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The apartment complex is a new monument that allows players getting started with a wipe to find a place to call home. Simply talk to the receptionist in the lobby to get started and rent a room.
There are options for every budget, from the basement to the penthouse. Different room types come with different perks, like more storage, furnaces and more.
Once you've rented a room you'll need to insert scrap into the slot next to your door, otherwise you'll be evicted and all of your possessions will be seized.
There is a master key available somewhere on the island - find it and you can unlock access to any occupied room in the apartments for 5 minutes.
Need a hint as to what room to burgle? There might be a guard in the basement who has more information.
The new apartment complex monument features a small marketplace of shops. Each shop can be purchased and run by players, allowing you to sell your wares to the residents of the apartment building.
To get started, simply approach the shop and interact with the contract hanging out front, and you'll get a breakdown of how much it costs. This includes a non-refundable upfront scrap fee as well as a per-hour (real-time) scrap cost. You will need at least 12 hours of rent available to open the store.
Once open, you can modify the sale listings and adjust stock levels like any other Vending Machine. These shops cannot be accessed by drone, but you can modify the sign above the shop to add some personal flair.
All of the shops already taken? After a shop has been open for 6 hours, you may take it over, but you will pay x2 on both the upfront scrap cost and per-hour rent. This will continue to escalate (3x, 4x, etc) if someone else takes over the shop after 6 hours until eventually someone runs out of rent and the shop (and cost multiplier) resets.
If a shop is taken over or closes and it has your belongings in its inventory, you may return to the shop to retrieve them. Just interact with the shop to pick up your items. These items will only last 24 hours though, so be quick!
Be warned, the master key can also be used on these stores so your items could be stolen if you try and store valuable goods.
We've made some new changes to the Softcore game mode.
There's now a 2x multiplier on resource gather amounts. This works pretty much as you'd be used to on modded servers, giving you extra ore, wood, food and animal loot.
It's hard to handle raids for more casual players. To combat this, we've created pre-defined time windows where you are allowed to raid each other. By default, raids can only happen between the hours of 6 PM - 9 PM. This is set via your server's local time, so it's the same time zone for everyone. E.g. 6 PM local time no matter where you are. During a Raid Window, everything is fair game, it's regular rust.
Outside of those times, Tool Cupboards 'project' the raid blocking system, so you need to be inside a TC radius to be protected outside of the window. During this time, building blocks and doors cannot be raided: walls, floors, roofs, doors, ladder hatches, etc. Deployables can still be attacked, as can a Tool Cupboard (if it's lying unprotected).
A Tool Cupboard must be at least 1 hour old to be able to block raids. This means a young TC can be raided regardless of whether the raid window is on or not. Helping prevent misuse of the system.
Server Owners have been given a bunch of ConVars to tweak this.
Clans are a more advanced version of teams where you can have more members with different roles/permissions. There is a separate clan chat channel and announcement/MoTD text for communicating with clan members.
Clans can be created and managed at Clan Tables.
You can now see clan names on player nameplates. You'll also see your clan members' locations on the map if they're nearby.
The clan system is disabled in hardcore mode.
As mentioned last month, we're starting to use a new set of animation tools to improve the player animator. This month we're rolling out new sprinting animations while holding most two handed projectile weapons/rifles.
The player now pops their right arm up and lets the sprinting animation take over the rest of the body, looking much more responsive and less robotic.
We've extended last month's Torch animation system to support one handed melee weapons. We're just testing this out on the vanilla Hatchet for now, but once we're happy with the results we'll roll this out to other melee weapons. This allows for nicer movement while holding a weapon while still allowing two handed animations like throwing to play as expected.
This month, we’re introducing the Glowing Wallpaper Pack.
Brighten up your base with this collection of 27 wall, floor, and ceiling wallpapers. Featuring luminous neon, glowing graffiti, foxfire fungi, and more. Whether you’re building the coziest crib or an industrial powerhouse, this pack has something for everyone.
These wallpapers look great in the day, but are even more special when the lights go out.
Included in the Glowing Wallpaper Pack:
Walls
Stars And Planets
Mushrooms
Firearms
Explosions
Graffiti Murals (3 variants)
Neon Shapes (3 variants)
Foxfire Fungi
Ceilings
Glow In The Dark Stars
Fireflies
Graffiti Murals (4 variants)
Foxfire Fungi
Floors
Directional Graffiti (6 variants)
Glow In The Dark Carpet (3 variants)
The Glowing Wallpaper Pack can be purchased in-game or from the Rust Steam item store
This month we've added a couple more changes/improvements to Jobs 3 code and we've had the it active on our servers for half of the month and things looked stable. We've also done a bit of a rewrite how we pass around server player state, which will force server mods to update their code as well. This makes it the perfect time for us to promote it to default, as it would enable us to clean up a bit more code and simplify things.
This means Jobs 2 mode will become deprecated and will be removed in August - one will still be able to set it to 2, but it will run mode 3 underneath.
As Jobs 3 has been modified over multiple months, here's the full list of improvements that comes with it:
Use of UniTask library to avoid allocations from multithreading code
Speeds up per frame player snapshot sending by using new fuzzy pool and removing buffer preallocation
Runs portions of player network subscription updates in parallel
Schedules EAC and Analytics tasks earlier to avoid main thread waiting on them
Parallelized remaining server Anti Hack logic
We've also started to explore Jobs 4 optimizations - our first contribution to it is parallelization of server occlusion pair gathering. We're also going to be looking what kind of more risky or breaking changes to make, so it'll likely be a couple months before Jobs 4 will have enough substance to ship it.
Picked Skin Grey Out
Picked Skin is now Greyed Out
Auto Sorted
Vending machines and fridges now support storage adaptor auto-sorting
Inventory Player Model
Player model quality now changes within the inventory to yield better performance
Footstep Frequency
Adjusted the footstep frequency to be closer to the old player rig
Get ready to cuddle up with a bear that’s not only adorable but also changing lives! Starting July 2nd, Rust will host a massive charity drive to raise money for two incredible causes: Cancer Research UK and Ronald McDonald House UK. Rust is also partnering with some of the biggest names in the Rust community! Throughout the drive, partnered creators will be hosting their own fundraising streams, with free Twitch Drops to also help raise awareness of the charities and allow players to show even more support.
We even have a Charity Auction! Want a signed Displate poster? Or to design your own Rust Skin? Go check it out!
100% of sale proceeds after Steam fees and tax from the sale of these charity bears will be donated, helping support Cancer Research UK's critical work in funding cancer research and saving lives, and also supporting Ronald McDonald House UK to provide free accommodation and support to families with children in hospital. Every purchase will make a difference.
These one-of-a-kind charity bears are available through Rust’s in-game item store, and players can choose from two cute, quirky, and (actually) glowing but true-to-Rust designs which represent your contribution to supporting families in need and funding groundbreaking cancer research. Every bear purchased is a symbol of the community coming together to create a lasting impact beyond the game.
Starting July 2nd, players can purchase these bears, but the clock is ticking as they are only available for a limited time.
Whether you’re surviving the wilds of Rust or just want to spread some good vibes in your base, these bears are a perfect way to help others while you play.
Charity Bear Plushies can be bought here!
You can donate directly to the charities through Rust's drive here.
And you can see creators and drive progress here.
Also starting July 2nd - we will have 5 drops you can earn watching any Rust stream on Twitch!
Over the course of the next few weeks you can help unlock more drops as we meet donation goal milestones!
Sync your Steam and Twitch accounts to claim your drops!
If you're a content creator or a community group and you want to help fundraise with us you can make your own Tiltify team here! Just select the Quick start option and publish your team page! Your teams progress will go towards the main campaign.
Every Rust update has the ability to break older demos. On our end its incredibly simple to do so, more than it should be. To this end: I've introduced a compatibility layer into the demo system. This layer will try and get old demos working on your new Rust version.
When opening an old demo you will be asked if you want to use the compatibility layer (should it be applicable). When enabled the layer will attempt to remap changed item names to what they used to be in order to get the demo to run. It's important to note that this is only likely to work provided the demo has been taken within the last few months, the older it is, the less likely it is to work.
The one catch is that this system wont work for demos taken on older Rust builds than now. Eg: this layer only works for demos taken from now onwards. Demos taken on older builds of rust don't have the information required to be able to turn on this layer
This month’s workshop skinnable is the Metal Shopfront.
Supporting customisation on both the front and back, you can finally sell your collection of severed wolf heads on brand. We’re looking forward to seeing some incredible submissions by the community.
To make your own Metal Shopfront skin, head over to the in-game workshop and locate the Metal Shopfront deployable item. From there, you can download the model file and add your own materials.
The Rust x Can Be backpack will begin shipping this month.
Every backpack purchase includes exclusive free in-game weapon charms.
Weapon Charms are fun cosmetic weapon accessories that can be attached to almost any ranged weapon. There are over 55 ranged weapons that currently support Charms with more to be added as we continue to develop Rust.
To add a charm to your ranged weapon simply open up the inventory, select the weapon and use the Change Accessory button to select from available charms. You can set the charm during the crafting phase, or when dropped into a repair bench. There is no crafting cost. You can even do this with looted ranged weapons that have charms already affixed. The selected charm is tied to the individual weapon, so if you pick up someone else's weapon with a charm attached it will still be there unless you remove or change it.
Weapon Charms are viewable both in first and third person, so other players will be able to see your selected accessory.
Check out the full collection over on the Can Be store.
We've teamed up with the talented ASH Entertainment and The Baltimore Knife & Sword Crew behind the YouTube series, Man at Arms, to bring to life one of Rust's most iconic items: the Auto Turret.
The team of expert fabricators and blacksmiths set out to recreate a 1:1 replication of the infamous base and safezone protecting Turret, with auto-tracking and a bespoke gun slot with firing mechanisms!
This custom, one-of-a-kind build was exclusively created for Facepunch.
Check out the full build over on the Man at Arms channel now.
Purchase official Rust items in the Discord Shop and earn Discord Orbs.
Orbs can be used on eligible items in the Discord Shop. Offer ends 16th July!
We’ve overhauled the player model from the ground up.
This includes improved meshes and materials, more realistic proportions on a new rig, expanded head and hair seeds and a much needed pass over almost everything player-related. The old player model has served us well for almost 10 years, but it’s lagged behind the rest of the game for some time. Visually, it was showing its age, but just as importantly it was holding us back from making bigger improvements to characters, animations and implementing future features. Prior attempts to improve the player model has always ended up feeling like band-aid fix, there was only so much we could do while working around the limitations of the old proportions and skeleton. At some point it became clear that the only real way forward was to rip it out and rebuild it properly.
Alongside the new base model, we’ve also:
Expanded the number of heads in the game, with each head now having unique materials and additional details such as eyelashes and improved eye lighting.
Reworked and expanded hairstyles and beards, using new anisotropic shaders to make hair feel more natural.
Updated all clothing to work with the new rig and proportions, giving a lot of older assets a much-needed refresh and fixing some long-standing issues.
Modernised the art pipeline behind the player model, making future fixes and improvements much easier to ship.
Your face will change, but race and gender seeds have been kept intact, so we’re hoping it won’t be too much of a shock for those of you who have grown attached to your random seed over the years. We’ll be continuing to improve on the player model after release, and we also have a player customisation update planned for the future.
It’s been a huge amount of work, especially as we’ve been doing it alongside regular development and monthly updates. Performing open-heart surgery on one of the most interconnected parts of Rust, while continuing to ship patches, has certainly come with its challenges.
For the first time in a very long time, we're adding a new top-tier armour set to Rust.
The Ballistic Armour set offers increased protection over existing craftable alternatives, but there's a catch. It cannot be crafted. If you want your hands on it, you'll need to find it. This armour is comparable to existing metal armour with plates.
We're also introducing the Battle Dress Uniform (BDU). Like the Ballistic Armour, the BDU is loot-only and cannot be crafted. It offers slightly improved protection over existing clothing options, while making a few trade-offs elsewhere.
Both sets are intended to expand late-game gear progression and create more valuable loot opportunities. If you're looking for the best equipment available, you'll need to get out there and fight for it.
The M16A2 is a military-grade rifle found through end-end loot and cannot be crafted. Designed around a three-round burst fire mode, it offers excellent accuracy and a high rate of fire, making it particularly effective at medium-range engagements.
To help balance the burst damage potential, the M16A2 deals less damage per shot compared to the LR-300.
Like the Ballistic Armour and BDU, the M16A2 is another valuable loot-only item you'll need to get out into the world and fight for. You'll see a theme here.
The Unity 6 update changed how mouse inputs are processed. High polling rate mice (1000Hz+) are now causing significant CPU overhead issues and frame drops.
Lower your mouse polling rate to <1000Hz via your mouse manufacturerer's software. (Logitech G HUB, SteelSeries GG, etc..)
We're looking into a proper fix on our end. Sorry for the hassle.
One of the primary goals of the new player model was to give us a better foundation to improve the player animations in Rust. We're now starting to improve our animation systems to allow us to make the player animator feel less robotic and more life like.
One key problem we've faced in the past is that all of the animations that the player uses are in a single monolithic animation state machine. This is over 250+ animations, along with override sets for most weapons. This state machine is painful and error prone to update since every weapon and mountable shares it - changing how an animation transitions could have unpredictable consequences for other situations in the game.
To resolve this we've built a new sub system tool that lets us layer in additional, bespoke animation logic in certain situations in the game. Instead of extending and adding even more animations into our massive animator controller, we can now create small self-contained new animation behaviours and apply them in specific contexts.
That's all a bit dense, so let's look at a real world example - the humble torch. We all start with one, and we've all turned it on at night and immediately been killed. It's suffered from a few animation issues that were challenging to solve in the past. Even though it's only held in the right hand, our animation system could only take over the whole upper body, so the left arm was always stiff and robotic. The upper body animator had no awareness of the players locomotion, so it couldn't react to running, jumping, etc (and even if it was aware, making a whole set of running and jumping animations just for the torch is wasteful).
To solve this we've applied a new sub system that creates a new state machine just applied to the right arm. This preserves the running and moving animations on the left arm. We've also added support to blend in the left arm during animations that require it - lighting the torch for instance.
We've just rolling this out in a few small places for now to test it out and make sure it's stable, but these new tools are going to allow us to work faster, produce less animation bugs and get a better looking result going forwards.
Animation matching
Where possible, we have taken this opportunity to match 3p animations with what happens in the viewmodel. Many of the old animations were wildly different, both in actions and timing.
More bespoke anims Some weapons shared anims due to time constraints but weren't always a great fit. There are now more bespoke anims created specifically for each weapon.
3/4 stance
The original goal was to move on from forward-facing aiming which, although functional looks awful visually. It also makes clipping of elements like the stock inevitable because the upper body can’t ‘make space’ for the weapon which must aim true.
We've gone with more of a weaver stance in this update, to reduce some of the issues listed above.
It's a more natural looking stance, importantly with more twist in the body and angled hips.
Straight from the forge this month is the Industrial Decor Pack, a collection of 20 heavy-duty and machined industrial themed items to galvanize your base. Featuring decorative deployables, utilitarian storage and sturdy tools.
Shipping in the in-game store or from the Rust Steam item store
To go alongside the shelving, we’re also shipping the Industrial Storage Barrels in both horizontal and vertical varieties. Made from steel and probably several hazardous chemicals, they’re sure to keep your precious loot safe, or toxic, and safe. You can change their colour with the Spray Can tool.
To go alongside the shelving, we’re also shipping the Industrial Storage Barrels in both horizontal and vertical varieties. Made from steel and probably several hazardous chemicals, they’re sure to keep your precious loot safe, or toxic, and safe.
Light-up the path ahead with this skin for the Torch, featuring an electric filament and unique animations.
Light-up the competition with the Industrial Auto Turret. Made from the toughest metal framework, this skin for the Auto Turret is sure to deal with any intruders definitively.
Start an industrial revolution with this unique and exclusive skin for the Large Furnace. Go from primitive to the modern era with this one-stop shop to progress.
Seize the means of production with this skin for the Electric Furnace. Looking like a basement nuclear reactor, you’ll be sure to blitz through any safety guidelines in your charge for more ore.
Roll up the shutters and get to work. Featuring a unique animation and plexiglass windows for extra security, this skin for the Garage Door is sure to get things done.
Featuring 6 unique flooring wallpapers, you can create virtually any layout you wish with these floor designs. From production-line to dead-end trap.
Theme up your base, or just trash-talk your rivals, these sprays and emojis are sure to put in a shift.
This month we’re introducing the Bowless Crossbow which is a unique skin for the Crossbow.
Clearly made by someone with a grudge and a hefty disregard for health and safety. Made from salvaged workshop components and featuring a bowless pulley system, this crossbow is sure to pack a punch.
The Bowless Crossbow can be purchased in-game or from the Rust Steam item store
The skin viewer got a small upgrade this month. You can now inspect skins in your hand, straight from the store or your Steam inventory menu.
Often, you can land shots on players in hot air balloons or on boats and you’ll be met with the dreaded ‘projectile invalid’. This is because the server has rejected your hit.
This month, I looked at improving hit validation for parented players. Hit validation now takes into consideration the previous position of parents when validation happens - this should let your shots land and provide a better experience for players all around.
We are excited to announce a very special, first-of-its-kind collaboration with our friends over at Discord. Starting today, you can bring Discord’s iconic mascot, Wumpus, out of your chats and straight into your base! Say hello to the In-Game Wumpus Plush.
The Wumpus Plush is a one time exception and is exclusive to the Discord Shop.
To grab them, you'll need to purchase him directly through Discord, which will then link up and unlock the item on your Steam account inventory.
The Wumpus Plushie can be placed anywhere inside your base. Stick them on your workbench, line a few up on your roof to confuse raiders, or just keep them next to your sleeping bag for 70% comfort, and good luck before a big Deep Sea run. Deployable Companion: Fully interactive placement - rotate, stack, and find the perfect spot for your new friend and receive 70% comfort when near them. Discord Authenticity: Lovingly modeled to bring Discord's signature colours and aesthetic, seamlessly into Rust's universe. 100% Flex: Show the friends and foes you were there for Rust's first-ever Discord store collab.
Head on over to the Rust Game Shop on Discord to get yours!
We rely on an internal utility called Pool to recycle objects and avoid allocations - it's vital for avoiding creating pressure on the Garbage Collector. Since it's vital, it's used everywhere throughout our codebase.
Couple months ago I've discovered that it becomes a bottleneck when trying to introduce multithreaded batch processing of work(example: sending entity snapshots to players every frame). To provide basic thread-race safety, it's implemented with the use of a mutex, and in hot-ish loops there can be a lot of contention on that mutex, slowing all worker threads down.
After some experimentation with different implementations, I've settled on a slightly-fuzzy lock-free design(FuzzyCB bellow) that is competitive with ConcurrentBag in single thread performance and Single-Producer-Single-Consumer threading scenarios, but beats it in Multi-Producer-Single-Consumer scenario:
As it's "fuzzy", it has a drawback - it never knows exactly how many objects are in the pool. As a result, when there's high contention on the pool and it's close to capacity, it can start to sporadically spill objects. The rate of spill is small - in one test of recycling 32k objects from 32 threads it spilled ~0.15%, or 48 objects.
It's now active throughout the codebase and I'm relying on it in UsePlayerUpdateJobs 3 to skip object preallocation. If it causes an issue for servers or clients, you can roll back to using original Pool implementation using pool.usemutexpool 1 command. Once new pool is confirmed stable, I'll remove the fallback option.
As part of the effort to clean-up various miscellaneous allocations, I've replaced parts of console commands system to work using StringView, specifically parsing and storing of incoming commands and their arguments. Most of the interface exposes arguments as StringViews with usual conversion APIs, but if there are mods that do their own fancy arg processing via strings, I've left a compatibility GetString call.
Although changing API is disruptive to server mods, this rewrite allowed us to get rid of 60+ allocations/4KB+ when invoking a command with 6 arguments, so it's worthwhile for me to pursue. To make the transition a bit less painful, I'm keeping StringView similar to both String and ReadOnlySpan APIs. Over the next couple months I'll be continuing it's propagation and smoothing out various kinks with it's design.
What do we gain under the hood for these player improvements?
Animation rig
By freeing ourselves up to create a new rig we have been able to nail more realistic proportions. We've also been able to select a more natural bind pose, allowing character art to sculpt more realistic models suitable for deformation.
