosen deliberately because prefixes share one namespace with core's own and the loader's collision probe cannot see all of core's — several core endpoints are mounted at the tier root rather than under a prefix. A noun from our own domain that equals the module id cannot collide, where /servers or /map very well might.

R18 — plugin configuration is editable from the site, with a generated form and an auto-reload

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). An admin edits any loaded plugin's configuration from the website and it reloads automatically. Two tiers:

• Base: the site walks oxide/config/ recursively and generates a form from the values themselves — a boolean becomes a toggle, a number a numeric field, a string a text box, an array a list, a nested object a group. It is derived at read time, so it works for whatever plugins happen to be installed, including ones added or removed after we shipped.
• Advanced: raw JSON editing for anything the generated form cannot express.

This is the same posture as R2 — the site as the authority over the game host — but a different shape. R2 is continuously reconciled state pushed on every connect; this is request/reply, on demand (kit ch. 3 §2a). Do not build it on the permission mirror.

The mechanics Oxide gives us, all verified 2026-09-15: configs live at oxide/config/<PluginName>.json; oxide.reload <name> rereads one; and OnPluginLoaded / OnPluginUnloaded are real hooks in the Server category, so whether a reload actually succeeded is observable rather than assumed.

Discovery is a recursive walk, and it stops at oxide/config/

Amended 2026-09-15 (org lead). Configuration is not one flat oxide/config/<Plugin>.json per plugin. Plugins nest — oxide/config/<Mod>/whatever.json, and deeper — and one plugin may own several files. So discovery is a recursive walk of the config tree, and the UI groups by plugin rather than assuming one file each.

Four things follow, and the first is a boundary rather than a detail.

oxide/data/ is not the settings surface, and must not be walked into. DataFileSystem writes to oxide/data/, and that is live state, not configuration. The base set makes the point by itself: Kits keeps Kits/kits_data.json and Kits/player_data.json, ZoneManager keeps ZoneManager/zone_data.json, Clans keeps clan_data.json (and a legacy clans_data.json beside it, which is also a reminder that these names are not stable). Editing those from a web form edits players' kit cooldowns and the live zone definitions, a running plugin overwrites the change on its next save, and oxide.reload does not make most plugins safely re-read them. It is a different problem with a different answer and it is deliberately out of scope. If a plugin's settings genuinely live under data/, that is a per-plugin exception someone opts into knowingly, never something the walk discovers on its own.

The reload target cannot be inferred from the path. oxide/config/Foo/bar.json may belong to plugin Foo, or to something else entirely — the folder name is convention, not contract. So the reload target is an explicit field with the folder name as its default guess, confirmable by the admin. Infer it silently and the failure is the nastiest kind available here: we reload the wrong plugin, observe OnPluginLoaded for it, and report success while the plugin that was actually edited never re-read anything.

A relative path from a web form is now a path-traversal surface. Canonicalise the resolved path, assert it is genuinely under the config root, reject absolute paths, and reject symlinks that resolve outside. Before this amendment the feature addressed files by plugin name; now it addresses them by path, and that is exactly the change that introduces the bug class.

Bound the walk and the file. A depth limit, a file-count limit and a per-file size cap — a pathological tree must not be enumerated and a multi-megabyte JSON must not be loaded into a form. And because one plugin can own several files, the backup and rollback operate on the whole set a save touches, not one file at a time.

The trap that would silently corrupt every float

JavaScript cannot tell 1 from 1.0, and Oxide configs deserialize into typed C# classes. JSON.parse('{"Rate":1.0}') yields the number 1, and JSON.stringify writes it back as 1 — so a naive read-modify-write of a config file silently rewrites every whole-numbered float as an integer, on fields nobody touched. Newtonsoft may coerce it, or may throw, and a throw at load means the plugin does not come back.

So: never parse the whole document, mutate, and re-serialize. Edit the file textually — a surgical replacement of the edited key's value — or use a parser that preserves number literals. The fields at risk are exactly the ones a Rust server tunes: gather rates, multipliers, scales.

Five more limits of inferring a schema from values

Worth stating because the feature's whole promise is that it works without knowing the plugin:

• Empty arrays and null carry no type. Nothing can be inferred; render them advanced-only.
• Enum-like strings are indistinguishable from free text. There is no allowed-value set to read, so a string field is a text box and cannot be validated.
• There are no descriptions, no minimums and no maximums. The key name is the entire label — which is survivable because Oxide convention favours readable keys (BetterChat really does ship "Maximal Titles" and "Reverse Title Order").
• Nested objects and arrays of objects need recursion, a depth limit, and a fall-back to raw JSON past it.
• The file after a reload may not be what we wrote. Oxide merges missing defaults and saves, so re-read after reloading rather than assuming our write is the current state.

Safety, and why it needs more than the usual

A bad config does not fail the write — it fails the next load, and the plugin stays down. Since R6 and R17 make four plugins required, a broken ZoneManager config takes event participation with it. So the write path is:

1. Read with a version (hash or mtime) and require it back on write — an operator editing on disk at the same time gets a conflict rather than a silent overwrite.
2. Validate the edited document parses.
3. Back up the current file, write, reload.
4. Watch for OnPluginLoaded within a window. If it does not arrive, restore the backup and reload again, automatically, and report the failure with whatever Oxide logged.

That rollback is the feature's real content. Without it this is a web form that can take the shard's plugins down one typo at a time.

Two more obligations.

Redact secrets. Plugin configs routinely hold API keys and Discord webhooks. A config reader hands those to anyone who can open the page. Mask values whose key matches the usual shapes — key, token, secret, password, webhook — and treat them write-only, exactly as the platform already treats the uo-link token. This is a real leak vector and the generated-form approach walks straight into it.

Gate it on its own site permission and audit every write — who changed which key, from what to what, and whether the reload succeeded. It is an admin writing to the game host's filesystem, which is the most powerful thing the site can do to a server.

One distinction to keep

Editing a plugin's config file is not a lease. A lease (§9) borrows a convar for a while and the game restores it on a deadline. This writes a file and is permanent until someone changes it back. They look similar from a web form and they are not the same mechanism — an event should never reach for this one.

