Building & Team

01What it does

Building & Team is where you shape how bases and groups work on your server. It has three tabs: Building Settings for demolish and debris, Decay & Upkeep for how and when bases fall apart, and Team Settings for team size and the team-based limits on code locks and turrets.

Every change is sent straight to your game server when you press Save or flip a switch.

02Building Settings

• Demolish time (seconds, 0 to 604800): how long after placing a building part a player can still demolish it. Bigger window, more forgiving for builders who misclick.
• Demo hammer (on/off): lets players demolish their own building parts with the demo hammer.
• Building debris (seconds, 0 to 86400): how long the rubble from a destroyed building part hangs around before it disappears.

Each card here shows a Last applied value, so you can see what you set last time without guessing.

03Schedule Demo Hammer (Premium)

Schedule Demo Hammer turns the demo hammer on at the same time every day and off again after a set number of hours. It works like the SRP schedule.

1. 1Pick Turn on at. The time is in UTC, and the card shows what that is in your own time.
2. 2Set Stay on for in hours, from 1 to 23. The quick buttons fill in common values. The 24 hour strip shows when the hammer will be on.
3. 3Flip the schedule switch on. The bot puts the hammer in the right state straight away, then turns it on and off at your times every day.

The normal Demo hammer switch keeps working. If you use it while the schedule is on, your choice stays until the next scheduled on or off time, then the schedule takes over again. The card tells you when that is.

If the server restarts, the bot sets the hammer back the way it was as soon as it reconnects. Turning the schedule off leaves the hammer as it is.

04How decay works

Decay is how Rust cleans up bases nobody is looking after. With upkeep on, it happens in three stages:

1. 1Protected by upkeep. While the Tool Cupboard holds enough resources to pay upkeep, the base doesn't decay and blocks slowly heal back up.
2. 2Decay delay. Once the Tool Cupboard runs out, each material gets a grace period before it starts losing health. By default this is 0, so decay starts straight away.
3. 3Decay duration. After the delay, this is how long a block takes to go from full health to destroyed. Out of the box that's 1 hour for Twig, 3 for Wood, 5 for Stone, 8 for Metal and 12 for High Quality Metal.

If a Tool Cupboard is destroyed, grief protection keeps the base protected for a while first, so a raid doesn't instantly turn into a crumbling base.

05Decay & Upkeep

The Decay & Upkeep tab reads every value live from your server when you open it, and the Refresh button checks again. Each card shows the Current value, the allowed range and the default, and it tells you when you have a change that isn't saved yet. Short links at the top jump you to each section.

Decay Upkeep switch

• ON (the default): buildings require the appropriate resources in the Tool Cupboard. If the Tool Cupboard doesn't have enough, the building eventually starts decaying.
• OFF: buildings no longer depend on Tool Cupboard upkeep, so players don't need to keep resources in their TC. Rust only uses the per material delays and durations while upkeep is on.

Tool Cupboard upkeep

• Upkeep period (minutes, default 1440): how many minutes one upkeep cost covers. Raise it and the same resources last longer, so upkeep gets cheaper. 2880 means a Tool Cupboard's resources go twice as far.
• Grief protection (minutes, default 1440): how long a base stays protected after its Tool Cupboard is destroyed. 0 means the base starts decaying the moment the cupboard goes.
• Heal scale (default 1): how fast building blocks heal when they haven't been hit for 10 minutes and their Tool Cupboard has upkeep. 2 heals twice as fast, 0 stops healing.
• Inside decay scale (default 0.1): how fast things decay when they are inside a building. 0.1 means a tenth of the normal speed.

Decay by material

Pick Twig, Wood, Stone, Metal or High Quality Metal from the dropdown, type the hours and press Save. The table on the left shows every material's delay and duration at a glance, and tapping a row loads that material into both cards.

• Decay delay (hours, 0 to 720, default 0): how long the material is protected from decay after it is no longer protected by upkeep.
• Decay duration (hours, 0.1 to 720): how long the material takes to actually decay once decay begins.

Overrides

• Decay delay override (seconds, default 0): above 0, every material uses this delay and the per material delays stop counting.
• Decay duration override (seconds, default 0): above 0, every material uses this duration and the per material durations stop counting.

Decay speed

• Decay scale (default 1): speeds decay and healing up or down for every building. 0.5 is half speed, 2 is double, 0 means buildings never decay.
• Decay tick (seconds, default 600): how often the server works out decay damage. Very high values can make buildings decay almost instantly when the damage lands, more so with a high decay scale.

Advanced (tucked away under a toggle, most servers never need it)

• Upkeep cost by base size: upkeep is tiered. Blocks up to bracket 1's count cost the least, and each bracket after that costs more. The cost is the share of a block's build cost paid every upkeep period, so 0.1 means 10%. Defaults are 15, 50, 125 and 200 blocks costing 10%, 15%, 20% and 33.3%. Each bracket needs more blocks than the one before it.
• Decay variance (default 0.995 to 1.005): every block gets a random decay speed between these two values, so a base doesn't all fall apart at the exact same moment. The minimum can't be higher than the maximum.

Everything on the Decay & Upkeep tab is saved to My Settings, so Surge puts it back automatically after every server restart.

06Team Settings

• Max team limit (players, 1 to 10): the most people allowed in one team. 10 is the hard cap here.
• Team Limit Codelocks (on/off): code lock authorisation is limited to members of the same team.
• Team Limit Turrets (on/off): when ON, the turret interference limit is set to match your Max team limit. When OFF, that limit is set back to 0.

Once Team Limit Turrets is on, you don't need to touch it again when you change team size. Saving a new Max team limit updates the turret limit to the same number automatically.

07Setting it up

1. 1Open Server Settings and pick Building & Team.
2. 2Choose the Building Settings, Decay & Upkeep or Team Settings tab.
3. 3Type a value into the card you want to change, or use one of the quick picks, then press Save. For switches, just click the ON/OFF toggle.
4. 4Confirm the popup if one appears. You'll get a green message once the server has taken the change.

Anything outside the allowed range for a card gets rejected with a message telling you the limits. Demolish, debris and team values have to be whole numbers. Hours and scales on the Decay & Upkeep tab can have decimals, like 1.5 hours.

08Good to know

• The bot needs to be connected to your server to save anything here. If the server is offline you'll get an error, and nothing changes. The Decay & Upkeep tab still shows the last values Surge saw while it waits.
• Decay & Upkeep reads the real values from your server, so it's always accurate. The Building Settings and Team Settings tabs remember what you last saved but don't read the live value back from the game.