Use the Better Loot Plugin on Rust

Better Loot, now maintained by MagicServices, is a loot container editor for Rust with rarity support and optional ore and collectable spawning. How to edit loot tables on your Rust server already covers installing it, building tables in the Looty editor, importing them and the blacklist. This page covers the rest: the permissions, the multipliers, previewing a table with a hammer, the backup commands and the ore spawning that sits beside the loot.

Checked against Better Loot 4.5.4 on uMod, October 2026 (released 20 October 2026). uMod describes it as a complete rework of the native drop system.

Install it

Open the Plugins tab, stay on Store, search for BetterLoot and press Install. On Oxide, a newly installed plugin stays unloaded until you restart the server or type oxide.load BetterLoot in the Console. On Carbon it loads by itself within seconds and oxide.load does nothing there, so use c.load BetterLoot, c.unload BetterLoot and c.reload BetterLoot. The loot guide above has the full steps, and How to install Oxide/uMod plugins on your Rust server covers the tab.

Permissions

There are two. betterloot.admin covers Looty imports, /blacklist and the backup commands. betterloot.oreshow covers the ore marker commands below, and betterloot.admin also passes that check. Grant them from the Console after the plugin has loaded, because a permission only exists once its plugin has:

oxide.grant user 76561198000000001 betterloot.admin

On Carbon, oxide.grant does nothing. Use c.grant with the same arguments, for example c.grant user 76561198000000001 betterloot.admin.

The settings file

The plugin writes oxide/config/BetterLoot.json (carbon/configs on Carbon), in four sections. Edit it in the Config window on the Plugins tab. Its loot data lives separately in oxide/data/BetterLoot (carbon/data/BetterLoot on Carbon). The options worth knowing:

• Loot Multiplier is 1. It multiplies the amount rolled for each item. Scrap Multipler, spelled that way in the file, is also 1 and multiplies scrap.
• Allow duplicate items is true, Enable Blueprint Conversion is true and Allow Duplicate Blueprints is false.
• Blueprint Weight is 0.11, on a scale where 0.0 is the minimum bias and 1.0 the maximum.
• Stand down gather rates if other gather plugins are loaded is true. The list in Other gather plugin names includes GatherManager, AdvancedGather, DayNightGather, ExtraGatherBonuses, InstantGather and Loottable.

Preview a table with a hammer

Set Enable Hammer Hit Loot Cycle to true. Then, as a server admin, hit a loot container with a hammer. The plugin ignores any item that has a condition bar. The container opens, and every Hammer Loot Cycle Time (3 seconds by default) the plugin rolls its loot again, so you can watch what the current table produces. Closing the container stops the cycle. Hitting a corpse prints "Cannot rotate loot directly on corpse."

Backups

bl-backup copies four data files, LootTables, LootGroups, Blacklist and GatherRates, to .json.bak files beside them. bl-restore puts them back. Both work as chat commands for a player with betterloot.admin. They also work from the panel Console, which connects over RCON; the plugin ignores them from any other source. Take one before you import a Looty table.

Ore and collectable spawning

The plugin can also place ore nodes and collectables itself. Enable Custom Ore Spawning is false by default, so a normal install leaves ores alone. Its settings, together with the gather amounts for ore, trees, NPC harvest, quarries and livestock production, sit in oxide/data/BetterLoot/GatherRates.json (carbon/data/BetterLoot on Carbon), and the Looty editor has an Ores tab for them. To check where nodes are, a player with betterloot.oreshow can type:

• /blshow ore or /blshow collectables to ping them on the map for 30 seconds.
• /oreshow for both, and /blhide to clear the markers.
• /blhelp to list these commands.

Common problems

1. "You don't have permission to use this command." For the ore commands, grant betterloot.oreshow or betterloot.admin.
2. The hammer does nothing. The setting is off by default, only a server admin can use it, and the held item must be a hammer without a condition bar.
3. A restore fails. bl-restore stops if a backup file is missing a section and keeps your current files.