We've been able to burn the 12-year-old Maya rig with fire and create a much more robust, powerful control rig for the animation team that's also future-proof. The skeleton itself includes helper twist bones and metacarpals that, even though we can't take full advantage of yet in Unity, are in the roadmap as our end goal.
The all new control rig now includes:
- ik/fk spine
- full body fk/ik/matching and switching
- customisable selection sets
- pose library
- space creation
- rig guide setup for easy re-generation and updating
- rig publishing
- referencing features for easily updating meshes mid-process
- communication with Maya's HIK system
- drag and drop mocap application
This rig essentially means creating 3p animation is now a more pleasant experience for us, and we can create higher-quality output.
Animation x character art
Working with this new Maya rig also means collaboration with the character art team (also in Maya) has become much more symbiotic. The current workflow for character art clothing involves creating a beautiful model and then having to mutilate and distort the proportions to fit the existing model. This step will now finally be removed and clothing can be seen as intended in all it's glory. All clothing assets can now all be directly loaded into Maya, with search tool functions & easy exporting so the character & animation teams can work directly on the same source files.
Entity updates
Many weapons were set up with hacky Unity offsets at a time when we didn't have a prop bone to attach to. We've now taken this opportunity to attach all weapons to a prop bone directly and remove those offsets.
Animation Logic
This remains mostly unchanged. We have seen from recent games that have attempted similar updates that ultimately in a game like Rust, you demand instant response time, not silky transitions between every action. While as an animator this stuff is lovely to see....generally, the player base on those other titles has seen such additions as an annoyance and has been received poorly.
You'll be happy to know the player update is just as snappy/responsive as the current version, so if you still get killed it's all on you. We hope to add nicer touches in the future (one such feature is explained in Jarryd's subsystem section) but any changes will be measured with the overall current players experience of Rust in mind. They also will be introduced organically, and not in one huge update that shocks the system.
Animals and scientists will be able to enter and move in player bases. For now they can only enter a simple base with no door when the new navmesh is enabled. This is part of the groundwork for keeping sheep, cows, dogs.
New animals dying randomly happens less (it happened because of unity failing to path on some convex or concave terrain).
We’ll be able to update the scientist AI on cargo and excavator (which was not possible before because we needed a moving navmesh).
New scientists will have better and cheaper flanking (through a custom A* cost that de-incentivizes direct paths).
Navmesh is built in the background after the server starts, but on restarts it will be loaded from disk which is instant.
The obstacles like player foundations are handled on other threads + budgeted, and don’t impact the framerate (unity’s way of handling obstacles has a significant constant performance overhead).
We limit the max time a single pathfinding query is allowed to take, so a single npc can’t create a lag spike with a long path request.
When looking for cover or peeks, new scientists will be able to quickly discard positions they can’t reach without needing expensive pathfinding queries.
We're renaming Premium to Premium Access Pass.
This is simply a rebrand, there are no functional changes. If your Steam inventory value is $15 or more, you'll continue to have access to Premium Access servers exactly as before.
This change is part of some longer-term groundwork for future monetisation (boo) plans. We've no plans to change how premium works, as we've talked about in prior blogs, it's doing a decent job at gating cheaters.
The Rust Premium name will be revived for a new monetisation system we're looking to implement late this year. It's not a battle pass, nor a VIP system, but more of a monthly opt-in for additional skins/perks. We're finalising details of exactly how this system will work. We'll share details ahead of launch for you all to tell us how bad it is, looking at you, Reddit.
This month’s workshop skinnable is the Auto Turret. A constant companion to many a Rust base, this little guy is ready to receive some love from the skinning community. Just make sure it’s not hostile when painting the business end.
To make your own Auto Turret skin, head over to the in-game workshop and locate the Auto Turret deployable item. From there, you can download the model file and add your own materials.
This June sees Kick bring their unique green back to the biggest survival game on Steam as they play host to Kick Off 2. And from June 11th - June 21st, players can earn up to 10 captain/co-captiain exclusives, a Garage Door, and a Locker skin, as well as a unique Kick Wallpaper, just by watching the action-packed PvP event!
Event/Broadcast/Drops start: June 11th 4PM EDT / 9PM BST / 8PM UTC Kick broadcast exclusive skin: June 11th-14th (15th UTC) Drops end: June 21st 7PM EDT / Midnight BST / 11PM UTC As usual, don't forget to sync your accounts here -
https://kick.facepunch.com/ And tune in for another chaotic PvP competition while getting your hands on these unique Drops!
We've launched a Furnace Night Light with long time merch partners, Youtooz!
The new Furnace Night Light stands at 5.3 inches tall and is perfect to perch on your bedside table, desk, or anywhere that needs a little extra light!
It requires 2 x AAA batteries, and then with a flick of a switch and you’re ready to watch it illuminate with a spectacular glow that will keep you cozy as you smelt through the night! You can find out more and pre-order yours here.
Workbenches have received a whole new upgrade system - along with nine upgrades to find and customise your benches with! Each upgrade provides a different bonus effect, and you can mix and match them to find your favourite combos.
These upgrades are not craftable and will not be commonly found, so keep them safe! Open the workbench's inventory to add your upgrades. They each have their own visual, which will alter the way the workbench looks.
If you get lucky and collect 'em all, you'll have a fully upgraded workbench - both in terms of bonuses and visuals!
We're adding a new anti-personnel/raiding deployable weapon: Mortar!
Functionally really similar to cannons, but is instead placed on flat land and allows for launching projectiles over long distances. Firing a mortar requires mastery through trial & error as there is no visual guide to help you land shells exactly where you want them. Instead, you'll need to pair it with binoculars to estimate how high to aim the mortar for it to land on your target.
To prevent repeated shots, the mortar has recoil that slightly bumps the mortar up on every shot, as well as a small inaccuracy that changes how far each shell lands.
You can choose between two mortar shells, one aimed to deal high damage to players while the other focuses on destroying structures.
The tin can alarm is getting a small update. You can now trap them with a bunch of different items.
How it operates has not changed, crossing its wire will trigger the trap and cause a loud clatter, alerting anyone nearby to your presence.
And you can deploy it anywhere from your base to inside monuments. Use it strategically to cover access points and defend your positions.
When triggered, it'll throw the loaded item in place. It supports:
F1 Grenade
Molotov
Bee Grenade
Beancan Grenade
Flashbang
Smoke Grenade
Supply Signal
Flare
Firecrackers
Watch your step!
The vending machine UI was in need of a refresh and some improvements. We've totally redesigned the administration page and given the purchase page a new lick of paint.
The new administration page comes with a few features: being able to quickly setup vending orders via its in built inventory, selling skins individually, and being able to reorder your existing sell orders without deleting and recreating them.
We’re launching a new much-requested building skin to the permanent store this month; the Crypt stone building skin. Available now from the Rust store, this building skin allows you to change the visuals of your stone tier base.
Your new home for eternity, or at least the next wipe.
Purchasable from the in-game store or Steam item store.
Time to put that power supply to use
Fixed some issues with 3rd person grenade throw animations
Floating City Boat Vendor now sells modular boat parts to get you back on your feet if you lose your boat (and a cheaper DPV too!)
Monuments which feature multiple no build zones now correctly display each one
Road signs are now correctly spawning in Outpost, Junkyard and Water wells
Drag has been greatly increased for boats with a flat bow. Build accordingly
Starting today (May 7th), we’re launching the official Rust Shop directly inside Discord. We’re actually only the second game to do this (shoutout to the Marvel Rivals team for going first), and the goal is pretty simple: making it easier to grab the skins and DLC you want, while you’re already hanging out with your team, browsing the goods right where you coordinate your raids.
To get things moving, we’re running a launch celebration for the first two weeks.
From May 7th to May 21st, every single piece of Steam Item Store DLC released before 2026 will be 20% off.
If you’ve been eyeing that specific building skin or hazmat suit for the last year, this is the time to snag it - or gift it to that special team mate.
It’s pretty seamless - anything you buy through the Discord Shop links straight to your Steam inventory. You can find the shop via our Official Discord or through the Discord Shop.
Check it out and let us know what you think in the #feedback channels!
We've now released several variants of the horizontal and vertical storage barrels but due to the fact that they don't have a common vanilla item (as opposed to something like the Tool Cupboard skins) they weren't compatible with the Spray Can/Repair Bench for swapping the skin.
We've fixed that this month, allowing you to freely swap between the barrel skins. This will also be fixed for future versions of other DLC items we've released (eg. single and half height shelves).
We're adding a new set of achievements related to the recent Naval Update. There are plenty of easy ones you should be able to get by just exploring the deep sea, as well as some more complicated hidden achievements that are a lot rarer in comparison - but should still come up within normal play.
Can you spot them all?
There has been a longstanding issue where if a player uses the last item in a stack, the viewmodel and player animations for using that item will stop immediately upon the item having been spent. Without affecting the timing of when items are determined to have been used (as changing this would have gameplay/balance implications), we now have a means of setting up animations to stick around after the item has been spent so they can be play out nicely before stopping. This has been applied to all grenade types, as well as the bandage and medical syringe, and will be applied to the other held items over time.
We've made some changes to the server browser. It was possible in the past for server owners to be able to spoof ping information through various means. This would make servers show lower in ping that were actually higher in ping to you, possibly picking a server which would end up feeling laggy when your intention was to pick a local server.
We're rolling out a new system: country mapping. Based on the servers IP we get an estimate of what country the server is in, as well as its coordinates. We use those coordinates to sort servers close to you. This means that servers can no longer spoof where they are located.
For the above system to work we also need to estimate where you are located (in order to show your servers nearby). This is located at the top left of the play menu and can be overridden by you. This override is saved between sessions if you'd rather have it done manually.
Binoculars have had a whole refresh!
The model, animations and UI have all been updated to feel more modern.
Right click to peer through the binoculars and Left click to cycle the three zoom levels. And it pairs nicely with the new mortar!
Crafting cost has been reduced too!
Last month we revisited the Salvaged Axe, with a full visual and animation overhaul. This month, we’ve given the same treatment to another legacy favourite — the Salvaged Cleaver !
The Salvaged Cleaver has received a complete remake, featuring a brand-new high-quality 3D model, updated HD textures, and an entirely new animation set.
The result is a weapon that looks like it was lovingly rebuilt from junk… and still very much wants to live in your enemies’ ribs.
This month’s workshop skinnable is the Electric Furnace
There are so many possibilities with skins for this item, especially as it lights up. We can’t wait to see what the community cooks up!
To make your own Electric Furnace skin, head over to the in-game workshop and locate the Electric Furnace deployable item. From there, you can download the model file and add your own materials.
Twitch Rivals - Base Invaders is back!
Watch and earn an exclusive Twitch Rivals HMLMG skin for one day only! This drop will be tied to the Twitch Rivals channel and only active during the broadcast window.
20 teams of 5 will battle it out, while 5 general Twitch Drops are available for 5 days only!
Drops start: May 13th - 11AM PT/ 2PM ET/ 7PM BST Drops end: May 18th - Midnight PT / 3AM ET / 8AM BST Connect your accounts to claim your drops!
Last update I mentioned that I was planning to remove old player processing code. The vanilla (UsePlayerUpdateJobs 0) and our first version of batching (Jobs 1) mode code has been removed. You can still set UsePlayerUpdateJobs to lower than default 2, but it won't have any effect and it'll run as if it's set to 2.
This patch we've made a couple bug fixes and tweaks that should both reduce number of garbage allocated for creating tasks every frame (our fork of UniTask can now reliably pool internals) and improved scheduling of physics queries for our server-side player checks. We're going to be switching some of our servers for Jobs 3 mode and seeing how they run over next month. If it holds, we'll promote it to default.
Alongside above, we're also working on eliminating some of the bottlenecks that prevent us from more heavily relying on parallelization:
The way our Pool is implemented causes a lot of contention on a singular lock - I'd like to ship an improvement in Jobs 3
We still have a lot of player state that's stored in a way that prevents us from converting to Burst code and having to run recaching logic every frame - it would be gradually completed in Jobs 3 and future modes
We need to find a way to make entity saving multithreading safe (which means no Unity API calling) - hoping to tackle for Jobs 4
We're slowly getting to the point where player processing is not the slowest part of the server workload. I'd like to squeeze out as much benefit as I can while it's still worthwhile before moving to the next big server performance problem.
We've reduced the amount of loot you can find in the Deep Sea.
Loot found in that side of the map was a little too generous compared to the other monuments and areas in the game. However, Scientist boats will also have less guns overall.
We are currently in the process of upgrading to Unity 6. This means Windows Server 2016 / Windows 8 and older will no longer be supported. The minimum required version will be Windows Server 2019 / Windows 10 Version 21H1 (Build 19043) or newer.
From our metrics none of our players are still on Windows 7 or Windows 8, so we aren't concerned about that. However, we suspect some server hosts are still running Windows Server 2016. If you run a Rust server, consider this the first and final notice that you need to upgrade to at least Windows Server 2019 by the end of the month.
The Armoured Ladder Hatch is a new top-tier construction. A direct upgrade from the Metal Ladder Hatch, the Armoured Ladder Hatch is built for players who want maximum durability on their vertical access points.
Unlocked at Tier 3, it’s available in both square and triangle variants, slots straight into existing frames.
Unlocked at Tier 3, it’s available in both square and triangle variants, slots straight into existing frames.
Renewable energy is the best energy. You liked wind and solar? Now it's time for another classic, Hydro!
Water wheels can be placed in rivers to passively generate electricity from the water flowing along its base. When placed in the ocean they do generate some charge, but more inconsistently as the tides change. Either way you will need to make sure that the waterflow coming in is not blocked by anything!
The wheels can also be used as giant hamster wheels if you want to hop in and convert some calories into power. And before you ask, yes you can force handcuffed players into them.
The tech tree unlocking process received a long-overdue upgrade this month!
Instead of painfully having to select and unlock each item as you go down the tree, you are now able to select any node you want and will be shown a preview path that leads to the desired item. Pressing the unlock button then automatically unlocks the whole path at once, playing a satisfying animation.
New sound effects have also been added, the unlock animation was improved and the tree is now centered when zooming in and out - interacting with this UI should feel a lot better overall.
Chainsaw Frenzy
Chainsaw now always hits the X when farming trees
Watchtowers
Watchtowers can no longer be spam placed next to each other
Sleepy Junkpiles
Fixed junkpiles spawning on sleeping bags
IO counter
Can now set the reset value of the IO counter
Deep Sea Sleeping Bags
Added a visual indicator to distinguish between sleeping bags in the deep sea on death screen
We've increased the time plants are in their "ripe" stage to 24 hours (was 14). This should hopefully be less punishing for players who can't log back on to harvest their plants more than once per day.
Note that the growable flowers were already at 28 hours so they are unchanged.
We've noted the new meta around shields becoming a bit too popular over the last month. Ideally shields are a powerful defensive tool but they come at the cost of reducing your offensive capabilities.
To better fit that direction we're now switching the hitbox based on whether you are actively holding up the shield. When idle the shield uses a smaller square hitbox and it will use the current larger hitbox while it is being held up.
We've also fixed a bug that resulted in additional recoil being applied when shooting at a shield, this was only meant to be applied when attacking a shield with a melee weapon.
We saw a cool community concept for coloured buttons and decided to implement it as a part of this patch, the functionality is really similar to wires with a similar colour set - the only difference being that red is the default colour for buttons to match how they previously looked.
The more technical and cooler side of this is that we previously didn't support nested radial menus, the new coloured buttons are the first to support them and should allow for more complex nested menus in the future.
After a recent request, I've added some extra colour pickers to the accessibility options.
These allow you to change the colour of the tags for Discord DMs, team chat, cards chat, etc.
Hopefully this makes things a bit clearer!
The old ToggleLight feature/bind has had a major upgrade this month!
“Light Toggle Radial” has been added to the controls menu as a replacement for the previous togglelight bind, and will use the same default/current bind.
Tap the keybind to retain the original behaviour: all equipped light sources toggle simultaneously.
Hold the keybind to open a radial menu (when multiple light sources are equipped), allowing you to toggle each one individually.
This is especially useful in situations where you don’t want everything toggled at once - for example, when using night vision goggles alongside a weapon-mounted flashlight. There's potential to expand this feature into a more generic "item state toggle" feature in the future, that could also toggle things such as weapon fire mode.
Fishing inside your base or botting the fishing minigame doesn't align with the true spirit of fishing. To get the best catches you should be hunting down secluded spots and casting your line there. Plus, if you want to do things passively, fishing traps exist for a reason.
So we've added an overfishing mechanic. If a certain amount of fish have been caught in the vicinity within a certain time span, the area becomes "overfished". In overfished areas, only junk will come up from cast lines. The area will repopulate after it has time to refresh, and fishing can resume then.
There are plenty of ConVars for community servers to tweak the mechanic to their liking (including disabling it completely) so don't worry about it being forced. Additionally, overfishing has no impact on the fish traps as the primary intent for the feature is to mitigate in-base afk fish farming.
To balance this out, fishing in the Deep Sea is getting a buff! You can no longer catch Herrings or Anchovies in the deep sea, which means the loot pool has been concentrated towards higher-value catches.
This year we’ve somehow created an even more silly costume to terrorise the nakeds with, the Bunny Costume.
Coming in three cute and cracked varieties so you can dress for any occasion.
The Bunny Costume is only available for a limited time on the Rust Steam item store
Bringing in a little decorum this Easter, we have the latest Rustigé Egg coming in exquisite amethyst and gold. Open it up to reveal an eggcellent mini Excavator scene and a unique tune.
Available for a limited time on the Rust Steam item store
Happy Easter! Easter Egg Hunt is back today until the 16th of April and there's a whole range of fun items now available too!
If you don't make the podium, that's okay. The painted eggs you collect can be upgraded to Bronze eggs once you collect 10. If you collect 10 bronze eggs then you can upgrade to a silver egg, eventually all the way to gold!
There are various items available to help you during your hunt - the Easter Basket will allow instant pickup of eggs and the Bunny Onesie and Ears will provide you with an advantage via Egg Vision.
EASTER WALLPAPERS
What better way to spring clean your base this year than applying these fresh new individual wallpapers for your walls and floors.
Available as individual limited wallpapers on the Rust Steam item store
Since rolling out march's Shipshape update, we have enabled UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 on all our servers and it's been a smooth ride, most of the time. It revealed a couple bugs with the demo system, but those have been fixed. And it's been helping our servers - you can see where we've switched one of our servers:
As a result, I'm changing the servervar to be set to 2 by default. For a short while the 0 and 1 modes will still be available, but I'm planning to rip out support for them - if your server has custom mods that target player update loop, you should look to upgrade those.
The above image shows the performance gain on a fresh-ish server, but as the world grows old it starts to slow down and bottlenecks become worse. Here's an example of a server mid-way through update cycle with 360 players:
There are a number of issues highlighted above in the ~20ms section:
The areas marked with 1 and 2 are running serial code. For 1(2.3ms) it's running our server side antihack logic, for 2(3.8ms) it's updating player's network streaming
For number 3 - we spend 0.3ms because one of async tasks doesn't finish early
For number 4 - our use of C# asyncs is leading to allocations, so our optims have a tax
Problems 2 and 4 are related - to fix problem 2, we would use more asyncs, but that would cause more allocations, inflating problem 4.
To deal with this, we started rolling out our fork of UniTask, a framework for cheaper creation of tasks. In Jobs 3 mode, all task creation code has been converted to UniTasks instead of C# Tasks to eliminate related allocations, we converted more of antihack to Burst Jobs and parallelized player network streaming logic further.
We're currently trialling it out internally, but it's publicly available for experimenting. I'll be keeping an eye out on feedback.
Continuing moving to a more GPU driven rendering pipeline we are rolling out our own terrain rendering system (no longer using Unity's). Everything should look broadly the same visually but a lot of the work has moved to the GPU. The new terrain has massively reduced drawcalls and more aggressive culling. This results in an overall gain in CPU performance.
Performance Details
Terrain can be situational but for a performance snapshot example I'll take a profile on top of this hill:
I can compare the metrics by turning new terrain on/off:
Rendering metrics
Drawcall reduction: ~1000 (2.71k -> 1.07k)
Shadowcaster reduction: ~550
CPU main thread
Unity's terrain CPU update completely removed: ~0.25ms gain
The combined reduction in drawcalls and terrain.CullAllTerrains update result in a median: ~0.65ms gain.
The numbers will vary (and can sometimes be even better) but overall you should see decent improvement in CPU times.