R17 — ZoneManager joins the required base set, because events need to know where people are

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). ZoneManager (k1lly0u, 3.1.14 released 2026-09-02, MIT, Rust, ~218k downloads) is a fourth required plugin, not an optional one. It is what makes an event able to answer where a player is.

Reading its source changed two things this plan had been vague about, and promoted one action out of the optional tier.

Its API is private methods reached through Oxide's reflection Call() — no [HookMethod], no API_ prefix, which is a third convention among the four base plugins and worth knowing before someone goes looking for one that is not there.

Surface	What it gives an event
IsPlayerInZone(zoneId, player) → bool	the direct question
GetPlayerZoneIDs(player) → string[]	every zone a player is in
GetPlayerZoneIDsNoAlloc(player, List<string>)	the allocation-free variant — the one to use on any sweep
CreateOrUpdateZone(zoneId, args, position)	make a zone
CreateOrUpdateTemporaryZone(..., Plugin owner)	make a zone owned by our plugin
EraseTemporaryZone(Plugin owner, zoneId)	remove one; owner-scoped only against another plugin's zone, not against an unowned one (§12.4)
GetZoneIDs / GetZoneName / GetZoneLocation / CheckZoneID	the catalogue, for an option source

And nine hooks raised: OnEnterZone / OnExitZone, OnEntityEnterZone / OnEntityExitZone, OnZoneInitialize / OnZoneUpdated / OnZoneDestroyed / OnZoneErased, plus CanSpawnInZone, which is a veto our bridge abstains from like every other.

Three things this settles.

Participation stops being the hard part. EVENTS.md §H rates participation "the hard part" for UO and "substantially easier" for Rust because hooks carry attacker and victim. ZoneManager makes it exact rather than merely easier: OnEnterZone and OnExitZone are presence transitions delivered as events, so the participation ledger is fed from what happened rather than reconstructed from a sweep. An action's reply carries its participants envelope member, and this is where that member gets its content.

Advance conditions become expressible. A phase that waits until "ten players are at the monument" is a real gate rather than a wish — it reads zone membership. Without ZoneManager the same condition is distance arithmetic against a point, recomputed on a timer, which is both more expensive and less accurate.

rust.zone.open moves from the optional tier into the base catalogue, and it can be reversible: 'ledger' honestly. This is the nicer half: CreateOrUpdateTemporaryZone takes a Plugin owner and EraseTemporaryZone is scoped to that owner, so ZoneManager already has a first-class notion of a zone belonging to the plugin that made it. And erasing a zone that is gone is a success, which is what revert needs.

Narrowed in phase 0 (§12.4), and this one is a safety correction. The scoping is real but it is one-directional: it stops us erasing a zone owned by another plugin, and does nothing at all for a zone owned by nobody.

// Only compare zone owner if the owner param is provided so users can remove temporary zones
// without needing to unload the plugin that created them
if (owner && zoneOwner && owner != zoneOwner)
    return false;

zoneOwner is null for every permanent zone — which is every zone an operator made by hand. So EraseTemporaryZone(us, "<operator's zone>") deletes it and returns true, indistinguishable from erasing our own. Observed live: a zone created with CreateOrUpdateZone and no owner was erased by an EraseTemporaryZone call from an unrelated plugin.

So this is less of ch. 4's persisted ownership registry than the paragraph above claims. We still keep our own map from core's resource reference to the zone id, and that map is now load-bearing rather than convenient: phase 12 must refuse to erase any zone id it did not record creating. ZoneManager will not refuse on our behalf, and the true it returns is not evidence the zone was ours.

One trap to design against, and it is chapter 4's rule meeting a chatty hook. OnEnterZone and OnExitZone fire on the game thread and a large zone with a busy server produces a great many of them. The emit path already enqueues and returns, so the game cannot stall — but the bridge should subscribe selectively rather than forwarding every transition in every zone. A zone no event cares about should cost nothing on the wire. Decide the filter with the hooks in front of you at phase 12, and measure it, because a sweep over GetPlayerZoneIDsNoAlloc is cheap and a flood of wire traffic is not.

R15 — an optional-integration tier, with BetterChat as the first member

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). Beyond the required base set (R6) the module carries a tier of optional integrations: each detects its plugin through [PluginReference], degrades cleanly to absent, and adds something the site already knows how to compute.

The first named member is BetterChat (LaserHydra, 5.2.15, MIT, Universal/Covalence, ~200k downloads) — "manage chat groups, customize colors, and add titles". The motivating case is titles earned from leaderboards: top of the wipe's kill board gets a tag in chat.

Its integration point is a pull, not a push, and that is why it is a good first member. API_RegisterThirdPartyTitle(Plugin plugin, Func<IPlayer, string> titleGetter) registers a callback, and BetterChat invokes it per player when it renders a chat line. So a leaderboard title is a pure function of state we already hold — nothing is written into BetterChat, nothing can go stale, and there is no drift to reconcile. Contrast R2, which is a push and needs a whole reconcile story.

The one trap, and it is chapter 4's rule applied to somebody else's callback: that getter runs synchronously on the chat path. It must be a cheap in-memory lookup — never a socket call, never a database query, never anything that can block. A title that costs a round trip is a chat message that costs a round trip.

Its other two API methods, API_AddGroup(group) and API_SetGroupField(group, field, value), pair naturally with R2: the site already authors permission groups, so a site-authored group can carry a chat colour and tag. That is a push and would need the same drift posture R2 has; it is a phase-17 decision, not a given.

The tier is open-ended by design. Other integrations get added as they prove useful, and the bar for each is the one this plan applies everywhere: it must fulfil the contract — declare honestly, degrade to absent, and never make the module's own surfaces depend on something that may not be installed.

R16 — the reward action grants the RIGHT to redeem, not the items

Decided 2026-09-15 (org lead). An event reward does not call GiveKit. It grants the permission that gates a kit, and the player redeems it themselves in game, whenever they next log in.

Kits already has exactly this model built in, which is what makes it cheap: every kit carries a RequiredPermission, GiveKit's own path checks it before handing anything over, and the in-game kit menu renders a kit the player lacks the permission for as locked rather than hiding it. GetKitInfo returns that permission under ["permission"], so the module can read which kits are gated and which are open to everyone.

