Admin and permissions on an Unturned server

Unturned has a deliberately simple administration model: you are an admin or you are not. Comfortable for a server among friends, and insufficient the moment a community grows.

Granting rights

Rights are assigned in Commands.dat, using the player's Steam ID. Two things to know:

• It is the numeric ID that counts, not the display name. A player who renames keeps their rights; an identical nickname grants none.
• The line is read at boot. Adding an admin mid-session requires either the console command or a restart.

What it actually grants

An Unturned admin can kick, ban, teleport, spawn items and vehicles, and alter the world. There is no gradation: everything is granted at once.

The practical consequence deserves stating plainly: giving someone admin so they can kick a player also gives them the power to spawn any equipment. On a server where progression matters, the whole balance rests on trust.

The alternatives

• The whitelist. Often more effective than moderation: if only known people can join, there is far less to moderate.
• A server password. The simplest option, and enough for a closed community.
• Permission extensions. Community tools bring role hierarchies, with the usual caveats: they depend on a third party and can break on a game update.

Removing rights

This is the part most people forget. An admin stays an admin as long as their line sits in the configuration, even if they have not played for six months. Reviewing that list occasionally is part of maintaining a server.

A rule that holds

Grant admin to the smallest number of people, chosen for trust rather than availability, and prefer the whitelist over moderation wherever you can. Availability is the wrong criterion precisely because it is the tempting one: the person who is online most is not necessarily the person whose judgement you want deciding who stays.

Our Unturned hosting gives access to both the configuration and the console, so rights can be managed without restarting for every change.