GPU performance
While most of the work has moved to the GPU, the improved culling and terrain rendering technique has minimised any overhead. In tests GPU performance has remained similar.
As part of our standard build process for the dedicated server, we have always stripped out Textures (since the server does no rendering) but Meshes have always been included. This is usually wasteful - the majority of meshes are only ever used for rendering and are not needed on the server. These meshes are loaded by default, and take up memory which is critical on the server. They also waste space on disk which is less important, but still worth improving.
This month, we are now removing most meshes from the server build unless they are required for a collider. Our initial tests showed that this has saved around 600mb of memory at runtime and 2.7GB of space on disk. We're reasonably sure we haven't inadvertently removed any meshes that are required by the server, but if you encounter any missing collisions that worked last month please let us know.
I've made some improvements to our network group code, which handles area of interest management, to better optimize what is networked from the server to clients.
Before this change, the server networked everything in a large square around the player. A square is simple but not ideal because it networks much further towards the corners vs. the center of the edges. After this change, the server now networks everything in a large, blocky circle around the player.
Next up, I added the ability to use different network ranges for different entities. This allows us to only network smaller entities (decor, dropped items, etc.) when you're closer to them, and allows us to network larger entities (vehicles) further away. We've tweaked the network ranges of a few entities to start with and will explore more going forward.
To make it clearer that altitude affects direction, we've added an altimeter to the Hot Air Balloon!
It's positioned right where you need it - next to the Windsock and the Burn Control Button.
This should help explain the correlation and make it a bit easier to get ballooning!
After 12 years, this month the Salvaged Axe has been given a new face lift. A well and truly deserved update to this staple tool.
Featuring a new high resolution model and textures, as well as a brand new set of animations to match the updated model.
Another asset receiving a facelift is the trusty medical syringe!
It was starting to show its age at 12 years old, so in this update we've upgraded it to includes a new high-resolution model, updated textures, and a brand-new set of animations.
Restoring health in an emergency situation has never looked so good!
This month’s workshop skinnable is the Salvaged Axe. This weapon just received an awesome visual upgrade which makes us especially excited to see what the community will create with it!
To make your own Salvaged Axe skin, head over to the in-game workshop and locate the Salvaged Axe weapon item. From there, you can download the model file and add your own materials.
We've completely re-designed and rebuilt the F1 menu. All tabs have been improved, packed with new features and nice QOLs.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of the notable improvements.
Console
A command list screen has been added, showing all the available commands
For admins, auto completion now works with server convars
CTRL + Scrollwheel will increase/decrease the text size
All the missing convar descriptions have been generated using AI. You'll see (Generated) in front as a warning, we figured AI descriptions are better than no descriptions.
Items/Vehicles
You can now favourite items and find them in a dedicated tab
We've also added a "Recents" tabs
CTRL + Scrollwheel will increase/decrease the item size
Keyboard controls have been added
Server
Added player positions and team ID
Added teleport and mute buttons
Added a UGC filtering panel
Copy pastes (new)
This tab lets you manage and use your copy paste files. Note: hold CTRL and click on a file to add a screenshot (or update it).
Loadouts (new)
An easier way to access the loadouts available on the server. Lets you create new ones from your inventory.
Note: you can still access the old F1 menu using client.legacyconsoletoggle. This will be removed in the coming months.
Last month, we introduced secure servers with TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot requirements, and while we're still in the process of evaluating, we do have some details to share.
To cut to the chase, we have seen a measurable reduction in cheaters across our new secure servers, with approximately 1-in-63 players being cheaters vs 1-in-42 players on a regular server. The impact has not been as considerable in comparison to when we introduced premium servers last year, but we are pleased with the initial results. You may be wondering, why is the impact less than premium servers? Currently we believe it's two primary factors.
Rollout
When we launched premium servers, we introduced 20 new servers to support the rollout. This represented a significant portion of the Facepunch server ecosystem, which still holds up today with around 25% of Facepunch server players being premium users.
For reasons we'll talk more about below, for secure servers we kept to a smaller pool of 6 servers, as a result it's not the perfect representation of the playerbase and cheaterbase and brings into question statistical reliability when analysing.
Adoption & Features
Our biggest hurdle with fast-tracking the rollout of secure servers is feature adoption, currently we require players to have TPM and Secure Boot enabled, features that only ~60% of players have enabled!
While our goal is to create a secure environment for players with as little cheater disruption as possible, we also don't want to alienate players from the game entirely, a tricky balancing act.
As mentioned in the last devblog, if your hardware supports it we strongly encourage you follow this support article and enable those features, the more players that adopt, the more secure we can make Rust.
We've added a new feature to our demo/cinematic tools this month that allows more iteration and control over shots produced in our demo editor. Once you've recorded a shot you can now open a new editing interface that will allow you to selectively modify elements of the shot.
This includes the position/rotation of the camera, Field of View and Depth of Field settings. Once you've selected the elements you want to modify, the shot will now play with a 3 second cooldown and you will have control over those elements only (eg. if you edit just FoV the camera will move and rotate on it's own).
This allows you to layer your work instead of having to get everything correct in a single take. Got a complex shot with camera positioning and zooming? Just do the camera movement and then apply the zoom afterwards.
We've started exploring tools to help server owners.
RustRelay is a system baked into the networking layer that forwards all outbound packets from the Rust server to a recipient of your choice via websocket.
This is the first part of our plan to implement a 3D real-time and historical server render application in the web browser. Think demos but outside of the game!
In this release RustRelay will be enablable on servers via the following command line arguments:
relayenabled #Enables the RustRelay server
relayurl "https://example.com" #Url of the recipient websocket server
relaytoken "" #Token of your choice to be passed as Bearer HTTP Authorization header
With the above 3 command args supplied (all required!) the Rust server will now start relaying outbound packets to your server, you can do what ever you'd like with them! Maybe a cute collage?
If you don't know what any of this means, maybe this feature isn't for you. But trust, it's gonna be cool!
This month we've extended the amount of time each day has sunlight by around 20 minutes. The duration of night is unchanged (around 10 minutes).
This should hopefully allow for more time for daylight activities while still keeping nighttime tactics viable.
There have been a ton of small fixes and improvements to player boats and boat building this month. I want to a highlight a few of the more common complaints that have been addressed here in this section.
Boat building blocks can now be rotated and demolished at any time in edit mode - they are no longer subject to the usual 5 minute timer.
The tiny dive site buoys that would bring your full size boat to a complete halt have now been addressed. You may now sail freely!
The very annoying issue with sails randomly being destroyed has also been fixed. This was caused by a sail being rotated after initial placement, which sometimes led to them being placed off the edge of a boat. When you then picked something up nearby, the groundwatch triggered and the sails got destroyed. Not any more!
Finally, the Deploy & Edit steering wheel option will now always show, even if the current location is unsuitable. An error toast will be displayed if you try to use it, informing you that you cannot edit in this location. There are many reasons why deploy & edit can be unavailable and most of the time the reason is explained, but this one was missing - which led to a lot of confusion previously. Hopefully this will help clear things up!
Head to the change list for the full details!
We made a number of balancing changes and improvements to the Deep Sea.
Loot now respawns slowly over time. The initial loot fill when the Deep Sea opens has been decreased to around 70% of what it was.
The side of the map it spawns on is now random after each opening.
The deep sea will no longer open right after the server wipes.
You can’t go there using RHIBs now.
A notification sound will play when the deep sea opens.
All these changes can be configured via new convars.
We’ve also increased the network range from 300 to 620 metres in the Deep Sea, so you can spot ships from much further away. We can’t afford to do that on the mainland because of player and entity density, but out at sea we have enough performance headroom to support it.
Thanks to everyone for sharing their thoughts about their experience with the Deep Sea since its release.
We've added a movement penalty for player built boats that are hit by cannons. Repeated hits can reduce a ship's movement speed to 30% of its maximum speed. We'll keep an eye on how this plays out, but our hope is that this leads to more interesting ship to ship combat as well as some more boarding action.
We've also buffed the player protection while mounted to cannons so players shouldn't be as vulnerable while using them.
You can now use electricity, industrial and water IO items on boats.
Almost all the items are available. Some of them are more involved to support than others, for performance or various other reasons. Some of them are blocked purely for gameplay balance concerns.
Blocked items:
Auto turret
SAM site
Windmill
CCTV cameras
Seismic sensor
Hanging lights
Door controller, hopper
All subject to change in the future!
You can now use wallpaper on boats, the same way as in your base.
Sunken player-built boats can now be damaged block by block, allowing for exploration and loot recovery.
I've made some changes to decay rates, based on player feedback.
Decay delay has been doubled from 12 hours to 24 hours and decay duration has been reduced from 18 hours to 12 hours.
This will mean players can stay offline for longer without their boat decaying, but abandoned boats will decay quicker.
As a reminder, a player boat is only classed as used when it receiving steering wheel input.
Shipping this month is the Storage Box Pack, a packed-out collection of 16 uniquely designed and labelled skins for the Large Wood Box. Featuring bespoke and beautiful designs for Ammo, Armor, Charcoal, Clothing, Components, Explosives, Food, Guns, Meds, Metal, Ore, Scrap, Stone, Sulfur, Tools and Wood.
Each box also has a special functionality where they show the contents as a distinctive stack of items. Never fear though, the contents are not visible to hostiles unless your auth is destroyed!
Get them boxed up from the in-game store or from the Rust item store!
You can now use deployable snapping on player built boats!
This works as you'd expect. Hold a relevant deployable and left shift whilst on a player boat. This works for the exact same set of deployables as it does on land.
We've added a moderate amount of ADS aim sway while on player built boats, scaled by the speed of the boat. Ideally this encourages the use of cannons over traditional weapons, but doesn't entirely rule out some poorly aimed rockets and AK spray.
Just like the line tool from back in the day, but updated for modern day Rust standards. You can now draw lines while painting by holding shift and dragging a click to paint a line!
While there's nothing more beautiful to us than the freehand drawing that took seconds to make, we think this tool could benefit the people who really go all out in making masterpieces.
We've added a static Boat Building Station to every Deep Sea island, allowing you to make repairs and modifications while at sea.
These static stations also have a slight magnet force that pulls your ship in as long as it's powered down and nearby, making it easier to dock.
We made it so that naval scientists can't see through the smoke from smoke grenades anymore.
If this works well we'll port the same soft occlusion tech to prevent them from seeing through bushes, which would be extra nice for the junkpile scientist once he gets the new AI.
There's been a bug in Rust since the very beginnings where the hazmat would give no protection against scientists or turrets. Turned out a lot of other armors actually performed worse than expected.
We updated the formula but only for naval scientists for now, as rebalancing turret damage is a gigantic can of worms.
tldr: Against naval scientist hazmat goes from 5% to 30% protection, and fullmetal from 25% to 50%
Naval scientists missed a lot but had high damage.
We changed it so that they miss less but have lower damage.
What this means is that you'll have more time to see your health ticking down and get in cover, as opposed to big chunks of health disappearing intermittently. Unlike regular scientists naval scientists did not have flashlight and lasersights. We gave them some so it'll be easier to fight them at night. There were a lot of rough corners to the scientists reactions to sniping from extreme distance.
They will be more responsive now, and will reposition if they hear bullets coming from other angles.
Previously at long range they would only reposition if they were hit or saw you flank them.
We'll keep monitoring the naval scientists performance and gameplay wise, before we start porting their AI to the scientists at other monuments.
Servers can now opt-in to requiring TPM and Secure Boot enabled for players to connect to them. This allows EAC to work better but not all players have it set up. Over 80% of players have TPM hardware already but just under 60% of players have Secure Boot enabled right now.
Servers that require TPM and Secure Boot for all players will have the Secure tag shown on the server browser. Clicking on a server with additional requirements will show you what is required and if it is supported on your system.
We will be enforcing this on a few Facepunch servers for the initial test period. Community servers will be able to enforce this at-will. Just look for the "Secure" tag in the server browser.
To require TPM and Secure Boot for all players and get the Secure tag you can enable the server.useServerWideRequiredSystemConfig convar.
Additionally, we are working on backend systems to require TPM, Secure Boot, and more for individual accounts. Servers can opt-in to enforcing these per-player requirements by enabling the server.usePerPlayerRequiredSystemConfig convar. Note that this will not apply the Secure tag to your server - that will only show if it is enforced for all players.
Players can check to see if their PC is compatible by running a couple of Windows commands. If you have a PC from the last ~8 years It's likely your PC is already running it or equipped to run it.
Here's a guide on how to check for and/or enable TPM/Secure Boot on your PC. It's good to familiarize yourself with it, as many games are already enforcing this. Our end goal is to make it global in the future.
We will communicate more about this timeline in future devblogs.
The Shadow settings have been reworked to be part of a Shadow Quality preset setting that can be found under the Graphics Quality section of the Graphics menu. We no longer have a specific section under the Graphics tab for Shadow Settings, as it's no longer needed.
The Max Shadow Lights setting has been moved to the Rendering section of the Graphics menu, as we still wanted this to be separate from the new presets. Max Shadow Lights has also had its minimum value changed to 1 to prevent light-leaking issues.
This has been done to allow us to have more control over the performance and visual balance of the shadow settings, while making it easier for players to configure.
The physics library that Unity uses, PhysX, has always had a limitation that only around 64,000 colliders are allowed to be within a broadphase cell, the entire world is split into 256 of these cells (16x16).As the world got a lot bigger with the naval update the size of these cells also had to increase, meaning a lot more colliders per cell.
As we now use a custom version of Unity, using a custom version of PhysX, for both the server and client, we have more control over limitations like this.
There is now effectively no limit to the number of colliders that are allowed in each broadphase cell. There is a theoretical limit of around 4 billion colliders per cell, but you would hit performance bottlenecks long before that.
Alongside the new missions introduced with the naval update was a bunch of general misc changes to how missions function on the backend and code cleanup in an effort to make missions easier for us to work with and fix some longstanding issues with them.
One of those longstanding issues was a problem with how we would find which missions are valid and able to be accepted by players. We need to have this information on hand for each player whenever they open their map due to the mission provider map markers showing how many missions are available and where, and to have the correct dialogue options show up when we go to talk with these mission provider NPC's.
The problem with how this worked before was that we would have the client try to figure out what missions are available for the mission map markers and dialogue options, with the server then checking if a mission is definitely valid for that player when a player tries to accept and start a mission.
This led to scenarios where there could be discrepancies between what the client and server see as a valid mission for that player, due to the client not having access to all the same information that the server has. Where there was a discrepancy, a client could see inaccurate mission map markers and could try to select dialogue options to start missions but would then be booted out the conversation without understanding why.
The idea to fix this was to consolidate this mission validation work to run on the server. To be smart and performant about it, we now have a mission validation "work queue" (a pattern we use to load-balance tasks across frames instead of running many tasks in one frame, to avoid frametime spikes).
The work queue figures out which missions could potentially be accepted by anyone on the server (do the required entities exist, is there a valid spawn point for an entity which the mission spawns, etc), so all players are able to pull from the same information here rather than having a different work queue run for each player. This work queue attempts to run any time a player needs to know what missions are valid, but with a fixed cooldown. If the work queue is in cooldown, then the player which requested an update instead receives the last calculated valid states for each mission.
After releasing the naval update, we were seeing that this new work queue was too expensive. We were also seeing some expensive RPC frametime spikes when players go to talk to NPC's (when a player talks to an NPC, the server performs a complete revalidation of that NPC's missions and checks that specific players mission prerequisites, so that they have the most up to date information to display the correct dialogue options). Data from our EU Staging server shows that the work queue was second place in terms of time spent executing (data captured across 7 days after the naval staging wipe). It was also accounting for up to 6% of our total frametime.
Profiling this showed that the most expensive part of the work queue was for trying to generate points for missions which create generate random positions in specific biome/topology areas of the map, with one position generation taking in the range of 5-6ms.
To summarise, part of that process would iterate over thousands of potential areas of the map, before passing these initially found potential areas to a second filter, pulling randomly until we find one which we can generate a valid position from. This is something which would have always been problematic every time we we started one of those types of missions, but was only exposed in this way because we moved the work to run in a work queue, and more frequently than before as we are now polling the mission regularly rather than only when a player tries to start that mission.
Put simply, the optimisation was to instead of always iterating through thousands of areas, pull all these potential areas into a basic indexed data structure once as part of the servers bootstrap process, and when we need a position pull randomly from that preallocated data structure until we find a valid area. In testing, this showed at worst case we would test a few hundred areas instead of always at least a few thousand.
Profiling after this change shows that the cost of the task is now down to around 0.15-0.275ms, bringing down the total cost of the work queue (across all frames) down from around 20ms to 1.5ms. Our EU Staging performance data across 7 days after the change shows that the work queue has now fallen right down the list of total time spent executing, and is now accounting for only up to 0.15% of total frametime. The change also resolved the lag spikes created from talking to mission provider NPC's.
This was a slightly lengthier writeup but I hope it gave some insight as to the context for this specific problem, and how these problems come up and how we resolve them. It is also a good example of a problematic system which can end up being in a game for years, but is only exposed because we happen to try to utilise it in a different way from before.
To help ease the burden on the phsyics system this month I've taken a look at some of the worst offending parts of our game in terms of collider counts. These are important - we want accurate colliders for a variety of gameplay reasons, but the quantity and detail level of the colliders can be a drain on server performance, memory use and contributed to the 64k limit mentioned above.
After receiving some helpful breakdowns from a few community servers I made some specific changes that should help our most collider heavy environments.
Vine swinging trees use 6-9 less colliders (depending on which variation is spawned)
Collectable plants in the world (Hemp, Wheat, Pumpkins, berries, etc) no longer have a collider on the server, just the client. It's needed on the client to allow the player to interact with them, but not needed on the server.
Plants growing in planters have also had the server colliders removed. Sprinklers, heaters and environmental factors are calculated by the planter rather than every individual plant, so this should have no gameplay changes.
The first point should make the Jungle biome a lot less collider heavy, while the other two points will help across the whole map as well as in heavy farming bases.
We've discovered in the last week that Windows is rolling out a new MIDI interface that seems to be incompatible with the implementation in Rust. This is sometimes resulting in a constant increase of virtual MIDI devices that degrades client performance over time.
We would recommend disabling these commands if you are on the latest Windows updates and have used MIDI commands in Rust in the past: midiconvar.enabled and global.processmidiinput.
This will unfortunately stop devices like MIDI instruments and Stream Decks working with Rust. We are investigating a fix as a priority as we use these tools internally quite a bit.
This month’s workshop skinnable is the Barbeque
Put another human meat on the barbie with this popular request from the skinning community. The possibilities are endless!
To make your own BBQ skin, head over to the in-game workshop and locate the Barbeque deployable item. From there, you can download the model file and add your own materials.
The journey for Rust doesn’t stop here. Rust is evolving throughout 2026, with new challenges and changes on the horizon. Here's a current snapshot of this year's roadmap.
It's also viewable here where it will be updated as we progress through the year's patches:
https://rust.facepunch.com/roadmap
Launching this month is The Art of Rust. A book takes you behind the scenes with a curated collection of concept art, early explorations, environment designs, and visual development that helped define Rust’s unmistakable style.
From the first sketches of iconic monuments to the detailed artwork behind your favourite loot, this is a deep dive into the creative process that built the world you’ve survived in for years.
Whether you’re a long-time player, a creator, or someone who appreciates game art, The Art of Rust captures 12 years of visual evolution in one beautifully crafted, hardback book. Get yours here.
Player-made boats are here, providing a new way to explore the seas, including the Deep Sea!
Place the new Boat Building Station deployable in the water and get building with your shipmates! Use the new Boat Building Plan to construct your dream boat, utilising a new set of boat-specific building blocks.
Add a steering wheel, anchor, sails, engines, planks, ramps and cannons to complete your vessel and head off into the Deep Sea!
Careful consideration and placement of your engines and sails is important if you want a seaworthy ship, as they will affect its handling and speed. Sails and engines can both be reversed using the radial menu options for some nifty reverse parking.
Be sure to set a lock code on your steering wheel to stop unwanted access or theft of your shiny new boat.
Regular deployables can be placed on your boats. If they work on the Tugboat, they'll work here too.
Need to make a change after realising your boat just goes in circles? Use the Deploy & Edit mode (not available in the Deep Sea) to quickly and easily deploy a Boat Building Station around your boat.
Have fun building and exploring the seas!
To get your vessel sea worthy, we've now got some new deployables - specifically for your boat!
