AI Assistant

TCAdmin includes a built-in AI assistant, available from a floating chat window on every page of the panel. You can ask it questions about TCAdmin or your game servers, have it investigate a problem, or ask it to make a change for you. It knows which page you are looking at, so questions like "why is this service offline?" just work.

The assistant never changes anything on its own. Every action it proposes — starting a service, editing a file, changing a setting — is shown in a confirmation card and only runs after you approve it. It also works within your own account's permissions, so it can never see or do anything your account couldn't do itself.

:::warning AI can make mistakes Like any AI, the assistant can be wrong. Review each confirmation card carefully before approving it, and keep backups of anything important — especially blueprint configurations before letting it change scripts or settings. :::

Enabling and configuring the assistant

The assistant is configured at System → Settings → AI Assistant. Changes take effect immediately — no restart is needed.

Setting	Description
Enabled	Turns the assistant on or off for the whole panel. When off, the chat button disappears for everyone.
Display name	The name the assistant goes by in the panel (default Tico). Leave it blank to use the generic "AI Assistant" label.
Custom instructions	Instructions applied to every conversation — see Custom instructions below.
Daily credit limits	How many credits a single user may spend per day. There are separate limits for regular users and for sub-administrators (your staff). Full administrators are never limited.
Help improve the assistant	Lets users rate the assistant's replies with thumbs up/down and optionally say why. Feedback is anonymous and is analyzed automatically to improve the assistant. Turning this off hides the rating buttons and stops all feedback collection.

The same page shows your credit balance and usage and the AI providers enabled for your license — see Credits and usage.

Who can use it

Access is controlled with regular role permissions, granted per role under User Management → Roles in the AI Assistant module:

Permission	What it allows
Use	Open the chat window and talk to the assistant.
Configure	Open the AI Assistant settings page. Intended for administrators.
View Chat Logs	Open the AI chat log viewer. Can be granted to support staff without giving them full administrator access.

Full administrators always have access to the assistant. On new installations the built-in Sub Administrators and Users roles are granted Use by default; custom roles must be granted the permission explicitly. Users without it simply don't see the chat button.

Whatever the role, the assistant can only work with what that user's account can already see and do in the panel. An administrator gets the full management toolset; a customer is limited to their own services; a sub-user is further limited to the permissions the service owner granted them.

Using the assistant

Click the assistant's button in the top bar (next to the dark/light mode switch) to open the chat window. It floats over the page you are on and can be maximized from its header; on phones it opens full screen. The window can be closed and reopened while you browse the panel without losing the conversation, and every reply can be rated with thumbs up/down.

A chip above the input shows the page being sent along as context with your next message. This is what lets you ask "what's wrong with this service?" without naming it. You can turn the page context off from the chip if you don't want the current page shared.

The assistant replies in your panel language.

What it can do

The assistant can do almost anything you can do from the web interface — if your account can see it or change it in the panel, you can ask the assistant to look at it or do it for you. Some examples:

• Answer questions — it has built-in knowledge of the TCAdmin documentation and general game/Docker hosting concepts, and it can look up live information from your panel.
• Investigate problems — read service status and query results, console output, log files, configuration files and variables, the activity log, and the status and progress of tasks, and search a service's files by name and content.
• Manage services — start/stop/restart, edit configuration files and variables, manage command lines, install mods, run Steam updates, switch game builds, send console and RCON commands, schedule tasks, and repair a service.
• Administer the panel — create and configure game and Docker blueprints, register new servers and virtual servers, install Docker on a server, move services between servers, import services from TCAdmin V2, edit layout templates, manage sub-users, and update TCAdmin itself — across the whole cluster or on a single outdated server.
• Write scripts — it can create and edit custom scripts for your games and Docker blueprints, and it can also create visual (flowchart) scripts on individual services — something administrators and regular users alike can ask for, for per-service automation such as "restart every night if nobody is online". Scripts are checked against your installation's actual scripting objects before they are proposed. When you open a script imported from TCAdmin V2, a Convert to C# with AI button in the script editor asks the assistant to rewrite it as a V3-compatible C# script.

These lists are examples, not limits — just ask for what you need. A few things are deliberately out of reach even for administrators, such as running arbitrary shell commands on your servers.

Confirmation cards

Reading never requires approval. Any action that would change something pauses the conversation and shows a confirmation card with the action and a plain-language summary — file and configuration edits include a diff of exactly what will change. Nothing runs until you press approve, and a card left unanswered is treated as denied.

Every executed action is written to the activity log, attributed to the user who approved it and marked as performed via the AI assistant.

Custom instructions

You can teach the assistant about your setup in two places. Instructions can steer what the assistant says and recommends, but they can never unlock actions a user couldn't perform or skip the confirmation step.

• General instructions — the Custom instructions field on the AI Assistant settings page applies to every conversation. Use it for house rules, tone, and knowledge about your company ("open a ticket at …", "our voice servers are managed elsewhere").
• Per-blueprint instructions — each game and Docker blueprint has an AI Assistant tab on its edit page. Instructions written there apply whenever a conversation involves a service of that blueprint — ideal for game-specific quirks, known issues, and preferred fixes.

warning

Custom instructions are sent to the AI provider together with the conversation. Don't put passwords or other secrets in them.

Credits and usage

The assistant runs on prepaid credits. Each request debits credits based on the AI model used and the size of the conversation. Credits are held on your TCAdmin client account, so all licenses on the same account share one balance.

• Buying credits — credit packs are purchased through the client area at https://clients.tcadmin.com. The new balance is available immediately.
• Balance and usage report — the AI Assistant settings page shows your current balance and a day-by-day usage report (newest day first). Each day shows its total requests and credits spent and can be expanded to a per-user breakdown, biggest spender first — so you can always see who is using the credits.
• Daily limits — the per-user daily limits from the settings page protect the balance from any single account. A user who reaches their limit is politely refused until the next day; full administrators are never limited.
• Running out — when the balance reaches zero, new conversations are refused and the assistant is shown as unavailable until you top up. A reply that is already in progress is allowed to finish.

Chat logs and auditing

Everything the assistant does is recorded in two places:

• AI chat logs — System → AI Chat Logs lists every conversation across all users. Opening a session shows the full transcript, the actions that were approved or denied, and any thumbs feedback left on the replies. The page is gated by the View Chat Logs permission, so it can be given to support staff.
• Activity log — every executed action also appears in the regular activity log, attributed to the user with a "via AI Assistant" marker, and is linked to the conversation that caused it.

Stored conversations are cleaned up according to your panel's data retention settings.

Privacy and data

In short, three things happen to a conversation:

1. It is visible to your panel's administrators. The full chat history is stored in your own TCAdmin database and appears in the chat log viewer.
2. It is processed and stored by TCAdmin. Each request passes through TCAdmin's hosted AI gateway, where message content is kept for 90 days for support and abuse handling, and usage details (tokens, model, credits) are kept for billing. TCAdmin staff access to transcripts is itself logged. When feedback collection is enabled, thumbs ratings and their optional comments are also stored and used to improve the assistant's responses — feedback is anonymous and is not linked to a name or email address.
3. It is sent to an AI provider. To generate replies, the conversation — including the page context and whatever the tools read, such as file contents and console output — is sent to one of the AI providers enabled for your license. Each provider processes it under its own terms.

Values flagged as secrets — restricted variables, password-type blueprint variables, and known secret patterns such as RCON passwords — are masked before tool results ever leave your installation, so they don't reach the chat logs or the AI provider.

An administrator can erase a user's conversations on request; this clears both the copy on your server and the copy held by TCAdmin.