The RUST+ Companion App Guide
The RUST+ Companion App went live for staging branch servers on May 27, 2020, and live for all servers in the June 4th, 2020 Update. This long-awaited feature finally gives players the power to monitor the status of their team and their base while outside of RUST.
RUST+ Features
Players are able to keep tabs on their team members with ease thanks to the chat and map tabs inside of the Rust Companion app. Any chats sent from the companion app will be sent to the team chat in-game and vice versa. The companion app will not display regular server chat, only team chat.
Players are also able to see all team member locations in real-time thanks to the map tab that displays and instantly updates team player locations.
Probably the most exciting and desired feature of the RUST Companion app would be the ability to monitor and toggle the functionality of in-game devices. With a simple tap, users of the companion app are able to toggle on or off any of their paired in-game devices with the nearly-instant response time. This means, at the first hint of “our base is getting hit”, a player can tap any number of registered device switches to combat offline raiders without having to pause Netflix in a rush to log in to RUST.
Steps for Setting up the RUST+ Companion App
Getting and setting up the companion app is not terribly difficult, but requires a fair amount of steps in order to gain the full benefits of the app. This guide will cover the following steps and explain the various tabs in order to get you up and running:
- Download and install the RUST+ Companion App
- Pair the app with a server
- The Map Tab
- The Team Tab
- The Devices Tab
- App Settings
Let’s do this!
1. Download and Install the RUST+ Companion App
This step is quite easy as long as you are familiar with installing an app on your mobile device. Android users will download from the Google Play store and iOS users will download from the Apple App Store. Follow any on-screen instructions required to download and install the app on your device. Once the app is installed and ready to go, you will be prompted to sign in with your Steam account, all of which is standard stuff. Once you’ve signed in with Steam, load up the app!
At the time of this writing, a notification will greet the user reminding them that the app is in beta and will only work with certain staging servers, but any servers running the staging branch are fair game to pair with as long as they have the app port available.
2. Pairing With a Server
Once you have completed the necessary tasks in step 1, it’s finally time to pair with your desired server(s).
To begin, load up the RUST client and load it into the server you wish to pair with. Once you are loaded in, you will be able to pair your app with the server by hitting escape and clicking the new “RUST+” menu item from the game menu. This will bring up a screen similar to the following:
You will see the title of the server you are playing on with a note below it stating that RUST+ is not enabled for this server. Change this by clicking the “Pair with Server” button. Your game screen should update to look like the following:
Pressing this button will alert your mobile device that a new server pairing is available. On your mobile device, open the app or tap any pending notifications to pair with the server. You will see a screen with your server’s title, description, and website URL. Tap the green “Pair Server” button to complete the pairing action.
Once you’ve tapped to pair the server with your mobile device, you’ll be taken to the server’s hub tab. The hub screen will display the general stats of the server including the number of players, the current in-game time, map size, last wipe date, and a slider to choose whether or not you want to receive notifications from this server. Make sure the bell icon is green to receive notifications. If you are currently in a team, you will also get a quick view of teammates’ statuses below the server info.
If you’ve paired additional servers with your companion app, you can tap the server icon in the top-left corner to view all paired servers as seen below. You can toggle between your servers by selecting the active server and this server will appear on your hub page.
3. The Map Tab
Now that you’ve paired a server with the RUST+ Companion App, you are ready to start using the rest of the app features.
The first tab after the Hub tab is the Map tab. This screen gives you a detailed look at the game map with all of the monuments and in-game events that a player who is currently logged into the game would see. With surprisingly quick update times, you can see your player icon as well as those of your teammates moving on the map. This is an incredible update to navigation as players no longer need to spam the G button while running to see their current location – they can keep their mobile device up with the map screen active to view theirs and their team’s locations at all times.
4. The Team Tab
The next tab is the Team tab. On this screen, you will have the team chat record for your team on the selected server. All team members will be listed at the top of the screen and you can verify their online status either by noting gray (offline) or green (online) highlights to their names or again by viewing the hub tab for the selected server. If you are monitoring team activity on multiple paired servers and you find that your team chat record is either missing or seems incorrect, check to make sure that the desired server is selected from the Paired Servers screen.
Everything you type into the game’s team chat will appear in the Companion App’s team chat, and vice versa. Only team chat will appear on this screen, so you will not be able to use this feature to keep tabs on the server’s main chat. Teammate’s messages will be identifiable via their Steam player icon, as most chat tools commonly do.
5. The Devices Tab
Finally, we have the Devices Tab. This is the tab we’ve all been waiting for. From this screen, you will be able to pair, toggle, and monitor various smart devices inside RUST. This guide will cover the basics for pairing and controlling a smart switch, but the possibilities for applications of this feature are really only limited by imagination.
To pair our smart switch, start with a placed switch as seen below:
Next, we need to pair this switch with the Companion App. Make sure you have the Wire Tool in your hand for this part; position your mouse over the switch and press and hold the E button to bring up the additional options menu. When the circular menu appears, you’ll see the option to “Pair this device with Rust+”. Click this option.
Your mobile device should quickly receive an alert that a new device needs pairing. If, after a short time, you still don’t receive an alert, try to pair the device again. When the Companion App receives the pairing notification, you will see a screen like the one below. You can rename the device to something that will better help you identify the device’s purpose on this screen, then tap “Pair Device” when everything looks good.
Now that you have a paired device, you are able to toggle the device on and off from this screen and see the device react almost instantly in-game. Should the device be destroyed, you will see a red, no response icon where the toggle state used to be. At the time of this writing, there does not seem to be a requirement that a smart switch must be connected to power in order to pair with the Companion App, and you will be able to toggle the switch on and off without being able to detect if the switch on the other end is powered.
To edit a paired device from your Devices Tab, simply tap the icon of the device you wish to change to bring up the device’s edit screen. From the edit screen, you can rename the device should you decide it was not adequately named before, or, change the icon of the device. Tap the pencil icon over the device’s current icon to select another.
Choosing an icon that helps you quickly recognize the purpose of the switch will help you make quick and accurate decisions in the event that you need to take action quickly. From the edit screen, you can also choose to delete a device by tapping the “Delete” button on the lower left of the screen. This is helpful if the paired device has been destroyed and you no longer need it paired with the companion app.
6. App Settings
The app settings, which can be accessed via the cog icon in the upper right corner of the app, will let you toggle notification and map settings. The RUST+ Companion app will alert you to any updates you leave toggled on, such as when a teammate logs into RUST, when that teammate (or someone else) kills your sleeper with a hatchet, and when any of your smart alarms go off. You are also able to toggle whether or not you want map features to appear on your map. The settings screen is also where you can check for a new version of the RUST+ Companion app manually by tapping the “Check for Updates” button close to the bottom of the screen.
We hope that you found this guide helpful and are now on your way to enjoying the endless possibilities that the RUST+ Companion app has introduced; not only for keeping us connected to the game but for providing the means to create new and exciting ways to make intruders suffer horribly for their poor decision to step into our bases uninvited.