Boat Building Station
The boat-building station is placeable in deep water, it's used to build and edit your boat.
Building plan
The boat-building plan is similar to the building planner you know and love, but for boats.
Sails
A sheet of toughened fabric rigged to catch the wind and help propel the boat forwards.
Helm
A must-have for any seaworthy boat. Used to steer and control your direction, with a built-in lock to keep your vessel secure when you’re not at the wheel.
Engine
A powerful motor that runs on low grade fuel and burns through it fast. Loud, thirsty, and inefficient, but invaluable when you need to escape danger, chase down other players, or muscle your way out of a bad situation. Sometimes speed is worth the cost.
Anchor
A heavy anchor used to stop your boat drifting. Drop it to hold position and keep your vessel exactly where you want it. Without it, your boat may drift to shore.
Canon
A powerful naval weapon used to sink other players’ boats. Load it with cannon balls.
Small Ramp
Bridge gaps and create quick access points. Ideal for boarding other ships or reaching land from the water.
Plank
Used to bridge gaps, board other boats, and settle minor disagreements by pushing friends into open water.
The Deep Sea is a new offshore region you can travel to using boats. It’s high risk, high reward, and intentionally unforgiving.
You can access it by sailing toward the edge of the map using a strong boat such as player-made boats, RHIBs or the new PT boats.
This is not a place to live: you cannot build, and nothing respawns. First come, first served. The deep sea will open and close intermittently, like a world event.
Inside, you can explore new content detailed below in this blog:
Tropical islands
Floating cities
Ghost ships
Boats controlled by scientists
We have lots of plans to expand deep-sea and use it as a bridge between worlds.
Similar to monuments, Ghost Ships are stationary ships scattered throughout the deep sea and filled with loot for people to scavenge while navigating on their boats.
Each Ghost Ship is protected by scientists, both on the ship and nearby patrols who will try to keep you off the ship. Some Ghost Ships also contain locked crates, which you'll need to hack while being under pressure of other players and scientist boats.
We hope that Ghost Ships, along with other loot locations such as tropical islands provide enough incentive to visit the deep sea often.
While exploring the deep sea, you may come across the Floating Cities. Built from abandoned barges and the framework of an unfinished oil rig, these ramshackle monuments serve as safe haven for all types of players.
Currently, there are four variants of Floating Cities that can spawn on a server with each floating city offering the same type of facilities. These include docks where you can secure your boat and various NPC vendors selling weapons, equipment, food, and medical supplies.
A nearby farming barge can be accessed for a small fee, giving you the chance to harvest fresh crops. Throughout each monument, familiar safe-zone amenities are scattered among the platforms, including recyclers, workbenches, research tables, and refineries.
At the center of every floating city is the Deep Deck Casino, an inviting space offering entertainment and a place to relax to all weary sailors. Here you can meet fellow survivors, unwind in the pool, enjoy music, and gamble away your scrap to your heart’s content.
Just remember to play nice while you're there - stir up trouble, and the security turrets will remind you why that was a bad idea.
For years, the ocean has just been a blue void between you and the Oil Rigs. With this update, we are introducing a brand new biome in the Deep Sea, the Tropical Islands.
These micro-islands are fully distinct from the mainland. Expect white sands, dense palms, and even a new delicious natural treat. You won't see any pine trees here.
Their semi-procedural nature will yield different experiences. Some of them might have old ruins, others a motherlode of ore - or both.
But tread carefully. You aren't the only one seeking a fortune out there.
We've added a new boat - the PT Boat. Only found in the Deepsea - It's slower than the RHIB and consumes more fuel, but is stronger and packs a punch.
Beware, the Deep Sea is filled with the new Scientist Boats. These vessels (including RHIBs and the new PT Boat), are crewed by scientists who roam the Deep Sea in coordinated groups looking for players to engage. You might find them protecting the Hacked Crate on board a Ghost Ship. Each boat can be cleared of Scientists and stolen by the player. We wonder what you'll find on-board?
Each PT Boat comes equipped with two turrets. One packing dual 50 caliber machine guns, and the other with a single more precise 50 caliber gun. Each can be reloaded with standard 5.56 rifle ammo.
The RHIB has been in need of a little TLC, and there's no better time to do that than the Naval Update. The model and textures have been updated, along with a new storage box model.
The RHIB now comes equipped with a working compass and map display screens - helping you navigate the ocean.
If you fought a lot of scientists, you know trying to sneak or flank them is the perfect way to get killed.
The always know where you are, and will instantly 180 and beam you if you try to play smart and outmanoeuver them.
Because of this, it's very tempting to either snipe them from very far away, or camp behind a bottleneck and wait for them to inevitably rush in one by one.
This makes taking a monument guarded by scientists a test of resources with a low skill ceiling.
It boils it down to: do you know the cheese, and do you have enough ammo and bandages to grind through them?
New scientist AI is progressively coming out, but only to oilrigs, ghostships and deep sea islands for now.
You can tell them apart from their naval camo outfit and square visor.
Unlike their cousins they don't see through walls, and need to rely on noises and recent sightings to find you.
This means you can bait them by peeking or making a noise, then go around and shoot them in the back.
This is further facilitated by their lower reaction time.
If you appear at an angle they didn't expect, they'll be surprised, then you can shoot them down before they can even react.
Additionally they won't rush down into bottlenecks to be slaughtered by a camping player, instead they'll try to flank, throw smoke grenades and rush together, or just wait in ambush on the other side.
They'll also be a lot more cautious against snipers, if they're hit or hear a shot they'll all dive into cover and wait.
We'll keep a close eye on your feedback and keep tweaking them.
Where they're in a good enough state, we'll consider switching the other scientists on the main island to the new AI.
We think it would be nice to have what everyone else sees match what you see so we've added a Viewmodel to the planner.
We have 5 new naval themed missions in this month's update. These can be picked up from a mixture of new and existing mission provider NPC's. Some of these require you to venture in the deep sea, some keep you rooted at the mainland.
This update brings in a lot of work to improve how we create and modify missions internally. There is still more we want to do with missions, but we are in a better place to work on them now than we were before. This work additionally brings in several QOL fixes and improvements to existing missions and NPC conversations, as well as related background optimisations.
Scientist boats will now spawn at Large Oilrig with the crate - giving players an additional challenge when taking oil from the sea.
The RHIBs will patrol around Large Oilrig, preventing any players from getting close. These respawn each time the Oilrig resets.
You can kill the scientists and steal the loot on board. Stolen boats will stay around after the Oilrig reset.
Rust has one of the most diverse playerbases of any popular game, from hardcore PVPers to friendly and not-so-friendly RPers. To reflect this, we’ve cracked out our finest digital brushes and created the Artist DLC Pack; a collection of cool and clever items designed to help you express yourself no matter if you want to paint a charming portrait, or tag up your neighbour’s base.
Paintball Gun and Overalls
Turn tactical assault into art with the Paintball Gun and Overalls. Featuring a unique ammo type, load the hopper with paintballs, select your team colour and make a scene. Comes in 5 colours for multiple teams.
Paintballs do different damage amounts depending on if both the hurt player and instigator player have overalls equipped. There are separate server convas to scale these if admins desire, 'paintballstandarddamage' and 'paintballoverallsdamage'.
You can of course also use the paintball gun to tag up whatever you want, not just other players! Additionally, the paintball overalls have a unique feature where the hood is dynamically up or down depending on your choice of headwear.
Paintable Reactive Target
Light up your own targets with this deployable skin for the Reactive Target. You can paint on both the target board and the bucket helmet. As an added feature the bucket acts like a player’s head, allowing you to hone your headshot skills.
Ornate Frames
Bring a touch of class to your base with these Ornate frames. Paint on them or add a photo, and once you’re happy with your masterpiece, give the frame a unique description. Comes in 5 size varieties from small to extra extra large.
Light-Up Frames
Put your artwork up in lights with this collection of 5 light-up frames. Supporting IO, you can display these lights off or on, which will highlight your work for all to see.
Shutter Frames
Unroll your designs with the shutter frames. Coming in 5 size variates, you can roll-up and down the shutters both manually and with IO, enabling endless possibilities from an RP Gameshow Contest to the ultimate trap base reveal.
Frameless Canvases
If the extra large frame isn’t big enough for your ambition, look no further than this set of 5 frameless canvasses. You can use these to create murals of truly epic proportions.
Portable Easel
Take your talent to the great outdoors with this new unique deployable. You can mount any frame up to Large size and paint to your heart's content taking in the crisp air downwind of Fishing Village. In paint-mode, you can toggle the background and even the canvas itself, helping you in your creative vision. The easel supports any colour you want to use, even black…
Paintable Window
Whether you want to make stained glass, a fish tank, a store window or a Home Alone-style decoy, this paintable window will come in handy! This deployable is a skin for the Strengthened Glass Window.
Rosette Award Sprays
Last but not least, awarded with the Artist DLC Pack are 4 custom sprays usable with the Spraypaint tool. Included are sprays for 1st Place, 2nd Place, 3rd Place and… Last Place. Use these as you see fit.
This month, we're introducing the next workshop skinnable: the SKS
The SKS has been a popular request from the skinning community, and we’re happy to oblige! As one of our newest weapons, we can’t wait to see how the community works with its updated visuals.
To make your own SKS skin, head over to the in-game workshop and locate the SKS weapon item. From there, you can download the model file and add your own materials.
If you've been following development of this update you'll likely know that we had to postpone it last year due to some concerning server performance issues. Since then we've been extremely focused on getting server performance as close to it's pre Naval update levels as possible. While a lot of the issues were in new content, we didn't stop there and have made a lot of improvements to older performance bottlenecks.
A lot of these explanations might be a bit technical but we thought it might be interesting to see the process we go through when working through these issues.
We noticed some large frame times attributed to the Oven process - this is any campfire, furnace, BBQ, etc. On closer inspection this had a few issues. The cook process runs every 0.5s with no randomisation, so if a lot of ovens were running at once they would likely bunch up and cause large spikes. In an artifical test case of 500 ovens running in sync, we were seeing 18ms to work through all of the ovens.
Ovens now use a maximum budget of 0.25ms a frame to smooth out the cost when running at scale. This would just make the system run slower so we also made some optimisations to get each Oven running faster. When creating an output item we used to make a new item (eg. 1x metal frag), and attempt to add that item to the output (which would usually add +1 to the existing stack and then delete the newly created item). It's much faster to check if there is already an item in the output and just increase it's count, bypassing the new item creation process (we've used this trick on the Industrial system for a while). Each oven was also iterating over all of it's items to find the fuel each tick, that's now cached. Finally, the oven was marking it's inventory dirty every time it updated the cook process (to update the animated progress on the item icon), this now only gets dirtied when passing a threshold (5%, 10%, etc) which dramatically cuts down the overhead from sending out the updated inventory.
These changes bring the artificial test of 500 Furnaces smelting Metal Ore down to a maximum of 0.25ms, often less than that and with no visible changes to players.
The Industrial system has always been a challenge when it comes to server performance. Base and pipe designs have been getting even more elaborate and complex over the years which exposes new bottlenecks in the logic. This month I was able to get a copy of an extremely poor performing base from one of our live servers that was a useful benchmark. In some cases this base was spending 20ms/frame to fully evaluate the entire Industrial system which is obviously a problem on any server.
The main gains here involved reducing the number of times we had to iterate over item containers and other arrays. At this scale simply getting an item from a container can be slow as the order of items in memory may not match the order of items in a container, so we potentially need to iterate over the entire container to find what item is in a given slot. Multiply that by every slot in every input evaluating ever slot on every output and the cost adds up quickly. Making a quick lookup that we can refer to during the Industrial process was a huge gain, in some cases bypassing over 20,000 enumerations.
Checking items passed filters was also costing us time, running the whole input container through the filter a single time at the start of the process allowed us to bypass even more enumerations, it also meant we could remove a couple of layers of nested for loops. The end result is that the above base would now peak at 3ms for a frame. Still quite a while, but a marked improvement over the original case.
The RelationshipManager system controls the Contacts system - taking images of players you meet and keeping track of your relationships. It's relatively limited in functionality, but it was taking quite a while on heavily populated servers.
This was iterating over every player in the server, finding any players in range, checking if they are visible (using a physics check) and creating a new relationship if needed. It would also go through every existing relationship a player has, calculate how many players have marked a player as negative and flag them as hostile by default (ie. their nametag will be red). This was happening every 1s with no protection for lots of players triggering this in the same frame, so this could lead to occasional very long frame times - up to 0.75ms on busy servers.
I've updated this process to use a budgeted queue so we'll only do a maximum of 0.15ms of processing in a frame, if more players need an update it will wait for the next frame. Since this logic doesn't need to be perfectly up to date a slight delay is acceptable and will likely not be noticeable. I also updated the hostile calculation to only run if a player has modified a contact (marked friendly/hostile/neutral) as in most cases this calculation was getting the same result every time. Finally I updated the line of sight check when creating new contacts to use the server occlusion system as a first pass, which means we can skip the physics calculation a lot of the time.
We support changing the size of the player collider in select scenarios - when downed, sleeping, mounted to vehicles, etc. This was being applied by iterating over every player on the server, every frame and updating it as needed. On a moderately populated server this was taking 0.25ms, even though in most cases it didn't need to update the collider size.
I've improved this to use a budgeted queue so it will only update 0.05ms worth of players a frame. Since the player collider size is quite important, I've gone through and added a manual size adjustment when the player changes state (eg. goes to sleep) so the size should still be updated immediately and not delayed by a few frames.
We have a system in Rust called "parenting volumes" - as the name implies, these volumes detect if a player or other entity is in the vicinity and should be parented to another object. As there are a lot of edge cases, we also run extra checks(like physics queries) to avoid issues.
The upcoming player-made boats depend on it, and also utilize it quite a bit more than anything else in the world. During development, we've discovered that it adds a large cost to server processing. Here's an example of 100 boats made out of 3 blocks and 3 sleeping players:
And here's how much it costs - 3.5ms, which is a lot for something that's not actively in use:
I've taken time to rewrite this logic that runs if TriggerParent.TickMode is set to 1 (which is default). It now:
Uses it's own processing queue instead of Invokes, reducing stalls if physics world changes between individual invokes
Used batch processing and Burst jobs to overlap work across threads where possible
Skip work if volume and it's contents haven't moved/changed
As a result, the above scenario now takes:
1.4ms(-61%) if every boat is moving
0.25ms(-93%) if every boat is static
While looking through our performance telemetry I've noticed that we've been experiencing weird, frequent massive lag spikes every minute or so:
Turns out our entity-population system was struggling to respawn all missing entities (specifically junkpiles). It works by tracking a population's density on the server, and running a bunch of random samples of the world, filtering invalid ones, then finally using those positions to spawn entities.
I wrote a tool that simulates population refilling(spawn.dump_map \) visualizes how the sampling works and why samples get rejected. Various rejection reasons are color coded, with only "Green" being success. Here's the before fixes visualization - 25000(max limit) attempts to spawn 800 junkpiles:
Turns out, we had a couple bugs that would both prevent spawning new entities as well as still samples even if we don't have any entities to spawn. Fixing those and running the tool again we get 3019 attempts to spawn 800 junkpiles (need to zoom in to see pixels):
This also had a positive effect on our max-frametime telemetry - lagspikes are much rarer now:
Auto Turrets are consistently a huge drain on servers. This is because they do frequent angle updates every few seconds, this happens for each turret on a server. Each of these angle updates were being constantly synced via the network to all nearby clients. This was flooding the clients with a bunch of unnecessary network overhead.
The graph below shows the execution time difference of the SendAimDir() method which was used to send these values over the network. The patch dropped at 10 PM on our staging servers ( you can see the harsh drop after implementation). This change also affects the Ballista and the new Cannon, reducing both of their networking overheads.
These angle updates were also being performed for every turret on the main thread without much load balancing or throttling.
To combat this I've introduced two new budgeted loops which will prevent a bunch of Auto Turrets from over-consuming server resources. This will be more obvious on larger servers. Each of the server budgets for turrets can be configured with the Convars below:
NEW - tick_update_ms (default 1) - Max milliseconds can be spent per frame on turret angle updates and general updates
NEW - ammo_update_ms (default 0.1) - Max milliseconds can be spent per frame on turret ammo checks
scan_budget_ms(default 0.5) - How many milliseconds can be spent per frame on gathering turret angles
In preparation for the Naval Update, we needed a way for our water systems to be able to support a large amount of floating objects within the deep sea, this not only includes the new player boats but also existing buoyant objects like corpses or loot.
The buoyancy code itself was already fairly optimized and using some of our newer APIs for getting things like the water height or checking collisions. However each buoyant object was running simulations for itself, which means they ran all of the individual steps for buoyancy one by one.
Instead of running checks one by one, we can batch these buoyancy checks together to run across all objects using multiple worker threads. Previously, in simplified logic, we check water heights for multiple points on each object, then added some forces to move the object towards the water surface. We now get all the heights for all buoyant objects at the same time on multiple threads, calculate their forces, and then finally apply their forces back on the main thread.
This ends up being 4x faster in a scenario with 200 boats (each boat having multiple buoyancy points), and scales better than it previously did as you add more objects.
Physics has been the bottleneck for Rust server performance for a long time. Beyond reducing the number of the colliders in the world, we've not had a way reducing this cost by any significant margin. Last year however we we gained the ability to make custom changes to our own version of Unity Engine and deploy updates to the game using it.
You can break down the physics tick in a lot of different ways, however the largest bottleneck for Rust is called the broadphase. This is the part of the physics tick where you quickly find pairs of colliders that may potentially be colliding, before then performing more expensive calculations to find accurate contact info in a later stage. Simply due to the size of the map in Rust and the density of colliders that large bases have, this ends up being an expensive operation.
We've made targeted changes to the physics engine (PhysX) which drastically speeds this portion of the physics tick up. Parallelizing the broadphase was the biggest impact change that we could make, splitting each region up into its own task that is scheduled across all available job threads before the results are combined again on the main thread.
The chart above shows the average time spent on the physics tick over a long period on one of our most active servers, the midpoint of the graph is when we switched over to the new Unity version with our custom PhysX libs in. The performance improvement is pretty drastic.
To make sure that these changes were safe, we pushed a server update prior to the naval update with just the switch to the new Unity/PhysX version. Naturally, all these performance gains turned into player caps being increased and the cycle begins again.
I've got further PhysX/Unity improvements in the works for the future, so things will improve from here.
When a player was mounted we were constantly setting their position to the mounted position every frame rather than instead just parenting the player. Parenting would automatically move the player to the mounted position for relatively cheap/free, whereas our setting method is pretty expensive. There's a few codebase reasons why we need to set each frame (relating to parenting volumes), but I've managed to get past enough of them that we can roll out mountable parenting to a select few mountables. At the moment it will just be boats, but I'm confident we can get it on more mountables in the future. This cost was also being increased by AI that are mounted to vehicles, which was increasing by a bunch this patch. Thankfully these improvements also fix AI increasing the cost.
Before, showing a test server (approx 0.6 ms being spent per frame moving players) with a low amount of players (around 20~):
With hundreds of AI we are now hitting 0.02ms on the parent method of MountedPlayerSync and MountedPlayerSync itself isn't even called:
Last month I notice some unusual performance drop when running around Outpost, turned out the static caboose train was using an excessive amount of canvases, this is now fixed.
This also impacted players in the vicinity of caboose train wagon in the wild.
We've noticed some unusual spikes caused by flame turrets and shotgun traps. It was happening every few seconds in large bases without any TC. Quite rare, but fixed nonetheless.
I’ve also reduced the networking overhead of flame turrets. They were sending their rotation to every player in network range every 0.1 seconds, which was unnecessary.
Couple days before internal lockdown I've rolled out an experimental improvement to ServerProfiler - the ability to capture specific regions of code. This should be useful when chasing lagspikes or measuring infrequently running code. Here are a couple usage examples:
// record Run() and all internals, then export a snapshot using(ServerProfiler.RecordScope("IndustrialQueue", RecordIndustrialQueueServerVar)) { industrialQueue.Run(); } // OR // keep recording and export only when expend more than 5ms using(ServerProfiler.RecordScopeIfSlow("IndustrialQueue", TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(5), RecordIndustrialQueueServerVar)) { industrialQueue.Run(); }
in both cases it'll produce a IndustrialQueue.json.gz file, which you can find locally in server//profiler/. In order not to flood with snapshots and not to have too much overhead(recording still slows down performance, export is async):
It is strongly recommended to have a flag whether scopes are active or not (RecordIndustrialQueueServerVar in example)
ServerProfiler has an internal 30-minute wait period after export where the scopes are inactive. Configured via profile.ExportIntervalS, interval can be reset with profile.ResetExportInterval if you don't want to wait it out
Entire feature can be disabled via profile.ImmediateModeEnabled(default enabled)
It's designed for code that runs in 0.05ms or more, so don't use it to profile something cheap (setting up profiler and installing profiler hooks costs)
February 5th - 15th!
