Scrap Racket

Scrap Racket is a server for the survival game Rust, and the website that goes with it — both mine. The server keeps vanilla rates and adds its own systems on top: an in-game economy, player-funded bounties with an NPC police force and a prison, personal quarries and pump jacks, generated cabins and guarded bases, leaderboards with small perks, and 27 achievements. The site at scrapracket.uk shows the live server, the wipe calendar and map vote and how every system works, and handles Steam sign-in, memberships, support tickets and appeals.

A community server lives on trust: rules stated plainly, an economy nobody can buy an advantage in, and a site that tells the truth about the server right now. So the game and the website had to agree on every number and word, the site had to read the live server without exposing it to the internet, and sign-in and payments had to be safe from the first day.

I built it alone from 17 August 2026 — 444 commits across three repositories in about five weeks — as the engineer directing a team of AI coding agents rather than typing every line. That is a craft of its own, closer to conducting and pair programming than to prompting: I write the brief and the rules (AGENTS.md for the site and for the server), split the work into tracked issues, run agents in parallel in isolated worktrees, pair with them on the hard parts, and review every change before it lands. The structure keeps them honest: a single source of truth for every piece of copy (copy.ts) and every colour (tokens.css), in-game text generated from that same source, guard tests that fail the build on a stray string or colour, and a knowledge base where each incident becomes a written rule. The visual design and the design system were made with Claude Design. The site came first; the game server followed on 10 September, the site went live on 12 September, and leaderboards, achievements, the Discord bot, the store and accessibility shipped over the next two weeks.

Web: a pnpm monorepo with Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS 4, TanStack Query and Zod, and Payload CMS 3 on PostgreSQL 17 with migrations only. The site reads the game server over RCON from the same host, never exposed to the internet, and accepts game events signed with HMAC-SHA256. Integrations: Steam OpenID sign-in, a Tebex headless store with a verified, idempotent webhook, three vote-list APIs, RustMaps, a Discord bot written directly on Discord's REST and gateway APIs, and backups to Cloudflare R2. Game: 14 C# plugins for the Carbon framework, about 22,000 lines. In-game text and colours are generated from the site's source, so the two cannot disagree. Deployed with Docker and Kamal on a Linux host behind Cloudflare.

Live at scrapracket.uk: 38 pages and a staff panel, 130 unit-test files with Vitest and Testing Library, and Playwright with axe-core at four screen widths. The site targets WCAG 2.2 AA, with settings for text size, spacing, dyslexia-friendly fonts, contrast, motion, arrow-key navigation and text to speech. The server is open and new features keep shipping.

• Open image: Scrap Racket logo — a riveted scrap-metal plate — over the site's night scrapyard art
• Open image: Home — the hero, live server count and the countdown to the next wipe

  Home — the hero, live server count and the countdown to the next wipe

• Open image: Gameplay — every custom system, explained in plain words

  Gameplay — every custom system, explained in plain words

• Open image: The Scrap Exchange — spending the Scrap you carry, in game

  The Scrap Exchange — spending the Scrap you carry, in game

• Open image: Contracts & the Old Bill — player-funded bounties

  Contracts & the Old Bill — player-funded bounties

• Open image: Leaders & perks — eight boards and the fair-play rules

  Leaders & perks — eight boards and the fair-play rules

• Open image: Leaderboards — this wipe's top three on each board

  Leaderboards — this wipe's top three on each board

• Open image: Wipes — countdown, calendar and what resets

  Wipes — countdown, calendar and what resets

• Open image: Vote on the next map

  Vote on the next map

• Open image: A server page — connect command, rates and map

  A server page — connect command, rates and map

• Open image: Status — live readings and 90-day uptime

  Status — live readings and 90-day uptime

• Open image: Memberships — cosmetic perks only, nothing that wins a fight

  Memberships — cosmetic perks only, nothing that wins a fight

• Open image: Accessibility settings — text size, spacing, fonts, contrast, motion, speech

  Accessibility settings — text size, spacing, fonts, contrast, motion, speech