Better Squads#

Gives a squad its own layer of in-game chat. Squad-only alerts when one of their people connects, dies, gets a kill or has their base raided — plus a command set players run themselves to see who is online, where they are and how far away. Nobody outside the squad ever sees a word of it.

How it works#

• Alerts go out through the SSA Bridge, addressed to individual recipients. The bridge walks the live players and asks each one for its own Steam ID, so a line can only reach the people named — that targeting is what makes "squad-only" real rather than cosmetic.
• Squad membership is read from the game database, so it is always the real roster.
• Reader-relative messages. A line containing {distance} or {direction} is rendered once per recipient, so every squadmate is told how far the event is from where they are standing: "Petr was killed by Raven in B3 — AK, 84 m. 340 m NE of you."
• Sectors and bearings use the manager's own map calibration — the same one the live map draws with — so they match what the player is looking at. Without calibration they render empty rather than pointing somewhere invented.
• Names come from the database. The bridge cannot name a player who has already disconnected (its leave event carries an empty name), so the name is resolved from the database instead. If nobody can name them, nothing is sent — a 17-digit Steam ID in front of the whole squad is worse than silence.
• Squad joins and leaves have no game event, so the roster is diffed on a timer, only for squads that have somebody online. A squad seen for the first time becomes a silent baseline, so a restart never floods anyone.
• Volume is capped. Past a threshold a reader-relative message is sent once to everyone instead of one copy each, and a per-minute ceiling protects a live server from any burst.
• Join/leave use the bridge's live player events, which fire the moment a player is actually in game — the log-derived equivalent can be many seconds late, because SCUM writes its log in batches.

Requirements#

• The SSA Bridge plugin (for targeted chat and /command interception). It's a dependency.
• Manager 4.0.0+. {sector} and {direction} additionally need a manager build that exposes the map calibration; on an older one those tokens render empty and the panel's status strip says so.

Configuration#

Everything is configured from the plugin's admin tab (👥 Better Squads):

• Events — eight independent switches, each with its own message template: connected, disconnected, killed, died, got a kill, base raided, joined squad, left squad. Clicking a token inserts it at the cursor; amber tokens are the reader-relative ones. Emptying a message silences that event without turning it off.
• Optional parts — anything inside [ ] disappears when a token in it has no value, so {player} died[ in {sector}]. reads "Petr died in B3." normally and "Petr died." when the position is unknown. Every shipped default uses it.
• Delivery — which chat channel the lines appear in (recipients are always the squad regardless), a per-player per-event cooldown, the roster check interval, quiet hours, whether the subject also gets their own alert, the per-reader limit and the messages-per-minute ceiling.
• In-game commands — the root command and every subcommand can be renamed, with a live preview of exactly what players will type. Ships as /squad (roster with sectors and distances), plus help, here (rally), msg, base, info, off / on and mute <events>.
• Command replies — every player-facing line, grouped by area, in any language.
• Silenced by players — what squad members turned off for themselves in game, with a reset button for when someone asks.
• Muted by an admin — players who receive nothing and cannot undo it in game. Kept separate from the players' own preferences so neither side overwrites the other.
• Activity — a live feed of every message delivered, plus Send a test, which delivers a real message to a real squad so the whole chain can be confirmed without waiting for someone to die.

Good to know#

• Players not in a squad generate nothing — there is nobody to tell.
• On friendly fire only the killed line is sent: it already names the killer, so the got a kill line would be the same event told twice to the same people.
• /squad off and /squad mute are the player's own switches and silence alerts, not their squadmates talking — a rally or a squad message still reaches them. An admin mute blocks everything.
• A player's /squad msg is stripped of braces and control characters and capped at 200 characters, so one player cannot push tokens or layout into another player's chat.
• SCUM reuses squad IDs after a disband, so a roster whose squad name changed is treated as a new group and re-baselined instead of announcing a burst of joins and leaves that never happened.
• Someone who leaves a squad stops receiving its messages immediately.
• The status header shows, live: how many players are online, how many squads have 2+ members online (i.e. how many could actually receive anything), and how much has been sent or suppressed.

Part of SCUM Server Automation — the all-in-one SCUM dedicated server manager. Get the manager, browse every plugin and read the docs at scumsa.com.