Tune in to view incredible streams from some of our favourite rising creators in the Rust community! Be sure to sync up and claim your Drops after watching these fantastic creators on Twitch.
Ahoy! To celebrate the long awaited release of the Naval Update, Rust is now half price for a limited time! Grab it from Steam and gift it to a friend to get some new crew mates on board!
In the event you've been living under a rock the Naval Update is coming with the February wipe!
We're encouraging anyone with the extra time and passion for its success to go play a bit of the staging branch (beta) between now and then. Your feedback is valuable to us and you can submit that feedback using the F7 reporting system built into the game!
To access Staging, simply download it from your Steam library!
Over Christmas break we ran a Rustmas Base Decoration contest where players have a chance to win a bunch of cosmetic skin bundles.
Happy to present our two winners!
Kayli_j with a village that span across and entire mountain range.
Full tour on her Youtube:
MAK with his snow globe dome!
There's a video tour in his X post that I'm unable to embed if you want to check it out!
Congratulations to both! Well done!
The Art of Rust community have out done themselves once a again. They have a custom server where people from the community can decorate their own plots.
They put together a tour for us and dedicated some of it to Rust's 12th Birthday. They had concerts, fireworks, and much more.
This is mostly going to be a photo dump and in no way could I ever capture how beautiful and heartwarming these scenes were using still photos, but being there was absolutely magical.
I did manage to clip some of the opening concert (thanks Oriwell!) before the tour started though. Its not very edited sorry not sorry.
Here's a hefty photo dump. If you're reading this on Steam go to the web blog for more!
So much time and effort went into this tour and it shows. Thank you Art of Rust! Love you guys!
Beastmode recently started a second channel to dedicate to some quality Rust content!
His very first upload happened to be with his dad, who coincidentally is also pretty well-versed in Rust too.
They make a great duo and this video really plays into that. Check it out!
Ok, break's over!
February 5th-15th | Homebrew 4
10 Exclusives from the Twitch Roster and 4 General drops from the Youtube scene.
Stay tuned to our socials for the full list!
Just going to leave this here...
Steam won't let me embed Twitch clips shakes fist
If you made something cool or saw something cool, reach out! Tag me on X or u/ErrnieGerrn Reddit.
Cover image by GreenMan from the Art of Rust community!
Servers are now wiped and Santa is packing up and clearing out the bodies, but we hope you enjoyed the Holiday Season. We're getting back to work after a couple of weeks off, which is why this blog is lighter than usual, but we're looking forward to the journey ahead in 2026!
Last month, we celebrated Rust's 12th anniversary, marking an incredible journey. The game continues to experience year-over-year growth, which is quite remarkable for being 12 years old. Rust is now bigger than ever, and it's only going to get, much bigger this year.
This year, Rust saw:
Highest ever peak player count of 259,646 on Steam in 2025
Over 450,000,000 Game Sessions
Over 5,800,000 unique players
Over 700,000,000 hours played
Over 37,000,000 Drops claimed players
28,523 Workshop Submissions
Here's a recap of some of the major updates we did last year:
Primitive We kickstarted the year with Primitive, introducing a new game mode and a whole load of new items and raiding methods
The Crafting Update The Crafting Update added advanced cooking, farming (chickens, bees), new workbenches, Armor and more
Premium Servers Premium Servers introduce a new server type, aiming to reduce cheating and improve fair, competitive play.
Jungle Update One of the biggest updates of the year saw the Jungle biome added with climbable trees, deadly tigers and crocodiles, new monuments, boomerangs, blowpipes, and more!
Friends with Benefits Friends with benefits was one of many updates which saw sweeping QOL updates, introducing party system and snappable deployables to name a few
Meta Shift Meta shift was one of several updates which made sweeping changes to progression. Introducing Blueprint fragments, custom crosshair and changes to monument puzzles
Quality Of Life Over 400 QOL changes
Menu Overhauls Sweeping changes to main menu, server browser and store.
Alongside a metric ton of improvements and bug fixes.
Rust continues to be a labour of love from all of us at Facepunch, and we couldn't have done it without your passion and feedback. Thank you for your continued support, be it playing the game, telling friends, and engaging and communicating with us. We've very much enjoyed everything we've worked on for the game this year.
What’s in store for 2026? Consistency! Continued guaranteed monthly updates on the first Thursday of every month, alongside regular fixes, quality-of-life enhancements, improvements, and exciting holiday events.
This year, Rust Mobile will be released globally. We're very excited to see how this performs, all early indicators are showing very promising signs. If you're intresting to learn more about Rust mobile or participate in the next closed beta next, visit:
Next month, on February 5th, we'll finally be shipping the Naval update. The update will include player-made boats, which will allow players to travel to the deep sea, explore new islands, and monuments with new AI encounters. This is going to be a massive update.
Alongside next month’s Naval update, we’ve got a huge amount of content either planned or already in active development for 2026.
You can expect to see new monuments, including apartment complex. We’re also working on new player models and animations, which will improve both how characters look and move. The player update will unblock one of the biggest hurdles to player customisation.
We’re expanding the ecosystem with new animals, cows and sheep, for example, alongside a proper animal breeding system. This opens up some interesting gameplay opportunities and adds more depth to the world beyond simple hunting. Bigger and better dung farms?
We’re also taking time to revisit older content. That includes expanding on popular features that players already love, and taking another look at less popular systems to see if they can be improved or reworked with the benefit of everything we’ve learned since they first shipped.
As always, plans will evolve, priorities will shift, and we’ll keep talking openly as things take shape. But there’s a lot to look forward to.
As with prior years, we've set aside multiple months in our internal roadmap for light or no content. These gaps are deliberate to allow us to be versatile and adaptive to community feedback, to have time to focus on and address old content, and to improve recent content. We have a lot we can keep building upon, not all content we add to Rust is supposed to become meta, but rather adding yet another way of achieving a goal.
Cheating continues to be one of the biggest threats to Rust, and it’s something we invest heavily in, both technically and operationally. 2025 stats:
338,000+ total bans applied
296,000+ permanent bans applied (27% increase from last year)
42,000+ temporary bans applied (26% decrease from last year)
16,000,000+ cheat reports received (28% increase from last year)
The majority of cheaters are now removed from the game in less than 7 hours of playtime, down from 10 hours at the start of 2025
In March, we released Premium Servers. To access these servers, your Rust Steam inventory must be valued at $15 or more. This includes items from the Permanent Store, such as building skins, décor packs, and hazmat skins, as well as any other tradable Rust items with an attached value.
Since launch, there have been several attempts by bad actors to game the system in various ways. So far, we’ve successfully countered those attempts.
We’ve also seen strong and healthy retention across Premium Servers. They’re doing an excellent job of gatekeeping cheaters out, and I'm very happy with how this is working. At present, the $15 price point is doing its job well, and see no need to raise the barrier to entry. If you want the best cheat-free experience, premium servers are it.
In May, we enabled server-side player culling by default across all servers. As a reminder, this is technology that stops networking players who are fully obscured by terrain and rocks, preventing or significantly limiting several high-impact cheat features such as ESP and aimbot.
In April, we opened our HackerOne program to the public. This allows players and researchers to report security vulnerabilities and exploits in exchange for a bug bounty. We also launched a dedicated security page on our website to make submitting reports easy, secure, and straightforward. To date, we’ve paid out over $300,000 through this program.
More recently, our anticheat partner, Easy Anti-Cheat, has begun additional efforts specifically targeting recoil cheats, often referred to as scripting. We continue to work very closely with the Epic Games EAC team, and there’s a lot of ongoing collaboration behind the scenes. We’ve got some big plans together for 2026.
Looking ahead to 2026, we’re continuing to hire additional support staff and developers dedicated to anticheat. We’ll also be introducing a new third-party anticheat layer that we’ll be working closely with. More details on that once we’re ready to talk about it publicly, but it'll be soon.
Performance is always an ongoing process. We’re constantly adding and improving features every single month, many of which never make the headlines and sit quietly in changelogs. There’s no magic button we can press to suddenly make Rust run faster. Instead, it’s a slow grind of small gains that add up over time.
Over the past few years, we’ve hired several people whose sole focus is performance. A lot of this work is experimental and, frankly, tedious. Things that should/could work in theory often don’t in the real world, and it can take days to weeks just to prove something isn’t viable. Sometimes you spend a long time getting to a result that simply says “nope”.
And, like every year, we do mess up performance from time to time. When that happens, we review what went wrong and keep adjusting our internal processes to get better at catching issues earlier.
That said, we did ship some genuinely great improvements in 2025, the BIG ones:
Load and server connection times reduced by around 65%
Significant reductions to RAM and VRAM usage
One area we’ve always hated is load times. For years, loading into Rust was easily one of the worst parts of the experience, it was embarrassing compared to other games. Long waits, inconsistent times, reconnecting after a crash or kick taking forever. It actively held the game back, and we knew it.
As we continue to add more content and systems, performance can take a hit. We’re constantly fighting that trade-off. It’s a balance between pushing Rust forward and making sure it still runs well across a huge range of machines.
Most players seem to understand the reality of this. Rust is a sandbox game. You can go to the largest, worst-performing monument in the game, drop a massive base next to it, have a dozen smaller teams build nearby, then throw 40 players into the area, raid while 500 players are connected to the server. Honestly, it’s a miracle Rust works as well as it does sometimes. These are exactly the kinds of situations we have to design and optimise for.
Looking ahead, we’ve got a lot of performance work underway. Much of it is deep, underlying changes to things like render pipelines, navmesh. We’re also regularly checking in with the Rust Mobile team to see what they’ve solved there, and whether any of those solutions realistically make sense to bring back to PC.
Performance is never “done”, but we’re committed to keeping Rust playable as it continues to grow. If we hit all performance roadmap taskings in 2026 and it works out as we hope, 2026 will be a good year.
DLC
Over the past two years, we’ve grown a dedicated DLC team, I want to be really clear about what that means as I often see meme comments on socials. This is a team we’ve explicitly hired for DLC work, not people moved off existing Rust development.
This team does not take resources away from regular Rust development. DLC work is (95%) separate from our core monthly update pipeline. It’s an add-on, not a replacement, and if anything, having a focused DLC team has at times helped us push more free content into the game by taking pressure off other teams.
If you look back at 2025, you’ll probably notice a pattern. Nearly every month we shipped a new in-house DLC item, pack or skinnable. That wasn’t accidental, and it’s a pace we’re comfortable maintaining. You can expect this to continue into 2026.
Compared to most games, I genuinely believe we offer good value for money. That’s something we don’t want to lose as Rust continues to grow.
One of the things we’re actively exploring is what a battlepass-style system could look like in Rust. This doesn’t mean we’re copying another game, and it doesn’t mean anything is locked in yet. If we do this, it has to feel very “Rust”, fair, respectful and good value. If you're a frequent user who purchasing DLC, this system should feel rewarding.
As with everything we do on Rust, we’ll be listening closely to feedback and adapting as we go. We’ll talk more openly about this once we’ve got something concrete to show and discuss, which will likely be around the middle of 2026.
We'll continue supporting the skinning community, we're not out to discontinue it with these plans. Going forward, we'll be adding one or two new skinnable item to the game monthly, working our way through the most popular items first. To date, we've helped payout over $32,701,869 to the community skinners!
The good news is, if you really want to try the naval content early, you can. Just be aware it comes with bugs, performance issues and all the rough edges we are still working through. We have fresh servers live on the Rust Staging branch that you can jump into.
If you want to help test, break things and give feedback, you are more than welcome. To learn how to get onto Rust Staging, check this out:
https://rust.facepunch.com/staging
If demand exceeds current capacity, we'll be adding new servers.
Something we'll be looking at this later year is a reward system for good and accurate bug reports, a human actually reads every single bug report and flags it appropriately. Since Staging has the most bugs, we hope this system will incentivise its use.
We're through to the final round! But in case you're new here, over the years, Rust has undergone some huge changes - including graphic, physics, and engine updates and rebuilds, all because we’ve wanted to make Rust what it is, and what it could be. We're guided by the community, and agile enough to deliver or pivot when we need to, month after month. And this year - Rust's 12th year - we've added a new biome, new animals, new vehicles, weapons, and so much more. As well as third party collabs, drops on Kick, more events on Twitch, raising lots of money for Charity, and doing so much more! To be a finalist is an achievement in itself, but we need the community to help us win it. Please vote for Rust in the Labor of Love category.
From everyone at Facepunch, we'd like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! The Christmas Event is once again live!
If you're new to the island, here's what you can expect:
As you play, you will start to hear the distinct sound of jingle bells. As soon as you do, leave the warm comfort of your base and start looking for your gifts!
Two gifts are spawned per player, in a radius of about 40m from you.
Run up and bash open your present to receive your Christmas gift.
They come in three sizes: small, medium, and large. But if you have enough small presents stashed, you can 'trade up' to a medium or large gift.
The contents of each present varies, but you'll find a mix of resources, weapons, and Christmas candy.
This year, you'll still be able to find Santa hats and reindeer antlers, both of which can be worn and provide a decent amount of protection. And the lickable candy cane club is back! As well as two types of stockings. If you hang a stocking inside your base when the jingle bells ring, the stocking will fill up with loot whether you've been good or not - no coal here! The larger stocking has a higher chance for better items and both last around 5-10 refills.
The advent calendar also returns and is a craftable deployable, available to everyone during the Christmas event. Once placed, you can claim an in-game surprise once every in-real-life day from the 16th of December.
The Christmas event ends on January 1st @ 19:00GMT / 14:00EST
Make it a December to remember!
Unrolling to the limited store this month are three festive wallpapers, specially designed to bring peace and joy to you and the grub just outside your door.
There’s one wallpaper each for floors, ceilings and walls.
This one sparkles!
As well as the new festive wallpapers, this year, we have brought back some items from previous festive periods for players to enjoy again - all now purchasable from the Rust Item Store.
Have you been naughty or nice this year? Well, it doesn't matter because as part of our ongoing commitment to creators, we're pleased to unveil Drops on Rustmas - on both Twitch and KICK! December 18th - January 1st will see 4 Category wide drops! TWITCH DROPS
KICK DROPS
All you need to do is check out anyone streaming Rust this festive period, and you can bag yourself some sweet Christmas themed Twitch/Kick Drops to make sure you and your base look festive this December and January.
Rustmas on Twitch and Kick starts now and ends 7PM GMT / 2PM EST on January 1st.
What happens when you mix the brutal world of Rust with a heritage brand? You get the ultimate loot bag. We are proud to announce our collaboration with Can Be. Known for their distinct design history and high-quality craftsmanship, Can Be has taken our standard-issue in-game Military backpack and crafted it into a tangible, premium accessory.
It captures the DIY, scavenged aesthetic of Rust while providing the durability and practicality you expect from a top-tier fashion house that also makes products for European militaries. Perfect for carrying your laptop and gym gear through the elements, or if you really want to stay on brand - your rock and your torch.
The Rust x Can Be Large Backpack launches in two colourways and includes the in-game weapon charms, available exclusively through the Can Be website. There's also an optional collection of interchangeable Velcro patches available separately for easy customization of your backpack.
Each physical backpack order comes with a set of unique digital items once shipped These are new, in-game weapon charms – uniting the tangible and virtual world together. A subtle but unmistakable way to personalize your weapon in game.
Just don't get too distracted by your charm during a gunfight - it might cost you your 2x2.
Pre-orders are now live, with orders shipping in the summer of 2026.
We are excited to announce that the annual Rustmas Base Decorating Competition is back for 2025's festive period!
We're looking for the best Christmassy base that Rust has ever seen!
£120 worth of skins of their choosing, and two Rust DLC/Items.
£75 worth of skins of their choosing, and one Rust DLC/Item.
Once you’ve completed decorating your base, be sure to take 3-4 screenshots or a video walkthrough (MTV Cribs style) and upload them to X/Twitter. Tag us (@playrust) and use the hashtag #Rustmas2025 in your post!
The winner and runner up will be announced from Rust's Official X account on January 12th.
Please make sure you are following the Rust X/Twitter account so we can DM you if you win. If we do not get a response within 1 week of the winner announcement, a new winner will be chosen.
Submissions will be judged based on the following:
Creativity
Design
Judging will be performed by Facepunch Staff.
Bonus points if you remove the UI and your graphics are set higher than 1 :)
This competition is run by Facepunch Studios LTD. The competition ends on January 1st 2026 23:59UTC. No more than three entries per person. The winner and runner-up will be selected based on which Facepunch thinks is the most original/creative and any decisions Facepunch makes will be final. The winner and runner up must claim their prizes within one month of the closing date (which Facepunch may exchange for an alternative of the same or greater value). Our terms of service apply to any content you make for the competition: https://facepunch.com/legal. Winning entries must pick items from the Rust marketplace with market value.
We're through to the final round! But in case you're new here, over the years, Rust has undergone some huge changes - including graphic, physics, and engine updates and rebuilds, all because we’ve wanted to make Rust what it is, and what it could be. We're guided by the community, and agile enough to deliver or pivot when we need to, month after month. And this year - Rust's 12th year - we've added a new biome, new animals, new vehicles, weapons, and so much more. As well as third party collabs, drops on Kick, more events on Twitch, raising money for Charity, and so much more!
To be a finalist is an achievement in itself, but we need the community to help us win it.
The Steam Winter Sale is now live!
Enjoy 50% off Rust and the Instruments, Sunburn, and Voice Props DLC packs from now until January 5th 2026! Now is the perfect time to bolster your clan and gift Rust to a friend.
Rust's Staging Branch will wipe as usual over the festive season, meaning if you haven't yet jumped into the preview of February's update, you can access the Deep Sea content early!
Staging Branch wipes on December 25th
January Patch + wipe released on January 1st @ 1900GMT
The Staging Branch in Rust is a separate version of Rust where new updates and features are tested before being released to the main game. It’s essentially the experimental build, allowing us to identify bugs, balance changes, and performance issues with help from players who opt in. You can learn more about it here.
It's that time of year again... The Steam Awards are here and the 'Labor of Love' award perfectly describes our past year as we soon hit twelve years of development! Day in and day out, our teams are grinding around the clock (literally on every continent) to keep the survival chaos alive. We’re always here, keeping the game fresh, and our dedication shows - every month, without fail, we drop new content, new meta, awesome Twitch (and now KICK) drops, competitive events, seasonal events, and more cool surprises!
We’re constantly keeping the community in the loop with regular updates on what’s going down in-game and behind the scenes. Updated mechanics? Check. Fresh skins and meta changes? You bet. Gorgeous landscapes and epic gameplay improvements? Always. And don’t forget, we’re always tuning things post-release, making sure everything’s running at its best so players can have the best wipe possible.
The Rust community never ceases to amaze us. Your feedback drives the game forward, shaping balances, fixes, and innovations that keep things unpredictable and exciting. Each month, we’re blown away by the wild things you guys create and discover. So keep it coming, we’re all in this together! In the last year, the game has undergone more huge changes, including graphic, physics, updates, as well as new biomes, animals, crossovers, and more - all because we’ve wanted to make Rust what it is, and continue striving to make it what it could be.
If you feel we are deserving of your vote in this year's Steam Awards, we'd love for you to give Rust yours in the 'Labor of Love' category. Thank you for your support!
Continuing from last month’s controversial Meta Shift changes and our push to make meaningful experimental changes to Rust’s progression, this month we’re taking things a step further.
By making progression easier! Wait, what? Bear with me.
One of the main issues with Rust progression is that the majority of servers don’t Blueprint wipe, including our Facepunch servers. When you join a freshly map-wiped server but already have everything unlocked, you’re effectively skipping the entire early and mid-game. You craft late-tier items immediately, bypassing all the gear and choices before it, which completely breaks the sense of progression on a wipe. Given the current state of the game, we may as well unlock or remove BPs, which seems crazy.
