Patrol Helicopter

Our servers use the normal Rust patrol helicopter plus a custom heli signal system so you can spawn your own tiered fights. This page covers how vanilla heli loot locking works, how signals are obtained, and how cooldowns and rewards behave—especially for multi-heli and wave signals, which are designed as one full event—not a pick-and-choose list of separate fights.

Public vanilla patrol helicopter

The map helicopter is free-for-all to engage. Competition is normal; there is no “you stole my heli” rule on vanilla patrol.

After your side has dealt a large majority of the helicopter’s health in damage, the fight locks to your team for loot. When the heli goes down, every supply crate it drops and the wreckage gibs are reserved for that team—only they can loot or harvest until the lock ends. Anyone can still shoot the aircraft while it is in the air; the lock is about who owns the payout on the ground, not who is allowed to damage the rotor.

Locks do not last forever. When they expire, anyone can open the leftover crates or harvest the gibs. If the locking side stops engaging for about five minutes (fight clearly idle), the lock can clear early and loot rights open up again. Lock and unlock are announced in global chat.

Heli signals

Heli signal items for sale in the Zeds store

Heli signals are special supply-style items you throw to call a tiered patrol fight. Higher tiers are tougher and pay out much more progression when you finish them properly.

Easy and Medium signals can be bought in the in-game store: open /s and browse the Zeds section (see screenshot—click to enlarge).

Hard tier and above are not sold in the store. You get them from Zombie Hordes, quests, raid bases, and dungeons (and you can trade them with other players).

Signals exist as solo spawns and as multi or wave sequences. A multi or wave is one event: you are expected to complete the whole chain for the big payout. Quitting halfway through a wave because “only the early helis were easy” is not how those items are meant to be used—you forfeit the consolidated completion rewards if you bail.

Cooldowns

  • Throwing a signal does not put cooldowns on your team by itself.
  • Cooldowns come from damaging a heli in that fight. If you never deal damage, you do not pick up a personal heli cooldown from that encounter.
  • Solo signal: Surrendering, failing, or letting the heli time out and leave does not apply a cooldown on its own—even if you had damaged it. Cooldown logic is tied to how the event ends, not to “I tagged it once.”
  • Multi / wave signals: If you surrender or fail after any helicopter in that event was destroyed, cooldown rules can apply. If none were killed before you quit, you typically do not get a cooldown from that bail.

Rewards (XP, RP, loot)

  • Solo signal: Killing that heli completes the event, and your rewards are then issued.
  • Multi / wave: XP and RP for the signal are granted when you finish the entire event, not after each individual helicopter. All tiers in that signal are tallied into one completion payout. Loot and gibs still drop from each heli as you bring them down along the way.
  • If you are on a personal heli cooldown from a recent fight, you do not earn XP/RP for that kill—but you can still shoot the heli if you enjoy the content, and loot can still drop for the run. Players who help friends are not blocked from fighting; they are only blocked from stacking more rank XP/RP while cooled down.

Across the tiers, per-helicopter XP for signal fights was raised substantially so that completing harder calls is worth the risk. Together with kill-based XP, you generally earn far more per signal than older setups where almost all of the XP came from looting crates.

Crates, skills, and XP

XP from looting heli crates was reduced to a modest bonus now that heli kill / event completion XP is the main source. The old crate values existed before kill XP was a thing; the mix is now tuned so you are not punished if you could not split roles (one person shooting, one person chasing crates)—you still get the bulk of the payoff from the fight itself.

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