This is a better design than the one it replaces, and it is worth being explicit about how much it removes:

• The offline-grant problem disappears entirely. GiveKit needed a connected BasePlayer, so an event firing at two in the morning rewarded only whoever happened to be online. An entitlement waits. This closes the open question §3 carried — no pending-grant queue, no second at-most-once store, none of it.
• It is the same machinery as R2, not a second mechanism. A reward becomes a permission grant authored by the site and mirrored into Oxide — the thing phase 7 already builds. One permission authority, one drift story, one audit trail.
• reversible: 'ledger' becomes honest, where a direct grant could only ever be 'none'. See "What phase 13 must declare honestly" below.
• The player gets agency. They redeem when they want it, where they want it, with Kits' own cooldown and use limits still applying — rather than having items appear in their inventory, possibly while they are somewhere it is a liability.

One design note the option source has to carry. A kit with an empty RequiredPermission is open to everybody, so granting a permission for it rewards nobody with anything. The authoring form's kit dropdown must surface which kits are permission-gated and refuse — or at minimum warn loudly — on one that is not. That is a real refusal with a real reason, and exactly what R3's envelope is for.

3. Open questions

None. Both questions this section carried were closed on 2026-09-15.

Clans in the base set while the Team provider reads first-party was confirmed as the intended reading: complementary, not in conflict — the plugin is installed for alliances and clan chat, the provider is fed from the first-party system that actually publishes membership transitions (R5).

Offline reward grants was dissolved rather than answered. R16 changed the noun: the reward action grants an entitlement instead of items, and an entitlement does not need the player to be online. The persisted pending-grant queue that question was weighing is not needed at all.

4. The test rig

D:\rust on the org lead's workstation. Brought current in phase 0 (see §12): build 25230300, Oxide 2.0.7716, a fresh procedural world (seed 1234, size 4000) generated for this wipe, and all four base plugins loaded. Its Oxide permission store holds a default and an admin group with one admin user, so R2's mechanism was exercised on day one and works.

A wipe keeps server/server1/cfg/. That directory holds users.cfg, and users.cfg holds the ownerid line — delete the whole identity directory and you silently remove the operator's own ownership along with the map.

Three traps recorded here because each cost time before it was understood:

• start.bat never updated anything — the 2026-09-15 diagnosis was wrong, corrected in phase 0. The script was read as "updates C:\rustserver, runs D:\rust", and the fix changed the path to d:\rust\. The path was never the problem. steamcmd requires +force_install_dir before +login, and the script had it after:

  steamcmd.exe +login anonymous +force_install_dir d:\rust\ +app_update 258550 +quit
  →  Please use force_install_dir before logon!
  →  Error! App '258550' state is 0x486 after update job.
  

  So the flag was discarded, the update ran against steamcmd's own directory, and the job errored out every single time. It updated no directory, ever — which is the actual reason D:\rust fell a wipe behind, and why C:\rustserver sits at the same stale buildid rather than a newer one. Now reads +force_install_dir d:\rust\ +login anonymous +app_update 258550 +quit; the pristine original is kept at start.bat.bak and the path-only fix at start.bat.broken-order-20260915. With the ordering right, the run is a delta and takes minutes.

• Re-extract Oxide after every app_update. Updating the server and re-installing Oxide together is the standard operator routine, not a discovery — Oxide ships a patched Assembly-CSharp.dll and a Steam update restores Facepunch's. Recorded here only for the mechanical detail: the update does not remove Oxide.Core.dll and friends, so a half-done install still looks Oxided while loading no plugins and raising no hook. Check the size rather than the directory — on build 25230300 vanilla is 9,758,544 bytes and Oxide 2.0.7716's is 9,953,280.

• C:\oxide_files is a 2025-04-23 Oxide and must not be copied anywhere. Oxide ships a patched Assembly-CSharp.dll; that bundle's is 6,842,880 bytes against the live 9,953,280, so copying it over a real install is a hard downgrade. D:\rust is already correct and needs nothing from it.

Rust force-wipes on the first Thursday of the month and Oxide is rebuilt to match, so "is the rig current" is a recurring question, not a one-time setup step. Every phase that touches the plugin re-checks it.

5. The phases

Twenty phases, roughly doubled from the first draft — the contract audit in §7 is why, and the honest reading is that the first list was a game-bridge plan with a website module bolted on, where the kit treats the module as the bulk of the work.

0–4 produce a working read-only multi-server Rust site that an operator can actually install. 6–7b are the permissions and remote-administration product. 9 is Teams. 10 is the notifications set, whose catalogue is §10. 12–13 are events, whose catalogue is §9. 14 is the map. 18 is how any of it reaches somebody who is not us. The Android legs (5, 8, 11, 15) each trail the website surface they consume by one phase, per R10.

Each phase ends with its findings written down, as every workstream here does.