Today, we’re wiping all Blueprints, wiping all servers, and drastically reducing tech tree and research costs:
Common: 15 (down from 20)
Uncommon: 30 (down from 75)
Rare: 60 (down from 125)
Very Rare: 120 (down from 500)
We’ve also removed scrap crafting costs from Workbenches, while Blueprint Fragment requirements remain unchanged. By drastically reducing unlock costs and removing scrap from workbench crafting, the progression curve will feel smoother without removing that sense of effort or reward. Rather than skipping straight to the end, players will be encouraged to actually use early-tier items first and naturally progress upward.
Blueprint wipes bring back that sense of discovery, structure, and early-game pacing that Rust was built on. Combined with the cheaper unlocks and the removal of scrap from workbench crafting, the system should feel faster and less punishing, not a grind, while still maintaining that satisfying sense of progression and reward each wipe. The current loop of the game is that you must find components and Blueprint fragments. Through that loop, you’ll naturally collect scrap as you go, and now with Blueprint wipes, there’s a meaningful way to spend it again.
Does this mean we’ll be force-wiping Blueprints every month? Maybe. We’re not committing to anything yet. We’re going to play, watch, and listen before making any long-term decisions based on the past two months of changes.
Got a Storage Adaptor attached to a box? You’ll now find it has a power input and some new box sorting settings available when you open it. You can sort items alphabetically (and change what language you use), condition, count, category (matching the conveyor filter) as well as a custom snapshot mode.
The custom snaphsot mode allows you to set a container up with the item layout that you want, take a snapshot of it and then the sorter will attempt to recreate that snapshot as best it can. Sorting is applied automatically 1s after an item is added or removed from the container.
Box sorting is enabled on the Large and Small Wooden Boxes, the Coffin and all DLC storage items (barrels and box skins).
Keep your food fresh and neatly stored with the new Mini Fridge deployable.
Designed for compact bases and early-game, the Mini Fridge offers a compact way to preserve perishables without needing a full-sized refrigerator.
Requires: 3 power
Storage: 18 slots
Placement: Fits comfortably under half-height floor builds
Unlock: Early unlock from the Engineers workbench
Perfect for solo players or tight base designs, the Mini Fridge bridges the gap between early-game food storage and late-game luxury, giving you a simple, power-efficient way to keep your meals from spoiling.
Last month’s Meta Shift update caused quite a lot of activity around monuments due to the new blueprint fragment system. While these fragments are designed to be scarce, we observed some undesired behaviour due to how monuments would reset to refresh their loot that was contributing to the fragments not spawning as quickly as intended.
Due to the value of these fragments, camping around monuments to ambush players became a popular playstyle. While that’s a classic strategy in Rust and not something we would want to disallow, we noticed that some players were camping so close to monument puzzles and loot rooms that they were inadvertently preventing the loot from respawning. This would lead to fragments becoming even more rare, which would encourage more players to camp the monuments, which would make the problem even worse. It would also lead to long periods of pointless camping, as no new fragments were being generated.
This is how monument puzzles used to work:
Start a timer for 30 minutes
If a player is within range of the monument pause the timer until they leave
Refresh the loot once the timer finishes
To resolve this we’ve made several changes to how most keycard monuments reset and refresh their loot:
Monument refresh timers will now only start once a player loots a container in the puzzle rooms, rather than constantly refreshing every 30 minutes even if no players have visited.
Monument refresh timers will now tick down even if players are in range.
Monuments will now start generating radiation around their loot rooms and relevant puzzle elements (switches, fuse boxes, etc) 10 minutes before they are due to refresh. This radiation is severe and unsurvivable, although it has a small radius around it of milder radiation to communicate that you should stay clear.
Once radiation is active, the puzzle can only reset once it has been clear of players for a total of 5 minutes.
We’ve adjusted and shrunk the areas that we check for player presence across most monuments in order to make them as forgiving as possible and still allow general movement and looting around the monument while this refresh is taking place.
These changes should hopefully preserve the importance of monument PvP combat while making sure that the presence of combat doesn’t make blueprint fragments artificially harder to get.
Medical syringes can now be used on horses by right clicking on the horse with a medical syringe equipped, in the same way you can heal other players. Horse healing can be performed whilst mounted as well as unmounted. Upon healing, horses additionally receive a temporary boost to their max gallop speed (+12.6km/h for 4s) and a small amount of stamina recovery.
This should help prevent tragedies of your noble steed succumbing to the various dangers of the island, with the speed boost also giving a better chance of escaping dangerous situations. Horse jockeys may also find this interesting in achieving the maximum possible speed with horses (please gallop responsibly).
Water Well Vendor Semi Automatic Pistol Sell Order Removed
M4 Shotgun M4 Shotgun Now Spawns Inside Hackable Loot Crate Again
Hackable L96 L96 Spawn Chance Lowered Inside Hackable Crate
Boat Vendor DPV DPV Can Now Be Purchased At Fishing Village
DPV Removed HQM Crafting Cost From DPV
Computer Station Can Now Add More Cameras To The Computer Station
Diving Tank Diving Tank Can Now Be Repaired For Free Like The Jack Hammer
Blue Keycard Vendor Removed Keycard Purchase from Vendor
No longer will you have to travel to outpost just to find that the Vending Machine you wanted to buy from doesn't support drones.
All Vending Machines will now show if they are drone accessible or not via the Vendor UI in the main game map.
On servers with large bases there are often a decent amount of wind turbines. Each of these turbines were skinned to allow it to be animated. This meant that each wind turbine had its own animator and animation system to allow it to spin. This is fine for lower numbers, but at higher amounts it can affect game performance. To combat this we have removed the skin from wind turbines. Instead having them animated in code.
You shouldn't see a difference here in game, but we should get some better performance, especially with more turbines in the same area.
This also gave me a chance to review our LODs for the turbines themselves and make them a bit better at distance as well, the 'pop in' should be noticeably improved.
We’ve given the player placed elevator a bit of love this month. One recurring annoyance was having to replug the elevator power every time you add a floor, which was difficult since you often couldn’t easily reach the top. Now there is a power input plug on each floor (separate to the call button) and if any floor has power the whole elevator will be considered powered.
We’ve also increased the speed significantly (3m/s to 5m/s) and reduced the delay between when the elevator can be used again after it comes to a stop.
There's no question that attack helicopters are at the apex of offensive vehicles, but with that strength there still has to be counter-play and ways for defenders (*cough* victims) to fight them off. With this balance pass we took a look at one of the core-problems, that the attack helicopters are too hard to take down with the homing missile launcher, which was intended to be the primary counter-play solution.
The first change is that we have completely removed the ability for thrown flares to interact with homing missiles. Passenger's shouldn't be able to avoid the 30s cooldown of the helicopter flare launcher by manually throwing a flare. Now when the flare launcher is used and is reloading, subsequent homing missiles pose a legitimate risk to the helicopter and the pilot needs to choose whether to fight or flee. To couple with this change, we have also removed the ability to repair helicopters that are in-flight. If you are taking heavy damage you will have to find a safe place to land to be able to repair your vehicle. This further reduces the ability for attack-heli passengers to mitigate all incoming damage.
And finally, pilots should be taking a risk when flying the helicopter, and to keep a steady grip on the controls they will need both hands. Currently healing items like the bandage and syringe aren't usable, but other items that act more like food still function (i.e. large medkit, and healing teas), meaning a quick-fingered pilot can heal from their inventory menu while flying. With this update we are bringing this more in-line with the other consumables, disabling the ability to use healing foods while piloting a vehicle. This applies to all vehicles, not just helicopters.
With these systematic changes, we don't want to hit the other player-driven helicopters too hard. So to compensate, the minicopter and scrap transport helicopter have been retro-fitted with their own flare launchers. When purchasing one of these helicopters from a vendor they will start with flares already loaded in the flare compartment accessible from the fuel tank(s).
For hot air balloons (HABs), you will be able to dodge homing missiles by turning off the engine for 4 seconds. But just to be clear, homing missiles by default do not target the HAB, this is only if the server ConVar has been toggled that enables the HAB to be targeted.
This month, some new static CCTV cameras were installed at the Cargo Ship and Ferry Terminal locations. Players will now be able to input the following codes into a computer station:
Cargo Ship
CARGODECK
CARGOBRIDGE
CARGOSTERN
CARGOHOLD1
CARGOHOLD2
Ferry Terminal
FERRYDOCK
FERRYPARKING
FERRYUTILITIES
FERRYLOGISTICS
Additionally, we fixed a long standing bug limiting the number of CCTV codes per computer station lower than intended, so you should now be able to have a lot more added at once.
The painting menu has gotten a long-awaited upgrade, a colour wheel! Now you can pick your colour using the same type of colour picker as in the workshop scene, including the copy/paste ability with hexcodes.
With this comes another QoL improvement so you don't lose your selections: favourite colours. Add up to 10 favourite colours that can be easily copied to the brush, or swapped out, with a single click. These favourites can also be accessed using the `paint.favcolours` ConVar, meaning you can bind custom swatches to different keys to hotswap your palette!
Foliage now will now physically and directionally push away from players and other moving objects. Things like leaves, shrubbery and branches will move out of your way (within reason). This should make off-ground foliage feel more reactive and realistic as players move around.
This month we’re introducing the RPG Launcher, which is a unique skin for the Rocket Launcher.
The skin can be purchased in-game or from the Rust Steam permanent item store.
Whether you’re marauding on the high seas or just outside Outpost, this battle-hardened RPG Launcher will strike fear into the hearts of your enemies, and a rocket into the heart of their base. Comes with unique rocket ammunition skins.
Continuing on the work from last patch, we have another round of workshop scene improvements for the skinners out there. This month has been focused on adding new features to improve the creative flow and keep most of the tools in-game, so you don't have to alt-tab to the workshop page or reference tables with the maximum texture resolutions.
Couple months ago I wrote about the release of updated flow of processing players on the server that could be activated with UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2. It's key aspect is that it tries to leverage multithreading to speed up stagers of logic. The highlights are:
We can run server occlusion in parallel
We can send entity snapshots and entity destroy messages in parallel
Only main thread serializes entity snapshots, the cached snapshots get consumed by worker threads
I've ran a bunch of tests on our servers and discovered that it's been a mixed bag of results - on fresh servers it showed good results, but on older servers it would show no benefit at all. I've investigated and discovered the following problems that have been addressed in this release.
Similar to last time, I'm hoping to validate the new mode and once confirmed that it's holding, roll it out to all official servers.
In retrospect, I've already mentioned in the old blog post how 350 players can cause 10k of various checks to be run, I just assumed that we'd be able to sift through them quick. But that's not the case:
In the above view we do a lot of small checks that usually are cheap, but we have so many pairs to check (~2.7k in above 330 player snapshot) that it becomes expensive. The way we gather pairs was inefficient - we could generate an (active player, sleeper) from-to visibility check, meaning we'd need to eventually validate if we should send data to the sleepers. We also intermixed player state checks throughout the logic, which would lead to us generating more pairs if we discovered half-way through pair filtering that we need to revalidate things. All-in-all, it was still doing too much work.
I've applied the following changes:
I've simplified player/sleeper state checks further, as some state can be inferred, and added result caching
When generating pairs we now always end up with (player-or-sleeper, player) from-to pairs.
Because of above, I ripped out additional downstream checks to see if pair.to is ever not-player or should ignore
This should bring down hash lookups by ~75% & reduce pair count by ~50% (rough guess). I hope this'll bring server occlusion times down to ~2ms per frame for 330p case.
Another obvious problem that became apparent on snapshots. Our multithreaded player update processing was slow, as slow as serial processing.
All threads, including main, got bottlenecked on 1 lock - you can see how the purple WriteThread bellow has gaps where it doesn't do anything right as above green worker thread is pushing more work:
We rely on pooling to reduce allocations. But to do that safely, our pool uses a lock per type - this allows us to be fast in single-thread cases. But it doesn't scale in a many-thread scenario. It was rather bad, to the point where total time across threads for pushing entity snapshots was 100ms. Instead of modifying our pool implementation (as that's used in our entire codebase), we now pre-allocate all necessary state on main thread (avoiding expensive locks). I'm hoping it'll speed up the processing and bring it closer to 3ms for comparable population(330p).
This month we've made a lot of UI optimisations again.
We noticed UI performance impact was relatively bad on populated servers for some reason. After investigating, we discovered a Unity bug causing the time spent on UI updates to scale with the number of gameobjects in the scenes.
We mitigated it by reducing the number of active canvases at any given time, significantly improving performance until Unity releases an official fix.
To recap the UI optimisations pushed over the last three months since the new menu was released:
Time spent on UI updates every frame (4.5k map, sitting in front of a large base)
Before: ~1.40ms
Now: ~0.17ms
We've rolled out improvements to several entities this month that we found were having a detrimental effect on performance.
We noticed Slot Machines and the Chippy Arcade machine while evaluating performance on next months Floating City casino. The Chippy Arcade machine was rendering it's on-screen image several times a second, even if the machine was idle and not being used (ie. a still image). This is now fixed, it will also not render the screen if the camera is facing the back of the machine as the screen would not be visible. In a test case when looking at 14 machines this has improved performance by 20-30 FPS.
Slot Machines use a small world space UI element to display the current payouts. This had several issues - the UI elements weren't properly using Pooling and they would be spawned in as soon as the player entered network range. Fixing the pooling and moving the UI creation to when the player actually comes close brings the time it takes to spawn a Slot machine from 2ms->0.13ms. This should mean less of a hiccup when entering range of Bandit Town. It was also using a skinned renderer despite it's moving parts being quite simple, so we modified the model and it's now made up of 3 static meshes. This will slightly improve rendering performance and allowed us to delete a mb of unneeded assets.
Sprinklers and Garage doors now switch from their skinned version to a static version when they are idle, allowing them to batch together and render more efficiently. It's common for bases to have quite a lot of these entities so this should help rendering performance.
Finally we discovered some lighting that was being incorrectly disabled at distance on the static phone booth. This is now fixed which should improve rendering performance when within network range of monuments with a phone booth.
Given how much content is in Rust finding gains like this is a bit like finding needles in a haystack, but our tools and processes for profiling the game has improved in leaps and bounds over the last year and we're now better able to drill in and find these issues.
This month, we're introducing another workshop skinnable: the HMLMG
This weapon has been a fan-favourite for a long time, and we're excited to release it to the skinning community after the popularity of last month's bed. We can't wait to see what incredible designs skin creators come up with.
To make your own HMLMG skin, head over to the in-game workshop and locate the HMLMG deployable. From there, you can download the model file and add your own materials.
Spawning vehicles can be a bit of a pain for Admins, they need to remember the entity name as well as type everything out all the time. We've now introduced spawning via icons in the F1 menu.
You can spawn Vehicles in the same way as you would Weapons: searching through and picking what you want visually.
Yes, you read that right. Drops are coming to Kick! Rust is the first game to do it on the platform!
In case you missed the news from Dreamhack Atlanta this past weekend, the world’s fastest-growing livestreaming platform meets the biggest survival game on Steam.
From November 13th-23rd, players can earn the exclusive KICK Hazmat and more skins from their favourite creators, just by watching an explosive PvP event!
Tune in for a chaotic base raid session to get your hands on these unique cosmetics! Drops include skins from CoconutB, Oilrats, hJune, Spoonkid, Panpots and more!
Get your accounts synced so you can claim your drops and see who to watch!
Thank you! Last month, Rust is partnered with both Ronald McDonald House Charities UK and Cancer Research UK to raise over £172,000 ($225,125) through the sale of two in-game charity plushies!
We have such a great and giving community with the figures shown above being 100% of sale proceeds after Steam fees and tax.
Ronald McDonald House Charities UK is an independent charity, operating 14 Houses around the UK. The Houses provides free ‘home away from home’ accommodation and support for families with a sick child in hospital.
The charity ensures families can stay together, and close to their children during critical times, easing the financial and emotional support for those in need.
Cancer Research UK is the world’s leading cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through research, influence and information. Cancer Research UK’s pioneering work into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer has helped save millions of lives.
Cancer Research UK has been at the heart of the progress that has already seen survival in the UK double in the last 50 years. Today, 2 in 4 people survive their cancer for at least 10 years. Cancer Research UK wants to accelerate progress and see 3 in 4 people surviving their cancer by 2034.
Cancer Research UK supports research into the prevention and treatment of cancer through the work of over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses.
Together with its partners and supporters, Cancer Research UK is working towards a world where people can live longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/
The all new Rust x Youtooz collection is now available to order and ships real soon - we've teamed up with Youtooz again to give the people TWO huggable scientists!
The new plushies are packed to the seams with 100% PP cotton and are made with a mix of the softest minky material and tricot sublimated material, perferct for cuddling or surviving with.
And they come with a free in-game decorative item to put in your base - requiring just 50 Cloth to craft!
Redemption codes for the in-game plush item are sent via email after your order ships in December 2025. Order yours here.
The infamous Death Korps of Krieg march into Rust, bringing their grim, war-forged resolve to the island.
This pack delivers battle-scarred war gear, inspired by one of Warhammer 40,000’s most fearless regiments.
Gear up and march across the island clad in their signature gas-masked Hazmat suit. Shoulder your Death Korps of Krieg Backpack, designed with the rugged practicality of Astra Militarum kit. Unleash the roar of the Death Korps Chainsword and the thunder of the Krieg Shotgun, while the Death Korps Storage Containers transform your base into a fortified stronghold. The Rust x Warhammer 40,000 pack, only available on Steam
A reskin of the Hazmat Suit with the classic Krieg gas mask and trench coat look.
You will be able to apply this skin at a repair bench or when you craft the item in game.
The rugged field pack for the survivalist soldier.
The Large Backpack (with the mug) skin is available to apply at a repair bench or when you craft the item in game.
Fire up the Chainsword - a brutal chainsaw reskin. You will be able to apply this skin at a repair bench or when you craft the item in game.
A grimdark firearm with real stopping power. The Death Korps of Krieg Shotgun skin is applicable to the Pump Shotgun. You will be able to apply this skin at a repair bench or when you craft the item in game.
The final items in the Rust x Warhammer 40,000 Pack - two Krieg-styled storage barrels. A veritcal and a horizontal variant. These are skins for the storage barrel stand alone items.
The Rust x Warhammer 40,000 pack, only available on Steam
Happy Halloween!
This year, spooky season returns as darkness falls upon the island as monsters re-awaken from their slumber. The usual rifts open in random locations, leading to who-knows-where.
As always, enter if you dare, but if you do, you better prepare!
Attention server owners!
BST officially ends and we head back to GMT this weekend - the clocks back an hour early Sunday morning!
Patches will be brought forward an hour early than usual until other timezones observe the autumn clock change.
The current progression meta has grown stale, moving too fast and becoming too easy over the years, with scrap inflation and scrap being everywhere. We don't believe this has been overwhelmingly negative, but it has detracted from world PvP, especially in and around monuments, and we want to experiment more with progression. This is experimental step 1:
We’re introducing a new layer of progression to the Workbench system. The aim is simple: get players back out of their bases, contesting monuments, slow down progression and clashing over territory.
Workbench level 1 remains unchanged, but Level 2 and Level 3 now require blueprint fragments to craft. These fragments are found at key monuments, creating a soft progression gate that pushes players into early fights and slows down clan snowballing.
Workbench Level 2 now requires 5 Basic Blueprint Fragments
Workbench Level 3 now requires 5 Advanced Blueprint Fragments
Blueprint fragments are tied directly to puzzles and high-end loot, encouraging players to push deeper into monuments and hackable events.
Always spawn in green puzzle rooms (x1)
Always found in blue-card puzzles next to the red keycard (x2)
Found in airdrops
If you chain both green and blue, you've already had 3 Fragments in a run.
Guaranteed inside hackable crates
1 in 10 chance to appear in elite crates
Always spawn in pairs
The main areas where these can be found are:
Launch Site
Military Tunnels
Nuclear Missile Silo
Underwater Labs
Small and Large Oilrigs
Events: Cargoship and Ch47 crate drop
You can also convert 20 Basic Fragments into 1 Advanced Fragment, giving a fallback path.
Scrap crafting costs for workbench levels 2 and 3 are now greatly reduced, allowing players to have extra scrap to unlock items from the techtree.
Larger groups will naturally eventually accumulate more fragments than they need, creating an economy where fragments and workbenches are traded. Smaller groups and solos will be forced to scrap harder for their progression, making monuments hotly contested again. We'll be watching and reading all feedback, and we'll adjust and balance as needed over the coming days and weeks. As mentioned at the beginning, this is just part 1, part 2 will be released in the December update.
