Lone Wolf Rust FIREWALL Explained

The Lone Wolf Rust FIREWALL is our custom first line of defense against cheaters and suspicious accounts.

Its job is simple: block accounts that meet suspicious criteria before they can join our server.

This keeps enforcement proactive, protects legitimate players, and reduces repeat abuse from low-trust throwaway accounts.

Required Steam Account Criteria

All Steam accounts must meet every rule below to join Lone Wolf Rust:

1. Your Steam account must have 0 game bans.
2. Your Steam account may have a maximum of 1 VAC ban, and it must be 3+ years old.
3. Your Steam account must be at least 30 days old.
4. Your Steam profile must be set up.
5. Your account must show at least 24 hours played in Rust on BattleMetrics-connected servers in the last 5 years.
6. Your account must be one you created yourself (not purchased from a bot farm, reseller, or stolen account marketplace).
7. You must join using the main Rust client (Staging Branch is not allowed).
8. You must connect to our server without the use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

What This Means for Legitimate Players

If your account meets the criteria above, you can join as normal.

If access is blocked, it usually means one or more requirements were not met yet.

In many cases, time and legitimate play history resolve this naturally (for example, account age or VAC age requirements).

Why We Use the FIREWALL

Rust servers are constantly targeted by:

• alts of gamebanned players,
• freshly created throwaways,
• botted accounts,
• purchased/stolen profiles,
• accounts with no meaningful play history.

Waiting until those accounts are already active in the server creates avoidable disruption.

The FIREWALL is designed to stop high-risk accounts at the door so our live moderation systems can focus on edge cases and in-game behavior.

Why the FIREWALL is more effective than "Premium" server status

Facepunch currently allows servers to mark themselves as "Premium". Put simply, this is a paywall which requires players to have $15 worth of microtransactions in Rust before they can join the "Premium" server.

There are two primary reasons why Lone Wolf Rust does not use the "Premium" paywall:

1. Cheat/script subscriptions are expensive and recurring costs. A $15 one-time transaction is a minor inconvenience compared to the cost of cheats/scripts (which can be upwards of $150+/month).
2. Many legitimate, longtime players of Rust choose not to pay an additional $15 for skins/DLCs after they have already paid the cost of buying Rust. We think this is more than fair.

The FIREWALL is a legitimate means of preventing suspicious or gamebanned players from joining our server without requiring microtransactions.

Why This Policy Exists

The FIREWALL is not about making things difficult for real players.

It exists to protect fair solo gameplay by reducing the volume of high-risk accounts entering the server in the first place.

A cleaner entry point means:

• fewer obvious bad actors,
• faster and more accurate moderation,
• a better experience for legitimate Lone Wolf Rust players.

Thanks for helping us keep Lone Wolf Rust fair.