#	Phase	Repos	Done when
0	The rig. ✅ Done 2026-09-15 — as built and findings in §12. Updated to the current wipe (the script was fixed again, properly), Oxide re-laid, base set installed, the grant path proven end to end. One acceptance criterion is open: zone occupancy needs a connected player and cannot be closed headlessly (§12.5)	docs	A current server boots with all four loaded, oxide.grant demonstrably gates something, and a test zone reports who is standing in it
1	Protocol 1, three skeletons, and every bundle seam at once. Plugin: bounded drop-oldest queue, one writer thread, tagged reconnect epoch, dial-out. Sidecar: listener, SQLite, always-on token auth, version header, rpc correlation. Module: id: rust, /rust on all three tiers (R14), schema.sql and purge.sql, the extensions declaration (§11.3), per-server sidecar tokens through ctx.secretBox (§11.4), the vite aliases and shims, checkExternals, checkImports, the swagger fragment and its staleness check, explicit onBoot/onShutdown, capabilities	all 3 + docs	One hello line travels game -> sidecar -> module; killing the sidecar does not stall the game; all five guards green on an untouched skeleton
2	Packaging and release. release.yml, the install manifest, the sha256, the host allowlist — and a real install into a running core from a manifest URL	Module-Rust + docs	An operator installs the empty module from Admin -> Modules and it reaches started
3	The read path. First hook wave from HOOKS.md; events and snapshots distinct at the wire; wipe_id and server id on every row (R8); all-time rollups (R12); every board re-emitted on connect	all 3 + docs	A restarted sidecar is fully populated within one connection, and a wipe does not erase a player's history
4	The first pages. Server list as the landing page, /rust/servers/:id beneath it, killfeed, leaderboard; nav rows; the UI kit (PublicLayout shell, PageHeader props); capabilities; the site.footer.status slot (R13)	Module-Rust	The site renders the last thing each server said while every server is off
5	Android leg A (R10). Capability-driven shell from GET /api/v1/public/modules, plus the phase-4 screens	Android-app	The app renders a Rust site it has never seen, and a UO site unchanged
6	Identity (R1), and the admin.users.detail slot (R13)	3 + docs	A player links an account in-game; an operator sees the Steam id inside core's own user page
7	Site-owned permissions (R2). Groups and grants authored on the site; full set pushed on connect, deltas after; drift reported	all 3 + docs	A grant made on the website gates a third-party plugin in-game, and survives a wipe
7b	Mod configuration from the site (R18). Recursive walk of oxide/config/ (never oxide/data/), generated form from the live values, raw-JSON advanced tier, explicit reload target, versioned read/write, auto-reload watched on OnPluginLoaded, automatic rollback over the whole file set, path-traversal guards, secret redaction, its own permission and an audit trail	all 3 + docs	An admin flips a ZoneManager setting from the website and it takes effect; a deliberately broken config rolls itself back and says why; a nested <Mod>/x.json is found and reloads the right plugin
8	Android leg B (R10). Identity and permission surfaces	Android-app	A player links from the app
9	Teams from first-party clans (R5). Membership event-driven, leadership read off LocalClan at snapshot; declareModuleSlot × 3 for core's team.notify / team.activity / team.forum	Module-Rust + 2	The clan page is ours, core's contributions land in places we named, and every slot empty still reads correctly
10	Notifications and engagement (R7). Streams, triggers with ceiling and subjectKey, audiences, engagement seeds, announce leg, post hook — the catalogue is §10, including the in-game-popup question	Module-Rust + docs	The offline raid alert reaches the player whose base it was, and nobody else
11	Android leg C (R10). Inbox and notification preferences for Rust triggers	Android-app	A Rust notification arrives on a phone and can be switched off there
12	Events: budgets, option sources and the leases (§9). kit ch. 5's own ordering — leases before actions — and every key verified live before it is advertised	Module-Rust + 2	A leased value is observed changing in the running game and restored, per key; rust.group.membership expires without core asking
13	Events: the actions (§9, R3, R16). rust.kit.entitle first, then rust.prefab.place and rust.announce; reversible: 'ledger'; the kit option source flags kits with no permission gate, plus reconcile() and the boot-id watch calling ctx.events.reconcile() (§11.1)	all 3 + docs	A reward granted at 03:00 is waiting in the kit menu when the player next logs in, and a revert withdraws it; a wipe reconciles the ledger instead of stranding it
14	The live map (R9). The map image over the bridge — request/reply, two-stage, one in flight, its own derivation version, no import on boot — plus the live layers and a per-layer public/players/admin switch built on our own visibility layer (§11.2 — shardVisibility is module-uo's, not core's)	all 3 + docs	The map renders for the current wipe, and a player layer is invisible until an operator deliberately opens it
15	Android leg D (R10). Map and events	Android-app	The map renders on a phone with the same layer gates
16	Discord slash commands (R11). A small read-only set, every refusal deferred ephemeral	Module-Rust + docs	A refusal does not go public in the channel
17	Optional mod integrations (R15). BetterChat first — leaderboard titles through API_RegisterThirdPartyTitle, a pull with no drift — then the uMod Clans adapter (alliances and clan chat, beside the provider rather than under it, R5), then others as they prove useful	Rust-Plugins + Module-Rust + docs	A server missing every optional mod still runs the module, Teams included
18	The installer (R4). `--game servuo	rust, the bundle payload as a variant, an Oxide prerequisite check in doctor`, the protocol pairing refusal carried over	installer + docs
19	Docs, kit feedback, cutover. docs/; .profile (three repos were added); runicgateway.com (a second game is a headline change); and the Integration-kit question R2 raised	docs + Integration-kit + .profile + runicgateway.com	docs/ describes what shipped, the front door names the new repos, and R2's missing chapter is answered either way

Why the lease comes before the reward action

The stated priority is Kits rewards, and this plan still schedules a lease first (12 before 13). kit ch. 5 is explicit about it and the reasoning survives restating: a lease is a value that already existed, changed for a while, and put back, so reading it first gives you the baseline for nothing. An action makes something that did not exist. The lease proves the whole command path — correlation, the idempotency key, budgetMs against the client timeout, the deadline the game enforces on its own — before anything hands out loot. It is a cheaper place to find all four of chapter 5's invisible failures.

Reversible on request.

What phase 13 must declare honestly

Rewritten 2026-09-15 by R16. This section previously argued that a kit reward could only be reversible: 'none', because there is no honest way to un-grant loot a player has already spent. That was correct about a direct grant and R16 stopped doing direct grants. The reasoning is kept below in its corrected form because the shape of the mistake is the reusable part: the action was declared around the wrong noun. What the event makes is not loot; it is an entitlement.

The reward action grants an entitlement, and an entitlement is reversible. revert revokes the permission, removing one that is not there is a success, and it is idempotent by construction — so reversible: 'ledger' is the honest declaration, and core's ledger sweep does real work on every terminal path.

One consequence to state rather than discover: a player who redeemed before the revert keeps the items. That is correct and not a hole. The ledgered resource is the grant, and reverting it withdraws the entitlement rather than the consumption — the same way cancelling a coupon does not un-eat the meal. An operator reading the run console should see that distinction in the wording.

cost() counts permission grants, and unlike a kit count it is exactly knowable before dispatch. That removes the whole class of problem chapter 5 §4 warns about: there is no "declare the maximum because you cannot know until the answer comes back". One recipient is one grant. Core prices cost before dispatch and never reconciles it, so being able to count precisely is worth more than it sounds.

And the idempotency key largely stops mattering here, which is the tidiest part of R16. Chapter 5 §2 draws the line itself: "A key is for a write whose repetition would be a second EFFECT — creating, granting, announcing. A write that SETS a value to X is idempotent by its own nature." A permission grant is a set. Pass the key through anyway — it costs nothing and it is what the contract expects — but the failure mode it exists to prevent, a socket hiccup producing a second set of everything, no longer has a way to happen.

