Article · 23/09/2026

Rust raid alerts on Discord: how they work and what to look for

Being offline raided is part of Rust. Finding out the next morning is optional. A raid alert tells base owners the moment the first wall is hit — here is how a good one works.

What a raid alert actually detects

A raid alert plugin runs on your server (Oxide or Carbon) and listens for damage to player-built structures. Most damage is irrelevant — a stray bullet, a hatchet on a door — so a good plugin only reacts to damage that looks like a raid: explosives, and optionally fire and incendiary ammo, above a minimum threshold.

To know whose base is being hit, it looks at the tool cupboard: the players authorised on it are the owners. The alert carries those players and the map grid, so owners know which base is under attack.

Why Discord

Players are not in the game when they are offline raided, but most have Discord on their phone. The simplest delivery is a Discord webhook: Discord's own documentation describes webhooks as a low-effort way to post messages to channels, without a bot user or authentication.

A private channel plus a bot is the stronger setup: the plugin posts a compact, machine-readable alert to a private channel, and your Discord bot decides who gets a direct message. That keeps Discord identities out of the game plugin, and it lets players link their own accounts instead of the plugin guessing.

What separates a good plugin from a noisy one

Cooldown per base: a long raid should not produce a hundred messages. One alert per base per interval is enough to wake someone up.

Limits for big teams: a cap on how many owners go in one alert keeps messages readable.

No gameplay changes: an alert should only notify. It should never block or change damage, and it should not reveal who is raiding unless you choose to — that information is a real advantage in the game.

Performance: the part nobody checks

Damage events fire constantly on a busy server. A raid alert that does heavy work on every hit will cost you frames. The right design exits as early as possible — check the damage type, check the threshold, and only then do the expensive lookups — and does nothing at all when it is not configured.

Setting one up

You need a Rust server with Oxide (Carbon also runs Oxide plugins), a private Discord channel with a webhook, and — if you want direct messages — a Discord bot that reads that channel. Test it on a quiet server first: place a small base, authorise on the tool cupboard, blow a wall and check the alert arrives with the right grid.

Our plugin

Raid Alerts is the plugin we run on our own live server: explosive damage only, per-base cooldown, owners from the tool cupboard, map grid, raider name off by default, and zero cost when idle. It costs €12, one payment.

Sources

• Webhook resource — Discord Developer Documentation
• Carbon — a drop-in replacement for the Oxide modding framework
• Creating a server — Rust wiki (Facepunch)