Use the Better Chat Plugin on Rust

Better Chat gives chat groups their own look. A player's messages can carry a coloured title such as [VIP] before their name, and the name and message can have their own colour and size, all decided by the groups the player belongs to. You create the groups and change them with one admin command, so you rarely touch a file. This guide covers installing it, the command, the group fields and the three config settings.

Checked against Better Chat 5.2.15 by LaserHydra on uMod (released 5 March 2026), October 2026.

Install it

1. Open the Plugins tab, search the Store for BetterChat and press Install. How to install Oxide/uMod plugins on your Rust server has the steps, including adding Oxide to a plain server.
2. A plugin installed onto a running Oxide server stays unloaded until you Restart the server or type oxide.load BetterChat in the Console. On Carbon it loads by itself, and c.load BetterChat or c.reload BetterChat in the Console loads or reloads it by hand.
3. When it loads it makes a chat group called default if it has none. Its config file, oxide/config/BetterChat.json (carbon/configs on Carbon), appears after the first load, and the groups are kept in oxide/data/BetterChat.json (carbon/data on Carbon).

Better Chat's groups are Oxide permission groups with the same name, so a player gets a chat look by being in the group.

Who can manage it

The command needs the permission betterchat.admin. It exists once the plugin has loaded. Give it to yourself, or to an admin group, from the Console:

oxide.grant group admin betterchat.admin

On Carbon, use c.grant group admin betterchat.admin.

The /chat command

Type these in the game chat. Without arguments, /chat prints the list of options.

Group names are lower case. A name is matched against connected players, or a 17-digit SteamID64 starting 7656119. Type /chat group set on its own to see the list of fields. The value must be one word, because the command takes exactly three words after set.

Fields you can set

For example, to make a VIP group with a gold title:

/chat group add vip
/chat group set vip Title [VIP]
/chat group set vip TitleColor #ffaa00
/chat user add 76561198000000001 vip

How groups combine

A player can be in several groups. Their primary group is the one with the lowest Priority number. The primary group's username colour, message colour and format are used. The titles of the groups they are in are listed in priority order, up to the Maximal Titles setting, so a player in two groups can show two titles. The format can also use {Group}, {ID}, {Time} and {Date}.

Config settings

Open Installed on the Plugins tab, press Config on Better Chat, edit, Save, then Reload plugin:

• Maximal Titles: 3
• Maximal Characters Per Message: 128. Longer messages are cut off.
• Reverse Title Order: false

Common problems

1. /chat does nothing. You need betterchat.admin, and the plugin must have loaded.
2. "is not a correct value for field". The value has the wrong type, such as a word where a number is wanted.
3. A player shows no title. They aren't in a group with a visible title. Check TitleHidden, and that they are in the group with /chat user add.
4. A long message was cut short. Raise Maximal Characters Per Message.