The monthly wipe is still the case revert's tolerance rule was written for: if a wipe or a rebuilt host clears Oxide's permission store, every ledgered grant is invalidated at once and "gone, and that is fine" is a success. Note this is also where R2 pays for itself twice — the site re-pushes its whole permission set on the next connect, so an entitlement an event granted comes back rather than being quietly lost.

6. Risks worth naming now

• Hooks bind by name and arity, by reflection, with no compile-time check. A misspelled hook is never called, silently, with no warning at load — the single most common way a Rust plugin does nothing. The plugin must log which of its expected hooks have fired at least once, so a hook Facepunch renamed on a wipe is visible rather than mysterious. See README.md §2.
• A convar that applies cleanly and does nothing. Most game config is read once at boot and cached; applying it later succeeds, reads back correctly, and changes nothing. Every lease key gets verified live — apply, observe in the running game, restore — before it is advertised. The UO module surveyed 156 config reads and found roughly eight that were live.
• The wipe cadence is the schedule. A monthly force wipe moves the hook list, rebuilds Oxide, and invalidates every ledgered resource. Phases that end near one should expect to re-verify rather than assume.
• start.bat's RCON password is letmein in plaintext with rcon.web 1. Acceptable on a loopback dev rig, and it must never be the shape anything published copies.

7. Contract coverage audit

Added 2026-09-15 after re-reading the whole kit rather than only chapters 3-5. The first draft of §5 was built from the game-facing chapters and under-planned the website module by a wide margin — the template makes eight of the ten non-event registrations and the plan covered three. Every element is listed with the phase it now lands in; the column worth reading is "was it in the first draft", because that is the shape of the mistake.

The server handshake — ten registrations plus two hooks (ch. 2)

Call	In the first draft	Phase
registerRoutes	yes	4
registerTeamProvider	yes	9
registerEventBudgets / OptionSources / Leases / Actions	yes	12-13
onBoot / onShutdown	implicit only	1
registerExtension	no	4 (site.footer.status), 6 (admin.users.detail)
registerNotificationStreams	no	10
registerEventTriggers	no	10
registerAudiences	no	10
registerEngagementSeeds	no	10
registerAnnounceLeg	no	10
registerPostHook	no	10
registerSlashCommands	no	16

Triggers, audiences and seeds are one phase because they are a matched set in template/server/index.js, not three independent gaps — see R7.

The bundle's own parts

Part	In the first draft	Phase
module.json id / coreApi / capabilities	yes	1, 4
mounts and prefix choice	no	1 (R14)
schema.sql	yes	1, 3
purge.sql	no	1
swagger-fragment.json + generator + check:swagger	no	1
vite.config.js aliases / shims / checkExternals	no	1
checkImports.js	no	1
release.yml, install manifest, sha256, host allowlist	no	2 — there was no packaging phase at all

Phase 1 carries most of these on purpose. kit ch. 1's whole argument is to get every seam working at once with almost nothing in them, so that afterwards you break exactly one at a time.

The client half

Part	In the first draft	Phase
registry.registerRoutes / registerNav	yes	4
declareModuleSlot	no	9 — the kit: "you will need it the moment your game has anything like a guild"
registerFeatureProvider	no	4
UI kit discipline (PublicLayout shell, PageHeader props)	no	4

Beyond the module

Item	In the first draft	Phase
Sidecar rpc correlation	implicit	1, stated
Asset bridge (ch. 3 §2b)	no	14 — map image only (R9)
.profile landing page	no	19
runicgateway.com	no	19
Android app	no	5, 8, 11, 15 (R10)
docs/	yes	every phase, plus 19

What the audit cost the schedule: twelve phases. That is the honest number, and it is worth recording because the under-planning had one cause — reading the chapters that describe the game bridge and treating the module as the thin part, when the kit says in its first paragraph that the website module is most of the work.

8. Questions the audit raised — all answered

Every question §7 produced was put to the org lead on 2026-09-15 and answered the same day. They are recorded as R7–R14 in §2 rather than repeated here:

Question	Answer	Decision
Notifications and engagement in v1?	the full matched set	R7
How many servers does the UI support?	multi-server from the start	R8
The asset bridge?	only the live map — not item icons, not skins	R9
Android in this workstream?	full app, capability-driven, trailing by one phase	R10
Discord slash commands?	a small read-only set	R11
What survives a wipe?	per-wipe detail plus all-time rollups	R12
Extension slots?	admin.users.detail and site.footer.status	R13
Which mount prefixes?	/rust on all three tiers	R14

§3 is empty; both were closed on the same day.

9. The event catalogue

Added 2026-09-15. Phases 12–13 described the event mechanism and never the catalogue — one budget and one lease as a proof of life, which is a skeleton rather than a product. This section is what the module actually declares.

EVENTS.md §H is a Rust/Oxide compatibility section that already sketched this, and it should have been read before §5 was written. What follows takes its ids and its reasoning as the starting point rather than inventing a parallel set.

§H's thesis, and it is the one to design around: "The lease is the primitive that travels, not the spawn. Double gather rate for the weekend is the canonical Rust community event, and it is exactly lease-with-expiry. Spawning creatures at a landmark is UO-shaped; holding a value for four hours is every game." It also rates Rust the easier case than UO, because Oxide's convars are live by default where ServUO's are mostly cached at boot.

Budgets — what core counts and bounds

Dimension	Counts
rust.prefabs	objects placed into the world by a run
rust.zone.minutes	zone time held — real since R17
rust.grants	entitlements granted (R16)
rust.announcements	in-game broadcasts

Caps are per run, and R8 makes that load-bearing. §H: run.scope is part of a run's unique key, so one definition fanning out to six servers is six separate budgets, not one shared pool. An operator setting a cap of 30 prefabs is setting it per server. Say so on the field.

