This is one of those things that seems obvious once you know it, but I still get asked in our Discord regularly, so here's the actual walkthrough.
Creating a team in-game
Rust has a built-in team system — you don't need a plugin or command for the basics. Open your inventory menu and look for the Team tab. From there you can create a team, which generates an invite you can send to nearby players, or you can invite someone directly if they're on your friends list or nearby in the world.
Once you're on a team, you'll see teammates' positions on your map (as long as they've got a marker active) and you can ping locations for each other, which matters a lot more than people expect once you're coordinating a raid or defense.
Team size limits matter — check before you commit
Most community servers cap team size, and it's usually enforced at the server level, not just a rule you're trusting people to follow. On a Solo/Duo/Trio server like ours, the cap is hard-set to 3 — you genuinely cannot form a team of 4, the game won't let you. Always check what a server's actual limit is before you invite people, since getting most of the way through inviting a squad only to find out the 4th person can't join is a rough way to start a wipe.
Sharing resources properly
Being on a team doesn't automatically share your inventory or storage — you still need to physically build shared storage boxes and authorize each other on your Tool Cupboard so everyone can build and access shared containers. This trips up new players constantly: they assume "team" means shared everything, but it's really just shared vision and communication. The building/storage access is a separate step you have to set up yourself.
Blueprint sharing is a separate system entirely
Here's something a lot of players don't realize: by default, Rust doesn't share researched blueprints between teammates at all — if you research an item, only you know it, even if your teammate is standing right next to you. Some servers run a plugin specifically to fix this, syncing blueprints automatically across a team so nobody's wasting scrap re-researching something a teammate already unlocked. Worth checking if a server you're playing on has this, because on servers without it, you're all effectively researching everything from scratch individually, which adds up to a lot of wasted resources over a wipe.
The actual advice
Before you commit to a team for the wipe, confirm three things: the server's actual team cap, whether blueprints share automatically, and who's actually going to be online at the same time as who. That last one matters more than people think — a "team" where everyone plays completely different hours barely functions as a team at all.