By design, not all monuments are equal, some have trade-offs, while others feel bad for groups but ideal for solos or small groups. With blueprint fragments, we want to ensure all mid to large-sized monuments are relevant, so with that said, the following monuments have basic green keycard puzzles added:
Dome
Ferry Terminal
Radtown
In addition, you'll now be able to find a recycler at the Dome, puzzle room.
The meta of running the same paths in monuments has gone stale, we've not changes some monuments in over 5 years. Do you know where every monument loot crate is? Many of you will.
Today, almost every monument has had the majority of its loot moved to new locations. Areas that previously had little to no loot have been refreshed, making these areas relevant again. Dead spots are gone, and new loot run paths have opened up.
Our goal here is to break old habits and get players rediscovering movements, hopefully making loot runs feel fresh, least for a bit.
Every day, we see posts on Reddit, X, Discord, Facebook, of someone sharing a screenshot of awful loot roll they just got. Granted, sometimes it is terrible, but Hackable crates should always feel rewarding.
We've reworked Hackable and Elite crate loot rolls, removing some of the junk. You should now always get something of use, hopefully multiple items.
Drones now have a single storage slot, able to hold a single stack of any item. While piloting the drone, you will be able to drop the contents by left clicking.
Throwable explosives dropped from the drone are active and will explode with their usual behaviour, keep your eyes and ears open.
SAMs and Auto Turrets will now treat player drones as hostile and target them, marketplace drones are safe.
The Nuclear Missile Silo monument, first introduced in May 2023 as a blue-card monument. The silo has always been a high risk vs reward location, with forced corridors and plenty of scientists to battle through, and then hopefully not door camped when leaving.
From today, the monument is now a red keycard monument. This change aligns it with other high-tier areas, advanced Blueprint Fragments can now be found here.
3 additional elite crates have been added throughout the silo.
This change should make the silo a more valuable, highly contested destination for groups chasing top-end loot and progression.
Did you know? Rust = Repopulation Unit Survival Test
Ever since its introduction, Rust's built in crosshair has left a lot to be desired. There was only one setting - on or off. If you didn't like the default look or behaviour, you were out of luck. This lead to many players opting for third party apps instead.
This month we are adding crosshair customization, which gives you control over settings like Style, Colour, Dot size, Spacing, Line length & width, Outline and Outline colour.
It also lets you choose whether to hide the crosshair when aiming or keep it visible.
Lastly, there's a built in crosshair sharing feature, where you can import & export crosshairs via a code.
The spike trap is a new default primitive trap which slows and hurts players when stepped on.
Crafting cost: 80 Wood.
The UI popups for Oil Rig resets, Cargo Ship inbound, and Excavator activated have been replaced with global environmental sounds. We hope that this proves to be a more immersive and less clunky way of notifying players to these monument events.
For players that miss the message popups, this can be reeenabled with the console command 'ui.monumentnotificationtoasts'
One of the many data points we collect is how often players are doing certain activities and missions sit towards the bottom of that list. The most common reasons we hear why you don't like missions are: that missions don't suit Rust, you don't want to do missions, and missions are not worth the time for the reward.
Fair, we don't want to force anyone to do missions if you don't want to, they're supposed to be an add-on to the activities you're already doing. We can certainly try to address some of the complaints, so today we've significantly increased mission rewards by offering a higher quantity of loot and additional mission rewards.
Do give them a try and let us know if they now feel worth the effort to reward.
A new type of crate can now be found washed up along the spawn beach shore, offering a small boost to help you get started.
They’re not common, so you won’t be able to rely on them for a steady supply, but you may be lucky enough to stumble across one
We have been working on some upgrades to the workshop skin creation scene, and would like to present you with a first pass. With this update comes a host of UI improvements, a few new features, and behind the scenes there's some updates to the interface components that are going to make them easier to work with going forward. Overall the flow of making skins should be smoother now, with less buggy menus and more clarity of all the different tools available. Notably some new features are: toggles for the player model and depth of field effect, custom workshop icon support, and a new colour picker. If you're interested in skinning but haven't bit the bullet yet, now is the time to check it out!
The medieval arsenal has had some love this month, with sweeping balance changes across the board. Our goal is to make these weapons and make them feel more viable.
The way shields work has had an overhaul. Your stamina allowing you to hold shields at the ready has been nearly doubled, but when you block damage with the shield, this stamina is reduced. The amount of stamina reduction is dependent on shield type, In addition, shields block a higher percentage of damage than before and also have a slightly larger hitbox. This should make them a more viable defense mechanism than their first iteration.
Catapult Ammo Range
All Catapult ammo fires 30% further
Catapult Reload
Catapult Now Reloads 3 Seconds Faster (50% faster)
Catapult Crafting
Catapult crafting reduced by 1 gear and 1 rope
Battering Ram
Battering Ram sheet metal cost reduced by 2
Propane Explosive
Propane Explosive bomb deployed and thrown, damage increased
Ballista Craft
Ballista craft reduced by 1 gear
Bee bomb
Bee bomb crafting cost reduced by 1 bee grenade
Ballista Incendiary
Ballista Incendiary low-grade fuel reduced by 10
Barricade placement
Fixed ice lakes and train tracks blocking barricade placement when close to monuments
Turret Interference Fix
Fixed turrets powered inside a base being turned off by turrets outside the base
APC Invisible Fire
Fixed Invisible fire around APC debris
Held Item Redeploy
Fixed held items rarely redeploying when moving quickly through the world
Chainsaw Startup
Removed the fail start-up chance from chainsaw, starts first time, every time
Cargoship Pathing
Smoothed ship path shown on the map & no longer sails around Oilrigs
There has been a long term bug in Rust with the Chinook's Crate drop logic. It would often frequently select the same location all wipe. This has now be changed to be a true random, as it should've been.
We've made some optimisations surrounding the new main menu this month.
Reduced VRAM usage by compressing and atlassing the UI assets in a better way
Lowered CPU overhead when the menu is not visible
Addressed freezes and stalls when landing in the main menu after the splash screen
More improvements that didn't make it in this patch are coming next month. We're exploring different ways to load and unload the menu content dynamically, reducing the VRAM pressure.
Considering my humble beginnings as a community modder before Facepunch, it seems fitting to be the one giving back to the modding community who works tirelessly to extend the game past the vision we originally had for Rust.
This month I integrated a previous Hackweek where I allowed the following features to be modified on the client.
drone station tax currency item & amount
ddraw works without client admin
dropped item custom names
entity scale
item icons
maximum health
melee weapons throwable
send user language when connecting to server
vitals
I also took a look at our Community UI modding framework and merged the following features into the base game.
9-slice sprite support
activeSelf exposed
button hover colors
draggable CUI components
input field multi-line
input field placeholder
layout groups
pivot
rotation
You can make Pull Requests for new CUI features at this github repo.
This month, we investigated the performance of Rust and found that the VRAM usage was significantly higher than intended. This was due to various factors, but the main issue stemmed from how we handled texture streaming. By default, texture streaming was set to use all available VRAM for textures.
This was problematic as it left no space for meshes and render targets, meaning RAM would be paged to cover the excess memory required for rendering.
To solve this issue, we started looking into a better way to calculate the memory budget for texture streaming by taking the available VRAM and subtracting an estimate of the excess memory we required, but this would have caused issues for devices with a lower amount of VRAM.
To ensure that textures are always loaded at the correct mipmap level, and the minimum amount of VRAM is used for texture memory, we've set the memory budget very high, but enabled discarding. This means that we only ever have the textures that are needed immediately in VRAM, which should improve memory performance for all devices.
We also identified an issue with texture streaming and our batching system, where the required mipmap level wasn't being calculated correctly. This has now been corrected to allow for more efficient use of texture memory.
Another significant change we made to improve the texture streaming system was to enable mimap streaming on all skins to reduce their memory overhead.
This month we're introducing a new workshop skinnable: the bed. The bed is always high up on the request list for adding new skins in the community, so we're really happy to kick this process in to action starting this month. We've already enabled the bed deployable to be available to skin creators and the first few skins are starting to come in which is very exciting to see.
We'll be rolling out other in-demand items over the calendar, so keep an eye out to get the freshest skins.
To make your own bed skin, head over to the in-game workshop and locate the Bed deployable. From there you can download the model file and add your own materials.
We can't wait to see what incredible and inventive skins people come up with!
Paintings, signs, and photo frames can now be rotated before deployment!
To help with this in the painting menu we have added some hot-keyed controls to help you quickly rotate your artwork, or reset the rotation/pan back to center.
Bicycles and Tricycles have received some additional love this month with a new feature - bunnyhopping!
Pressing Right-mouse-button whilst riding will activate a small jump to help you navigate obstacles in the world. The bikes are now more thrilling to ride and are even better than before in getting you to your destination - logs, rocks, walls and grubs won't stand a chance!
Some key points:
Faster bikes provide higher bunnyhops
You can only activate 1 bunnyhop every 3 seconds
Jumping will require and consume 10% of the bike's stamina bar
Jumping is scaled with the bike's health and stamina bar (keep those tyres inflated, chain oiled up and don't wear yourself out too fast if you want a big hop!)
Send me your best skatepark clips!
Every Rust player has been pained by a projectile invalid appearing in their combatlog. These checks exist for good reason to ensure projectiles behave as expected within legal values between clients and the server, preventing manipulation by bad actors. For the most part, these checks work correctly and do their job, contributing to a safe and consistent experience, but we are aware that there are cases in which they go wrong, invalidating a projectile that should have been accepted by the server.
I'm working to investigate and resolve these false positives.
This month, I have been working with the server projectile's code to investigate and reproduce reported issues. This involves pages of code reading, note taking, drawing projectile trajectories in editor, making diagrams and firing thousands of bullets, amongst a whole lot more.
Improvements have been made this month to edge-case false positives affecting the following areas:
Firing projectiles when inside vents (like the ones found on the oilrigs) and other tight spaces
Firing projectiles at long distances
Firing projectiles at fast-moving players
Firing slower-moving projectiles (arrows, shotgun bullets...)
Additional preventions put in place relating to incorrect projectile movement
I've also got further plans on how to better debug projectiles in-editor to find these edge case false positives that negatively affect gameplay.
How you can help:
If you experience projectile invalids in your F1 combatlog during gameplay then please try and record a video clip showing the entire interaction (GeForce overlay is great for this) and then upload a bug report in-game using F7, stating the full server name and any other important information. You can also reach out to me on discord.gg/rust
Additionally, any information you have regarding possible projectile exploits or cheats is always appreciated. Reminder that we have a bug-bounty 💰 program available at our Hackerone security page
in June, in the nerfed, buffed, balanced? update, we reduced the stack size of the wooden barricade from 10 to 5. Today, we're doubling down and reducing the stack size to 3.
This should continue to help curb the Insta-maze spam in close quarters without gutting their utility entirely. You'll now have to use them more strategically.
In addition, the barricade health has been reduced by 20%
We have been working on some upgrades to the workshop skin creation scene, and would like to present you with a first pass. With this update comes a host of UI improvements, a few new features, and behind the scenes there's some updates to the interface components that are going to make them easier to work with going forward.
Overall the flow of making skins should be smoother now, with less buggy menus and more clarity of all the different tools available. Notably some new features are: toggles for the player model and depth of field effect, custom workshop icon support, and a new colour picker. If you're interested in skinning but haven't bit the bullet yet, now is the time to check it out!
On October 23rd at 18:00BST / 13:00 EST, we'll release a mandatory server and client update to enable some new spooky features!
This year, we'll be introducing some spooky-themed wallpapers!
Server owners, please remember this date.
Rust is partnering with both Ronald McDonald House Charities UK and Cancer Research UK to combine the cosyness of your base, with real-world impact! 100% of sale proceeds after Steam fees and tax from the sale of these charity bears will be donated, helping Ronald McDonald House Charities UK provide free ‘home away from home’ accommodation and support to families with children in hospital, while also supporting Cancer Research UK's critical work in funding cancer research and saving lives!
These limited-time items will run through to 30th October.
Ronald McDonald House Charities UK is an independent charity, operating 14 Houses around the UK. The Houses provides free ‘home away from home’ accommodation and support for families with a sick child in hospital.
The charity ensures families can stay together, and close to their children during critical times, easing the financial and emotional support for those in need.
Cancer Research UK is the world’s leading cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through research, influence and information. Cancer Research UK’s pioneering work into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer has helped save millions of lives.
Cancer Research UK has been at the heart of the progress that has already seen survival in the UK double in the last 50 years. Today, 2 in 4 people survive their cancer for at least 10 years. Cancer Research UK wants to accelerate progress and see 3 in 4 people surviving their cancer by 2034.
Cancer Research UK supports research into the prevention and treatment of cancer through the work of over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses.
Together with its partners and supporters, Cancer Research UK is working towards a world where people can live longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.
https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/
In case you missed it on Monday from Steam, Rust is now 50% OFF until Monday October 6th at 1800 BST / 1300 ET!
Why not treat that friend that's considering joining your squad? Gift it to them here.
On the morning of Sunday the 26th of October, clocks in our native timezone (British Summer Time) will be going back one hour to GMT. European servers will also be doing this. BUT clocks in the US also go back on the 2nd of November, meaning we should be in sync for wipe. But better safe than sorry!
Join us for Twitch Rivals Base Invaders!
Watch & earn and exclusive Twitch Rival Backpack skin for one day only! This drop will be tied to the Twitch Rivals channel and only active during the broadcast window.
We will also have general drops across the entire Rust category until October 12th.
Connect your accounts to claim your drops! https://twitch.facepunch.com/
Rust Mobile is coming!
Facepunch has teamed up with Level Infinite to bring you Rust, Anytime, Everywhere.
The closed beta begins early November.
If you thought fishing village music was a toe-tapper, you're in for a treat.
B. Dolan in production with James "1030" Houston put together this banger filmed on a live server!
all ur base belong to me
Tune in now for the Kingdoms 3 RP event all across Twitch! Drops go till midnight PT on the 30th!
Be sure to link your accounts in order to claim your drops! https://twitch.facepunch.com/connect
This video by Monstera is really special to me. It expresses a side of Rust the average player does not get to experience. Rust is a harsh environment and typically played at a hardcore PVP level.
We love how our art and creative community are always coming up with innovative forms of "sandbox" gameplay.
Epic Desk has a giant collaboration of Rust deskmats live right now!
These deskpads are all limited edition and once they are sold out they are gone!
Check them out!
https://epicdesk.shop/collections/rust
Twitch Rivals one day Base Invaders event!
Watch your favorite creators battle it out till the last team standing. There will be Twitch drops of course! Important to note: One drop will only be available on the Twitch Rivals channel for one day (8th) during the event broadcast. It is very exclusive to those that are paying attention. :) Remainder of the general drops will go until the weekend and end on October 12th. See you then!
Rust's staging branch is a chance for the community to play with new features, content, and to directly feedback your thoughts to us here at Facepunch! Ahead of next week's patch, this month's staging branch is now freshly wiped for the community to participate in. For more information, head here.
If you made something cool or saw something cool, reach out! Tag me on X or u/ErrnieGerrn Reddit.
Cover image by cre8tiv1!
This month’s update is a little lighter than recent, focused on tackling a number of long-standing bugs and improvements. We’ve been working through community feedback to smooth out some of the more persistent issues and make everyday gameplay feel that bit better. Normally, if bugs persist for several years, there’s usually a good reason for that, whether it’s being difficult to reproduce or requiring a lot of work to resolve.
Looking ahead to November, we’re lining up some strong meta and balance changes. If you’ve got suggestions, don’t hesitate to share them with us across our socials, including Discord, we’re always keeping an eye out and reading through what you send.
November will bring the much-anticipated Naval update. This will introduce modular boats with cannons, of course, and much more. You’ll be able to customise your vessel, set sail across the high seas, explore new ocean-based monuments, and even discover smaller outlying islands beyond the horizon.
In December, we'll be celebrating 12 years of Rust, what the heck. 12! Additionally, we'll soon be announcing the Warhammer X Rust crossover DLC.
Networking range in Rust is made up of grids. These grids are a fixed size and can be adjusted by server owners, they are sometimes reduced on high-populated community servers to lower network overhead. When these grids are reduced, it also reduces things like: gun audio. This makes the world feel incredibly small and closed off.
We can now run gunshots at different distances to the network range: helping make Rust feel more alive and shaking up the meta by giving advantages/disadvantages to certain weapons.
The old default was around 350 meters.
The new values are as follows:
Pistols / SAR / SKS / SMGs / Shotguns - 400 meters
AK / LR - 500 meters
LMGs / Minigun / Long Distance Rifles (Bolt Action Rifle / L9) - 600 meters
This means that players will now be able to hear you from much further away if you're choosing to use stronger weapons such as the AK or a Bolt Action Rifle.
It was hard to see what bags belonged to which team members, even if they named them correctly: it could be a pain to figure out.
Provided you now have Building Privilege and a Hammer out, you will now be able to see which bags are owned by which team members when looking at them.
Added visual and audio damage indicator effects to provide clearer feedback on minicopter health status. Players will now see progressive visual cues as the minicopter takes damage, with thresholds at 45% and 20% health remaining. Now if you see a mini leaving a raid trailing smoke and you can't hit the driver, you'll know to aim for the chassis itself!
Foliage displacement has been improved to allow for smooth transitions. This includes when objects are removed and also makes displacement from moving sources like players look more realistic and natural.
With the last patch, we introduced new volumetric clouds as an alternative to the 2D clouds. However, we put them under experimental settings and kept them disabled by default.
With this patch, the volumetric clouds are now enabled by default, with the long-term goal being to completely replace the 2D clouds. The setting for them has been moved under the normal graphics settings tab, and the quality levels are tied to graphics presets. Additionally, the graphics.vclouds convar has been replaced by graphics.volumetric_clouds.
Workshop submissions using the in-client skin creator tool now automatically take screenshots that are included in the upload.
For several years, a bug has caused players eyes to sometimes appear closed, this is now fixed!
Fixed players being invisible when respawning, whilst asleep
Fixed C4 not being stackable after enabling RF
Fixed rugs deleting deployables when picked up, if on a tugboat
Fixed barricade deployment being blocked on sand dunes around giant excavator
Taking the stage this month is the Exhibit Decor Pack, an illuminating collection of deployable items to glow up your base.
The pack can be purchased in-game or from the Rust Steam item store
Bulb String Lights
Get that warm and fuzzy feeling with these decorative bulb string lights. Hosting a garden party or wiping a raiding party - it’ll look fabulous.
Clothing Mannequin
Goes by “Manny”. Dress him up in your favourite attire and pose him for style. He’ll even swap clothes with you if you want a quick wardrobe change.
Wall Cabinet
Place on the wall and store your smaller items inside or on the shelf below. Has 18 slots.
Moveable Spotlights
Light-up the action with these moveable spotlights. Target them with the hammer and they’ll orient towards you! Comes both in wall and floor mountable varieties.
Fairy Lights
Smaller and more twinkly than the Bulb String Lights, these Fairy Lights bring a touch of magic to the wasteland.
Fluorescent Strip Lights
Giving off a strong UV light, these strip lights will be a great addition to any grow-op. Comes both in wall and ceiling mountable varieties.
Chandelier
Give a touch of elegance to your base with this adjustable Chandelier light. Raise and lower it to the perfect height. Time to fit a grand staircase in your 2x1.
Electric Table Lamp
Settle down for the long dark night with this cozy Electric Table Lamp. Maybe get a buddy to read you a story.
Beanbag Chairs
Sit back and relax in these Beanbag Chairs. Comes in two varieties.
Wallpapers
Interior design to the max with these unique and sparkly wallpapers. Included are a dark shaggy carpet, hexagonal wall tiles and painted gold stars ceiling decoration!
Back in Jungle Update blog, I wrote about experimenting with batched processing of players on our servers. To summarize, I talked about how we needed to restructure code and start doing more operations in batches instead of on individual basis, and I showcased how it allowed us to leverage Burst and parallel job execution to speed up NoClip checks on the server.