Option sources — what fills a dropdown

Source	Filled from
rust.options.kits	Kits GetKitNames / GetAllKits, flagged by whether RequiredPermission is set (R16)
rust.options.groups	Oxide permission groups (§H names this one)
rust.options.permissions	registered permissions
rust.options.prefabs	a plugin-declared constructible allowlist — the analogue of UO's spawn atlas
rust.options.monuments	monument names, shared with the map work (R9)
rust.options.zones	ZoneManager GetZoneIDs / GetZoneName (R17)

Every one resolves from live data and returns [] on failure rather than defending with a hardcoded list that will be wrong. A source that refuses degrades its field to free text with a warning and never blocks the form.

Leases — values borrowed with a deadline

The heart of it, and the thing to build first.

Lease	Value
rust.rate.gather	gather rate multiplier
rust.rate.craft	craft speed
rust.rate.smelt	smelting speed
rust.rate.decay	decay scale
rust.time.night	night length
rust.population.<kind>	spawn population multipliers
rust.group.membership	a time-limited permission group — weekend VIP

rust.group.membership is the one §H names that R16 did not, and the pair is the whole design. R16 settled that a permanent earned entitlement is an action with reversible: 'ledger' — grant the kit's permission, revert revokes it. §H settles that a time-limited group is genuinely core.lease — held with a deadline the game enforces on its own, restored when it expires without core having to come back. Same underlying permission mirror (R2), two different shapes, and choosing the wrong one is the mistake: a weekend VIP implemented as a grant is a VIP who stays one for ever if the website goes away.

Every key gets verified live before it is advertised — apply, observe in the running game, restore, per key. §H's claim that Rust convars are live by default is an argument for expecting them to work, never a substitute for checking. A value the server reads once at boot applies cleanly, reads back cleanly, and does nothing at all, and neither core nor review can catch it.

Actions — verbs a run performs

Action	risk	reversible	Notes
rust.kit.entitle	change	ledger	R16 — grants the kit's RequiredPermission; revert revokes
rust.prefab.place	change	ledger	§H's verb; revert kills the entity, and needs the persisted ownership registry ch. 4 describes
rust.announce	notify	none	via PopupNotifications (R6) — global or targeted
rust.zone.open	change	ledger	§H's other verb. Base, not optional, since R17 — CreateOrUpdateTemporaryZone takes a Plugin owner, so the undo is real. Our own id map decides what may be erased, not ZoneManager's owner check (§12.4)

Rewards are not a contract member. EVENTS.md deleted a registerEventRewards registry because it carried four Ultima Online nouns inside a core signature. A reward here is an ordinary action — which is exactly why R16 could change what it grants without touching anything of core's.

10. The engagement catalogue — what Rust can expose

Added 2026-09-15, answering "check the default alerts Rust can expose". R7 settled that the set ships; this is what goes in it.

The ceiling lattice is containment, not size — self, owner, subscribers, staff, members, authenticated, everyone, and the flat reading is the trap. staff is not a superset of owner: for a cheat-detection event, "one person" is the player it was detected on. Every ceiling below is chosen against that, not against a ladder.

Trigger	Source	ceiling	subjectKey
rust.wipe.started	OnNewSave	everyone	server
rust.server.online / .offline	link state transition	everyone	server
rust.leaderboard.topped	our own rollup (R12)	everyone	server
rust.base.destroyed	OnEntityDeath on owned building blocks	owner	player
rust.kit.entitled	R16's own grant	self	user
rust.player.linked	R1's link flow	self	user
rust.clan.member.added / .left / .kicked	first-party clan hooks (R5)	members	clan
rust.clan.disbanded	OnClanDisbanded	members	clan
rust.player.reported	OnPlayerReported	staff	player
rust.login.denied	CanUserLogin	staff	player
rust.player.banned / .unbanned	OnUserBanned / OnUserUnbanned	staff	player

rust.base.destroyed is the one that matters most and the one most likely to be got wrong. The offline raid alert is the single most-wanted notification in Rust, and its ceiling is owner — the player whose base it was. Ceilinged staff it would be useless to the person who needs it, and ceilinged everyone it would broadcast base locations to the server. This is exactly the case the lattice exists for.

Three hooks carry data that must never widen. CanUserLogin and OnUserApproved carry IP addresses; OnPlayerReported carries player reports. README.md §5 already flags these as admin-channel-only on the live feed, and the same judgement binds their triggers.

Audiences

Audience	Resolves to	ceiling
rust.clan.members	a clan's linked members	members
rust.server.players	linked accounts seen on a server this wipe	authenticated
rust.wipe.participants	everyone who played the current wipe	authenticated

A resolver returns user ids and nothing else — never a template, a channel or an address — and one that fails resolves to nobody, never to everybody and never to its last good answer. Its params are constant, filled in when an operator saves the rule, so "the clan this event was about" is not expressible; an event that needs that carries its own recipients.

Seeds, and one thing to decide when building them

Bodies re-ensure every boot under a seed version; rule groups are offered once per group key, so a rule appended to an existing group reaches fresh installs only. Wipe announcements, raid alerts and clan transitions each take their own group key for that reason.

One design note, flagged rather than decided. PopupNotifications gives the module an in-game alert surface, which is not one of core's channels — core resolves ids to email, in-app and push. So an in-game popup is the module publishing to its own surface off its own trigger, not a fourth channel core learns about. Worth settling deliberately at phase 10: a raid alert that reaches a player's phone and pops on their screen next login is two mechanisms, and only one of them is core's.

11. Second contract pass — MODULE_API.md read member by member

Added 2026-09-15, after docs#249 merged. §7 audited the plan against the Integration Kit and the template; this pass reads MODULE_API.md itself, enumerating every member rather than grepping for registration names. It found one regression, one mispriced decision, one missing declaration and a set of ctx members the plan had never mentioned.

11.1 The regression: reconcile was dropped

ctx.events.reconcile() and an action's reconcile() appear nowhere in this document. The twelve-phase first draft had them — "phase 6: reconcile, and the boot-id watch" — and the rewrite to twenty phases lost them. That is a regression in the plan, not a decision.

