Sockets

Some Rust prefabs are built to join: a cave corridor has a mouth at each end, an underwater lab module has a doorway on every face, a train tunnel tile meets its neighbor on a shared edge. Creator reads those openings as sockets, and a piece dragged near a compatible one snaps onto it exactly, with no typing of coordinates. The Sockets tool shows you every socket in a prefab document, tells you which are joined, and lets you author sockets on pieces that ship with none.

Press O or pick Sockets on the tool rail. The SOCKETS panel opens in the inspector, beside the prefab document’s DOCUMENT panel, so the document’s editing commands stay in reach while you work on sockets. The status bar then reads:

LMB pick a piece to edit its sockets · click empty space to clear · drag in the Move tool to snap them together

Sockets live in a prefab document, not on a map. The tool works in the prefab workspace, where you are building one pack out of several pieces. On a map the panel says so and shows nothing, because a map has no sockets to join: your snapping settings are kept either way.

The four rings

With Show sockets on, every socket in the document draws a ring at its opening, facing the way the opening faces. There are four states and each has its own color.

Ring	What it means
Blue	Free: open, and compatible with whatever you are dragging
Green	Mated: joined to another socket
Amber, with a wider second ring	The candidate: the join that will be made when you let go
Gray, dashed	Cannot mate: wrong family, type or gender

The wider amber ring is a pulse around the pair that is about to join, so you can see the join before you commit it. Both halves of the pair wear it.

Snapping two pieces together

The snap happens in the Move tool, not in this one. This tool decides what a socket is; Move is where you drag.

1. Place two pieces in the workspace from the prefab browser.
2. Switch to Move and drag one piece so its opening is near the other’s.
3. When a compatible free socket comes within the snap radius, both rings turn amber and the piece jumps onto the exact join.
4. Let go. The move and the join are recorded as one undo step, so a single Ctrl+Z puts the piece back where it was and breaks the joint again.

The snapping settings

These four sit at the top of the panel and are kept between sessions, maps and documents.

Setting	What it does
Show sockets	Draws the rings. On by default
Snap rotation	The snap turns the piece to face its partner as well as moving it. On by default, which is what the pieces are authored for
Move individually	Off drags the whole joined chain, on drags the one piece and breaks its joints. Off by default
Snap radius	How far a drag looks for a mate. 8 m by default

The radius is how far the snap looks, not how close counts as joined. Two sockets count as joined at 0.1 m, which is the number the game itself uses, and no setting loosens it. Raising the radius makes the snap reach further; it never makes a sloppier joint.

Where a piece’s sockets come from

The prefab browser marks every piece that has sockets, and says where they came from, because the three are not the same claim.

Mark	Where the sockets came from
GAME DATA	Rust’s own socket data: underwater lab modules, train tunnel tiles and shafts, coastal cliff anchors
DERIVED	Creator measured them from the piece’s own collision mesh: the cave kit
YOURS	You authored them, in this document or in your saved kit sockets
NO SOCKETS	Creator has an entry for the piece and no socket for it, so it will not snap

A piece with no mark at all has no socket entry and joins on the grid instead, like a building block.

Caution

NO SOCKETS is not a bug and it is not an oversight. The bunker rooms are the case: nothing in Rust’s own data says where their doorways are, and Creator refused to guess. Author sockets on them yourself with the steps below and they snap like any other piece.

Authoring sockets on a piece

Pick one piece in the arena and its socket list appears under Selected. Selecting a piece keeps the SOCKETS panel in the inspector rather than switching it to TRANSFORM; to move or turn the piece, pick Move or Rotate in the tool strip and the TRANSFORM panel takes the inspector. Each row shows the socket’s name, its family, its gender and its type tag, with a colored dot for its state; the row’s tooltip says where that socket came from.

1. Click a row to edit it. Name, Type, Position and Rotation are text fields, and position and rotation read x y z in the piece’s own space.
2. Click ADD SOCKET for a new one at the piece’s origin, then drag it out with the position field.
3. Click DETECT OPENINGS to have Creator propose one socket at the center of each face of the piece’s bounds, facing outward.
4. Click DELETE SOCKET to remove the one you are editing.

Every one of those is a single undo step, and the rings update as you type.

A socket’s name is its identity. A saved joint points at a socket by name, so Creator refuses a blank name and refuses a name another socket on the same piece already has, and says which. Renaming a socket that is already joined keeps the joint; deleting one breaks it, as it must.

What DETECT OPENINGS actually does

It proposes six sockets, one at the center of each face of the piece’s bounds, each facing out of that face. It is a starting point you drag onto the real opening, not a measurement of the piece’s mesh. For a room-shaped piece whose doorways sit on its walls, the proposals usually land close; for a curved or irregular piece they will not, and you move them. Pressing it twice adds nothing the second time, so it is safe to press again after you have deleted the proposals you did not want.

Saving sockets for every future document

SAVE TO MY KIT SOCKETS keeps the selected piece’s sockets on this machine, so every prefab document you open from now on sees them. A document that carries its own sockets for a piece still wins, which means a pack you send to someone else snaps the way you built it even though they never authored anything. See Where your files live for the file it writes.

Reading the document roll-up

The Document block counts the whole document, not the selection.

Row	What it means
Sockets	Every socket on every piece in the document
Linked pairs	How many joints exist
Free	Sockets still open
Connected components	How many separate chains the pieces form. One means everything is joined to everything else

Connected components is the one to watch before you save: a pack you thought was one chain that reports two has a joint you believe in and Creator does not.