It matters more for Rust than for the game the contract was written against. kit ch. 5 rates reconcile the one omission that is "merely a lower standard rather than a broken promise" — but that judgement assumes a world that persists. Rust wipes monthly, and a wipe invalidates every ledgered resource for that server at once. Core cannot tell a wedged sidecar from a game that rebooted and lost everything an event made: it sees { ok: false, retry: true } either way. It asks once, at its own boot, and otherwise waits to be told.

ctx.events.reconcile() is being told, and the thing that triggers it is a watch on the game's boot id changing — which is also the only way to tell a game restart from a sidecar reconnect. They are not the same event and the second loses nothing. Two rules ride with it: anything that is not an explicit { ok: true, inForce: [...] } leaves the ledger alone — "I do not know" is never read as "it is gone" — and a resource reported missing becomes orphaned, not reverted, because nobody asked for it to go.

Restored to phase 13, after the actions exist, with the boot-id watch as its trigger.

11.2 R9 was mispriced: the visibility framework is module-uo's, not core's

R9 says the map's per-layer switches work "through the existing visibility framework (SHARD_VISIBILITY.md)", which reads as reuse. It is not reuse. §6.3 records that shardVisibility is module-owned, and the tree confirms it — the util, both models, the admin controller and its tests all live under module-uo/server/, and there is nothing by that name left in website/server.

§2.7 forbids a module requiring anything outside its own directory, so module-rust cannot import a line of it. It builds its own, informed by UO's design and its document but sharing no code.

That is a real cost R9 did not price. It is not a reason to change the decision — per-layer switches are still right, and SHARD_VISIBILITY.md is still the design to learn from — but phase 14 carries a visibility layer of its own rather than a configuration of somebody else's.

11.3 extensions is a declared field, not just a call

R13 claims two slots and never says where they are declared. module.json has an extensions array (§2.1, optional), and the dry run's own manifest carried "extensions": ["admin.users.detail"]. Like mounts, it is a statement of surface that the loader holds against reality — so admin.users.detail and site.footer.status are declared there as well as registered. Phase 1 adds it to the list of module.json fields that must be got right.

11.4 The ctx members the plan had never named

ctx has 29 members (§2.3). The plan named a handful. The ones that change work:

Member	Where it lands	Why it matters
ctx.secretBox	1	Each configured server's sidecar token is a secret at rest. Core encrypts its own (AES-256-GCM, write-only in the API, never returned to any client) and hands a module the same facility — so R8's several tokens get the platform's existing posture rather than a new one
ctx.middleware.rateLimit	6	R1 requires the link code be rate-limited. This is the mechanism; accountChangeLimiter sits beside it for the account-facing half
ctx.uploads	14	Where R9's map image actually lands. The plan described fetching it over the bridge and never said where it goes
ctx.activity.log	7, 7b	R2's permission changes and R18's config writes both owe an audit trail. Core has an activity log; neither needed inventing one
ctx.teams.publish, ctx.teams.activity.push, ctx.teams.reconcile	9	Teams is more than the provider. The plan named only registerTeamProvider, which answers core's questions — these are how a module pushes a change and asks for reconciliation
ctx.posts	10	The CMS surface behind registerAnnounceLeg and registerPostHook
ctx.events.emit, ctx.inbox.push, ctx.push.publish	10	The three send paths §10's catalogue implies and never named
ctx.users.getById, ctx.settings.*, ctx.validator, ctx.db.query, ctx.paths.moduleRoot, ctx.log, ctx.express, ctx.auth.getUserFromRequest, ctx.site.baseUrl, ctx.moduleId	throughout	Ordinary plumbing; listed so the narrowing is visible

ctx is a curated list, not core's internals — ctx.auth is one function rather than core's whole auth facade, because minting a session is core's job and a module needs to read one. Expect to want something that is not there; that is a minor-version conversation, never a reason to reach around it.

11.5 §6.8 — a trigger, a rule and an audience outlive the module that declared them

A constraint on phase 10 and on purge that the plan did not carry.

engagement_rules.trigger_id is a plain VARCHAR — no foreign key, no cascade — deliberately, so a module can be removed and reinstalled without destroying an operator's rules. The consequence:

• A rule whose trigger is unregistered shows dormant — never an error, never auto-deleted.
• The same for an unregistered audience: it resolves to the empty set and shows dormant, which is not the same answer as "resolved to nobody" and must not be rendered as if it were.

The failure that prevents is exact: an id that stops resolving must never silently become a send to a different set of people.

11.6 The two client lists, in full

Recorded because §7 said "UI kit discipline" without saying what is in it. Both are closed and curated — adding a member is a minor version bump, changing an existing prop is a major one.

registry — registerRoutes, registerNav, registerExtension, registerFeatureProvider, declareModuleSlot (1.6.0), plus the read side, routesFor and featureProviders.

ui — PublicLayout, PageHeader, Loading, ErrorState, EmptyState, useAsync, useAuth, useSite, Slot (1.6.0). Anything else — tables, chips, tabs, editors — your chunk carries it.

11.7 One confirmation for R10

§2.9: GET /api/v1/public/modules returns only started modules, with four fields and no state, no failure stage and no failure reason. A disabled or startup_failed module is simply absent.

So R10's capability probe already has the behaviour the app wants: a Rust module that failed to boot makes the app render a site without those screens, rather than one advertising screens that 503. The app needs no failure handling for this case because core does not expose the failure.

12. Phase 0 as built — the rig, 2026-09-15

The rig is current and the base set runs. Five things were learned that the plan had either wrong or had never asked, and three of them change work in later phases.

12.0 What the rig is now

	Before	After
Server build	24613624 (2026-08-13)	25230300 (2026-09-10)
Oxide	2.0.7585	2.0.7716 (OxideMod/Oxide.Rust, 2026-09-11)
World	seed 1234 save v287, previous wipe	regenerated for this wipe; cfg/ preserved
oxide/plugins/	empty	Kits 4.4.9 · Clans 0.2.10 · Popup Notifications 0.2.1 · Zone Manager 3.1.14

All four compiled and loaded first time on the new build, at exactly the versions R6 and R17 name — pulled fresh from https://umod.org/plugins/<Name>.cs, which still serves those versions and needs no Cloudflare workaround. Server protocol 2633.288.1.

The Oxide permission store survived the update untouched (oxide/ is not a Steam depot directory), so 76561198038695917 is still in default and admin.

Two instruments were built and are kept in the phase-0 scratchpad rather than committed: a dependency-free WebSocket RCON driver (Node's global WebSocket, no ws package), and RGProbe.cs, a throwaway Oxide plugin that exposes Oxide's permission API and ZoneManager's by-name API as console commands. The probe is what made §12.2 and §12.4 observable; phase 1's plugin skeleton can start from it.

One thing the RCON driver had to learn. Oxide tags its own Puts() output and its warnings with the identifier of the command being run, so a first-match-wins client reads a plugin's log line as if it were the reply and discards the real one. It cost two wrong readings before it was spotted. Collect every frame in a window; do not correlate one reply per identifier.

12.1 The rig's own script was broken in a way the earlier diagnosis missed

Recorded in §4. In short: start.bat put +force_install_dir after +login, steamcmd discarded it, and every update run in the rig's history errored out without updating anything. The 2026-09-15 "fix" changed the path and left the order, so it fixed nothing.

The Oxide re-install in §4 is not a finding — pairing a server update with an Oxide re-install is the routine every Rust host already follows, and saying otherwise would be this plan talking down to its own audience. One narrow consequence is still worth carrying to phase 18: because app_update leaves Oxide.Core.dll and the rest in place, a doctor check that tests for oxide/ or for Oxide's assemblies passes on a server that is mid-routine. Compare the Assembly-CSharp.dll against the Oxide build instead, so doctor reports the real state rather than a directory listing.

12.2 Four rules the R2 permission push must obey

Verified live against the real store, granting and revoking through both the console command and the API:

1. permission.GrantUserPermission silently no-ops for an unregistered permission. void, no throw, no log. The console oxide.grant at least answers Permission 'x' doesn't exist; the API path R2 uses says nothing at all. This is the finding with teeth — see R2.
2. A permission exists only because a loaded plugin registered it. Kits registers kits.admin and, dynamically, every kit's RequiredPermission (Kits.cs:1225, :2895) — which is what makes R16's entitlement model real. Unload Kits and those names stop existing.
3. RegisterPermission warns about a foreign prefix but registers anyway. Missing plugin name prefix 'rgprobe' for permission 'someplugin.vip' is a warning, not a refusal — the permission was created and granted successfully. So the site can make a grant stick for a plugin that is not currently loaded, at the cost of a console warning. Whether it should is a phase 7 decision; the mechanism exists.
4. A player who has never connected is in no group, but can hold direct grants. A grant to an unseen SteamID64 works and reads back immediately. Group membership does not exist for them yet, so anything the site expresses as group membership does not reach a player until their first connection, while a direct grant does. R16's offline entitlement is safe; a group-shaped entitlement is not.

Point 4 is the one to carry into phase 7's design: grants and groups have different reach for offline players, and the site's model currently treats them as two spellings of the same thing.

12.3 R5's claim about the Clans plugin was a grep artefact

Corrected in R5. The plugin raises nine hooks, not three, and three of them carry full member lists; the six that were missed are invisible to a literal search because the hook name is a const at the call site. The decision stands on a different reason — first-party is what every server has, the plugin is optional — and phase 17 gains event-driven leadership as a sharpening rather than a replacement.

Two smaller things from the same read, both worth having before phase 9 and 17:

• Clans raises the same hook name twice per transition, once Rust-typed (string, ulong, List<ulong>) and once Universal-typed (string, string, List<string>), plus two deprecated arities. Oxide binds by name and arity, and both live forms are arity 3 — so a loosely typed subscriber catches both and double-counts every join and leave. Type the parameters precisely and pick one.
• Clans calls API_RegisterThirdPartyTitle itself. R15's BetterChat integration will be the second title provider on any server running both, not the first.

Also confirmed, since the plan rests on it: the first-party set is exactly the seven hooks in agent/hooks.tsv, all "no return behavior", with no promote and no leader-changed.

12.4 ZoneManager's owner scoping is narrower than R17 assumed

Corrected in R17. EraseTemporaryZone(owner, id) refuses only when the zone has a different owner; an unowned zone — every permanent zone, including every zone an operator made by hand — is erased by anyone and returns true. Phase 12 must gate erasure on its own id map.

Three more things the source and the live rig agreed on:

• ZoneManager's entire API is plain private methods, no [HookMethod] anywhere in 3.1.14 — so Call() by name is the only way in, and a typo is silence. Confirmed working live for CreateOrUpdateZone, CreateOrUpdateTemporaryZone, EraseTemporaryZone, GetZoneIDs and GetPlayersInZone. The three-conventions finding holds: Kits declares [HookMethod] (23 of them), ZoneManager declares nothing, BetterChat will use API_ prefixes.
• GetPlayersInZone cannot distinguish an unknown zone from an empty one — both return an empty list, not null. The participation ledger R17 wants to feed therefore cannot use this call alone to answer "is this zone still there", and must check GetZoneIDs separately. This is the same absence-of-an-answer / answer-of-absence trap earlier phases of other workstreams hit.
• NPCs never appear in a zone's player list. baseEntity is BasePlayer { IsNpc: false } routes them to the zone's entity list instead. Useful to know before designing a condition that counts "players at the monument" on a server with scientists.

12.5 The one criterion phase 0 could not close, and why

oxide.grant demonstrably gates something, and a test zone reports who is standing in it

The first half is done — proven for both an online-known and a never-seen player, in both directions, through the same UserHasPermission call every third-party plugin makes.

The second half is open, and not by choice of method. A plugin's own permission check reads:

private bool HasPermission(ConsoleSystem.Arg arg, string perm)
{
    BasePlayer player = arg.Player();
    return !player || permission.UserHasPermission(player.UserIDString, perm);
}

!player || — a command from RCON has no BasePlayer, so the server console is unconditionally allowed. This is the standard Oxide idiom, not a ZoneManager quirk, and it means no console session can ever observe a gate closing. Zone occupancy has the same shape from the other end: NPCs are excluded by construction, so nothing but a real connected player puts a name in that list.

Everything up to the body was proven: a zone was created through the API, listed by both the probe and ZoneManager's own zone_list, read for occupancy (a real empty list, so the call resolved), and erased. What remains is one person, connected, standing inside it.

This is a standing property of the rig, not a phase-0 leftover. Any phase whose acceptance depends on a permission actually refusing somebody, or on presence, needs a client attached. Worth knowing at phase 7 and phase 12 rather than discovering there.