This update I'm taking it a step further - I've converted more parts of our player update code to batch/pipeline form, which allowed to clearly see dependencies between processing stages. This, in turn, confirmed which parts we can try to process in parallel on worker threads. As a result, we can now offload a bunch of player-related logic over to worker threads, speeding up the main thread:
Right now it's gated behind UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 server variable, as an experimental mode. We've been running this on our EU Staging Server for a couple weeks to confirm that things are stable - and so far it's holding, but I don't have clear guarantees on how it will scale on high-population servers. In theory, thanks to these points:
Faster server occlusion (more on that below)
Avoiding redundant calculations of player state by using frame caches
Use of managed threads for work offloading (sending entity snapshots and destroy messages have been converted)
I'm hoping that it'll allow the server to scale better with a higher player count and make player processing less of a bottleneck.
The plan is to roll it out gradually to release servers, while confirming server stability & performance - so far it's been developed in a lightly stress tested EU Staging, so I'm missing real world data. After roll-out is successful, I'll be able to identify further bottlenecks and work on expanding parallel processing.
As part of the above rewrite I took a look at server occlusion, as I noticed that it has been running too many checks per frame. In addition to other problems, this caused server occlusion to eat up to 8ms in some cases, like bellow:
Having to process 10k occlusion queries for 350 players seems to be excessive, even if it eventually boils down to only 500 paths to check.
I've reworked the relevant code to benefit from the following improvements when UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 is enabled:
We now deduplicate occlusion queries - if player A and player B want to check for visibility of each other, it's enough to just check A->B
We run occlusion queries in parallel
We cache results of occlusion queries for the duration of a frame, allowing us to skip them throughout the rest of the frame
I'm hoping that the gains will scale with the player count and become substantial once we're testing with 350+ players.
The rewrite of player update allows us to see more clearly how the execution and data flow, but it's lacking further optimizations(aware of 1 bottleneck) and tuning (controlling worker batch sizes). My plan is to use the new telemetry to guide where to focus efforts as I continue to expand UsePlayerUpdateJobs further. I currently don't see a specific end in sight, as the more is converted, the more opportunities to capitalize on data/execution patterns we get.
If things go well for UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 during this patch, it's likely the mode will be promoted to level 1, and a new experimental stage will begin.
As mentioned in last patches devblog, we are going ahead with requiring a minimum encryption level of 2 on servers that wish to be considered 'secure' and appear on the Rust Client server browser.
As a reminder, encryption level 2 is the default configuration for Rust Dedicated Servers and as a result the vast majority of server owners do not need to take action. For those that do, you will need to update your server.encryption convar to 2 and restart your server.
Additionally, we are going ahead with the removal of the server.secure convar. As previously mentioned, any insecure servers will now need to pass the '-insecure' parameter on server startup instead.
Rust Kingdoms 3 returns bigger and better! Watch for socials to see the lineup and what drops you can collect!
Head to https://twitch.facepunch.com/connect to sync your Twitch and Steam accounts.
Hardcore mode is making a comeback this month, bringing with it some community requested changes and a few new tweaks we've been planning for a while.
Our goal with game modes, such as Primitive and Hardcore, is to offer a fresh way to experience Rust, see how players respond, and try out different ideas. We don’t expect them to stay popular for long, usually just a couple of months. They’re not a major development focus or time sink, as most of the team is working on bigger features behind the scenes.
We look forward to seeing your feedback. These game modes help guide our decision-making for the core Rust experience, so your input really does matter. If Hardcore’s not your thing, don’t worry, there are plenty of other changes to check out in the blog below.
The fog of war system is back on Hardcore game mode, exclusively, obscuring the map when you first spawn and slowly revealing itself as you move around the world. This is now integrated with the normal map system rather than a held item like it's original version.
Our goal with this mode is to heighten the inherent risk and reward gameplay in Rust, hopefully leading players to consider their next moves carefully as the consequences for dying can be significant.
As part of an effort to make navigation more interesting in Hardcore we have added the compass as a new handheld tool item. In Hardcore mode your location on the map is now no longer displayed at all unless you have compass equipped in your belt. Once you have a compass in the belt, the player location is displayed without the direction indicator. The compass UI at the top of the screen is also completely removed, as it was in the previous Hardcore mode.
Whilst the compass is available to use in all other gamemodes too, the changes relating to the map and compass UI are limited to the Hardcore gamemode only. There is endless fun to be had in spinning around in circles whilst holding the compass. I hope that it will also prove valuable to all those who enjoy roleplaying as scurvy seadogs navigating the high seas aboard boats.
Firearms can no longer be crafted or researched at all. You'll now be at the mercy of what loot you find in the world, although you can now repair any weapon you find without needing to research it. We've also increased the crafting costs of all ammunition by 5x.
We hope these changes will make you think twice before engaging and promote a more thoughtful style of play.
On hardcore, Sleeping bag respawn cooldowns have been increased to 15 minutes, while beds will now be 10 minutes. Along with the weapon crafting changes this hopefully leads to a more complex thought process when deciding whether to attack other players.
We've doubled the upkeep cost in Hardcore mode. The goal here is to encourage tighter, more efficient base designs and reduce the number of massive, sprawling compounds that tend to dominate the map over time. With higher upkeep, players will need to think more strategically about how they build and maintain their bases, prioritising what's essential and trimming the excess.
This change should help promote more frequent raiding, faster turnover of bases, and a more dynamic map overall. It also aligns with the core intent of Hardcore, leaner gameplay, higher stakes, and a tougher, more unforgiving survival loop. We'll be keeping an eye on how this plays out and adjusting if needed.
This month we've introduced a refreshed look for our menu. After several years of our existing menu being built upon we've decided to create a new experience built from the ground up. Allowing us to add new features in, better UX and a more modern appearance.
On load to Rust post-patch you'll notice our shiny new interface. Across the top we have the new navigation menu with all of the usual links just in a horizontal format. And along the bottom we have the social bar, the place you go to access your friends list, party system and send our message.
Sandwiched between those two is where we'll hold all of the pages, content, media and everything else.
Home
Our new homepage design. Primarily more of the same from the last UI but an improved focus on the most recent patch. In the top left of the interface we now have a new call to action, the Twitch Drops tile. It'll be activated when we've published a new event either coming soon or currently in progress. Bottom left we have a curated list of heroes - whether that be weekly skins, featured DLCs or even a bit of information we want to share.
In the top right we've added a new area for Quick Join, see your previously played servers quickly. If you want to jump straight back into the action you can connect from the homepage. No extra clicks required.
Play
A refreshed look at the Play tab. We've introduced a horizontal tab menu for the server types, from Official all the way across to what your friends are playing. Down the left side of the UI we've got a filter menu, we've spent a bit of time tidying this area up so its a lot less overwhelming and gives you a quick glance at what filters and options you have toggled to tailor your server results.
We've added a few new features: like sorting via server modes, as well as the ability to see queue sizes before you join.
Server Maps
You can now preview a server map before you join. This lets you plan where you're going to put your base, make sure its got whatever biome you love and make plans before committing to a queue. This works for any servers with Rust+ support.
Store
Featured, Limited and General stores all got a major overhaul. We fully rewrote the entire store system to improve the experience of viewing skins and packs. Within the Featured tab we'll have a curated list of items for sale as well as a block for the weekly skins.
Skin Viewer
On a few pages you'll notice we've added a new skin viewer. A new overlay where you can view skins from all angles. Rotate, pan and zoom to inspect skins to your hearts content. We've also put the same viewer into the Inventory page so you can see existing skins in all their glory.
Inventory
The inventory has been tidied up, a new organised structure. Pressing on an item within your inventory will now open a new modal which will give you information about it, a 3D model viewer if available, market rates and even if you can break it down or not.
Likewise the crafting of items has also received the same modals to make everything consistent, cleaner and more usable.
Settings
Settings also received a full overhaul. Options have been re-organized into categories and a search bar will let you filter all of the controls, highlighting the pages in which items match your query.
Gesture Wheel
The gesture menu got a full overhaul from the existing experience. You can now drag and drop items from the gesture bar on the right to the slots you want them to sit in. Whether you replace existing items, or into empty sockets you should be able to freely move items around quicker than ever before.
We've also introduced other gesture packs into the menu, allowing you to see what you own and what you don't own with the ability to quickly navigate to the pack on the store to learn more about it.
You should now expect up to 65% quicker loading from desktop to loading into a server due to a big refactor of how we load assets. This optimization also enabled us to reduce our memory usage by 10-20%. Results will vary but everyone should see a boost!
The experimental option "Optimized Loading" has also been removed. This new optimization completely replaces that and cannot be toggled.
These optimizations also apply to the Rust server.
Everyone who has played Rust before now would know that Asset Warmup takes so long. Even on a top end PC it can take at least a minute or two to complete on its own. This loading step is where we load all of our prefabs from disk and preprocess them to automatically fill in bits of information and remove unnecessary pieces for the client (or server). Loading the prefabs takes up most of the time here. If you had the experimental Optimized Loading option enabled it made them load quicker by having Unity load the prefabs asynchronously (and starts as soon as the menu is visible).
Our new method of loading prefabs is to stick all of them into a couple scenes and then load the scenes. Apparently Unity is way faster at loading scenes than prefabs (who knew?). We can also load those scenes asynchronously - they're loading as soon as you're booted to the menu. Once they're loaded we hook them into our ResourceRef system (basically addressables but predates addressables) and then they can be used as normal prefabs everywhere.
The memory usage reductions come from not needing two copies of every prefab (the prefab asset + preprocessed copy) and doing a chunk of the preprocessing at build time. Both weren't possible before this optimization because modifying prefab assets during builds is unreliable and modifying prefab assets at runtime is unusually slow. Using scenes lets us stop using prefab assets as soon as they get instantiated into one of these scenes.
Minigun turret changes Miniguns placed in Autoturrets and Attack Helicopters now spin up before shooting
Invisible indicator Admins using the `debug.invis` command now have a visual indicator when invis is enabled
God indicator Admins using the `global.god` (godmode) command now have a visual indicator when godmode is enabled
Map marker keybinds Two new keybinds can be set in the options, one to place a marker on your current position, and one to clear all map markers
Dynamic weapon stats
Weapon stats update when adding/removing attachments
Server restart warnings Server restart chat messages moved to toasts
Tugboat horn Tugboat can now honk in the same way cars can
Metal detectors can now detect weapons dropped by other players. Whenever a player's backpack or dropped weapon despawns, it will now be buried for a day, allowing other players to find it using a metal detector.
To keep things balanced, the chances of finding a weapon are relatively low, but they increase based on the number of weapons dropped. This means scavenging after a raid with a metal detector should still feel rewarding for players.
The buried weapons are stored in a rough grid and have a chance of being buried, you won't be able to drop a weapon to hide it and return to the same spot and dig it back up. The buried weapons will also expire after 24 hours if they haven't been found.
The weapons are also filtered so that you won't find something crazy underground but the majority of weapons should still be allowed.
This month, we’re landing a new Hazmat pack based around an elite fighter pilot.
The pack can be purchased in-game or from the Rust Steam item store.
Pilot Suit
Touchdown in the turbulent world of Rust in this fighter pilot’s G-Suit. Whether sustaining high speed turns or dealing with rads, this suit has you covered.
M15 Semi-Automatic Pistol
Only high-ranking personnel get to handle the M15. Put it to good use.
Flight Control Codelock
High-tech and guaranteed to keep the hostiles out.
Black Box wood storage box
There’s no chance of rescue, so salvage what you can and store it here.
Salvaged Ejector Seat Chair
Pulled from the wreckage and repurposed as the coolest place to hang out after a hard day’s raiding. No longer ejects.
Suit up here
Starting this patch, we've made some minor changes to how servers mark themselves as insecure as well as introduced an additional requirement a secure server needs to meet in order to appear on the Rust Client server browser.
If you wish to run an insecure server you will now pass the '-insecure' parameter on startup rather than setting the server.secure convar to false. The convar still exists and server owners will see warnings on server startup if they are still using it, we are aiming to remove the convar entirely on the 4th September 2025.
For existing secure servers, you now need to ensure your secure.encryption value is at least 1 to appear on the server browser in the Rust Client. We have plans to further increase this requirement to 2 on the 4th September 2025. This is, and has been, the default configuration for Rust Dedicated Servers and as a result these changes only impact a minority of servers and most will not need to take any action.
With this patch, Rust's atmospherics have received a facelift, including:
New volumetric clouds.
New volumetric, biome-localized fog.
The goal is to better support a wide variety of dynamic weather, which is something we struggled to do with the old tech.
Available under the Experimental options tab as a replacement for the 2D clouds, the volumetric clouds are fully 3D, move across the sky, morph into different shapes with weather, and interact naturally with lighting from the sky at all times of day.
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This new fogging technique allows us to have different fog setups localized to each biome that remain spatially consistent.
Previously, we would adjust fog globally depending on which biome you were standing in, which was unnatural and provided an advantage to players standing outside of the biome. Now, for example, you'll be able to see the haziness of the arctic biome as an outsider looking in.
Along with this, the volumetric nature of the fog presents cool visual improvements. For example, it receives light from the sun and shadows from the surrounding environment, creating natural god rays and pretty sunsets. The fog in each biome of also colored slightly differently to better match the environment.
For those marathon painters creating the next masterpiece of Rust's art history, we want to make sure you don't lose it all if you happen to starve to death before the final brush stroke. With this toggleable option checked your paintings will automatically sync with the server every 30 seconds, saving you from a complete restart.
Foliage (trees, bushes) outside of shadow range will apply directional self-shadowing. This should improve visuals of distant foliage and reduce trees looking like they are glowing (especially at sunrise/set).
Each time a bullet or thrown weapon moves around, the client would perform some physics raycasts to see what it had hit and process the results (damage, blood, sound, etc.), then the next projectile would do the same, then the next one, etc. This is pretty standard and works fine when you have a small number of projectiles, but can be a bit slow when you have a large number of projectiles in a densely packed area.
The projectiles have been rewritten to update as a single batched set, where the information on the physics queries they need to perform is gathered first and ran across all available job threads in parallel. Updating projectiles as a set like this also opened up a few new optimisation paths that we're now making use of.
From our benchmarks we've seen that batched projectiles are generally at least twice as fast to compute as the old serial projectiles. You're not going to see your framerate double but things should be a little smoother when fights get intense.
Quite a small change, but we've modified the syringe self injection animation to now apply the heal just as the syringe leaves the arm rather than slightly after. The animation was reworked so that the duration is no different to before, this is purely a visual change.
This should hopefully result in less accidentally cancelled heals.
Unless you're a skins artist you probably won't have noticed, but we identified a bug in the client that caused normal maps to be updated in an incorrect configuration under certain circumstances when submitted via the Workshop.
The Workshop submission was fixed in a previous update but now the historically affected skins have also been fixed and should appear exactly how the creator intended!
August 7th - 17th!
And from more of our favourite creators on the rise that you should definitely start to pay attention to! Be sure to sync up and claim your Drops after watching these fantastic creators on Twitch.
Are you spending your holidays weary of raids? Do you need a friend to help defend your base? Well, Rust is 50% off on Steam for the weekend! Gift it to a friend, or let them know they can get it here.
FancyOrb's Global Warfare 3 starts right now on Twitch!
All your favorite creators, big and small, will have Twitch Drops enabled if they're streaming Rust during the event!
There will be one store item up where proceeds will go directly to Hope for the Day mental health charity. Please be aware this item will be account-bound once purchased.
If you would like to take part in the charity drive you can check out their Tiltify page!
Be sure to get synced at https://twitch.facepunch.com/connect to claim your skins!
You know we love a good art timelapse!
Check out this incredibly detailed one from Odoban.
Zchum is at it again with his little conniving ways. Building inconspicuous bait bases for the long con.
It's great. Watch it.
RECYCLER BASE
Reddit user Botsworth1985 shares with us their big-ass recycler base. Looks impressive!
Lone has been adding to his arsenal over the last few months and has a full fledged IRL rust room now. His attention to detail is great!
Full tour so far:
He's got a full size automated auto turret in the works keep an eye out for that in the upcoming weeks.
Here we go again! We'll be bringing you even more Twitch Drops this August to support some incredible rising stars in the Rust community on Twitch and YouTube!
As part of one of our long term goals of reducing friction for new players, we bring the party system to make it easier to connect to a server as your friends!
To invite friends to a party:
Open the friends menu (bottom right of the main menu)
Right click on a friend
Click "Invite To Party"
Wait for them to accept the invite
Once all your friends have joined your party the party leader can connect to a server. This will cause all party members to connect to the same server.
There is also an in-game advantage to joining a server as a party. When you first spawn on the server your party members will spawn nearby each other and automatically be put on the same team. Future respawns will remain random scattered on the beach.
After several years of waving a radiation detector around, we’ve finally given CZ-721 in the Outpost something to do. He now offer players a mission to travel to a Fishing Village and back to unlock a new, permanent spawn point in Outpost. This new spawn point has a 30 minute cooldown and won’t count towards your bag limit. This mission is available in both Vanilla and Primitive modes, but is disabled in Softcore (as there is already a permanently available spawn point in that mode).
Along with this new mission we’re also shipping a bunch of under the hood improvements to the mission system. This has been a longer term project over the last few months as we all want to make more missions and flesh this system out but the process to create new missions internally is quite cumbersome and error prone. Prior to these upgrades, creating a new mission involved a long process of manually setting up conversation nodes, filling in translation fields and lots of manual data entry. We’ve automated as much of this as possible, allowing us to iterate and create more missions faster. We’re not quite there yet but we’ve got more missions planned this year that will allow us to push these tools further. In terms of player facing upgrades, we’ve improved the conversation screen so that it doesn’t bounce around as the text is animating in, added a Mission Complete panel to communicate when a player has finished a mission and applied a lot of performance improvements as the conversation screen was quite heavy.
We’ve made several improvements to the invite process this month in order to make it easier to find and play with your friends. You’ll find a new Invite button in the bottom left Team UI that allows you to add friends to your team even if they aren’t on the current server or online.
You can also now send team invites via the chat panel by right clicking a players name in the chat.
Peacekeeper Mode
Now display a holster warning to offending players (like the old safe zones)
Headshot Sounds
Added dedicated UI sounds slider (affects headshot sounds)
Surrendering Holstered
Weapons are now holstered when surrendering, no longer hidden
Optimized Turrets
Optimized Turrets aiming calculations on the server for better performance
Placing Deployables has always been a bit of a chore in Rust, especially if you want it to be properly in a corner or against a wall. We've finally implemented a solution to this, one that will hopefully be unintrusive, easy to use and help open up the building system by allowing quick and accurate placement of deployables for all.
Plenty of Deployables can now be snapped. This snapping is enabled by pressing Left Shift whilst ready to place an object. It comes in two flavours: Simple and Advanced (default). These modes can be changed in the settings menu.
Simple:
Simple mode will try to snap the object to a wall whenever possible. It will not force any other changes, and can be used to use the wall as a simple slider, allowing custom placement wherever you would like, but with the walls help. Advanced:
Advanced will do everything simple does and more. Deployables will snap into corners, and will try to snap onto similar Deployables nearby. For example a box will snap to a box, or a shelf will snap to a shelf.
August 2023's Abyss Pack has been updated to now include another new free item!
The Vertical and Horizontal Storage Tanks have been bought up from the depths. Holding as much as a Large Wood Box, they're great places to store your salvaged loot.
If you already own the Abyss Pack, the new Storage Tanks will automatically be added as an option in the crafting menu.
You can get the pack on the Steam Item Store.
I know the most recent set of Patrol Helicopter changes weren't the best in some respects, so we want to try and improve them. It may be best to discuss some of the reasoning behind the previous changes as well as the reasoning to these new changes before getting into it.
Our main drive with the Patrol Helicopter changes is to encourage PVP across the map, whilst simultaneously stopping the same clans from getting Patrol Helicopter every time it comes out. Our previous set of changes included two main parts: Tug of War
Before the last set of changes, the Patrol Helicopter would simply aggro on the player that shot at it, providing it wasn't mid missile attack and enough time had passed since its previous aggro. This meant that 'the last player that damaged it' could tag the Patrol Helicopter predictably and easily. Therefore a system known as 'tug of war'/danger zones was developed. When a player attacks the Patrol Helicopter an invisible bubble is generated, players attacking the helicopter from within this this bubble increase the bubbles score according to a specific set of factors (damage dealt etc). This allows multiple groups or individuals to fight for aggro of the Patrol Helicopter in a more serverwide style.
Multi-Stage Fights (Fleeing Mechanics) When these 'bubbles'/danger zones ranked up too much score too fast, then the Patrol Helicopter will flee. With the idea being that the flee would happen 2/3 times and players would be required to chase down the Patrol Helicopter: fighting it across the map to encourage PVP serverwide. In my opinion: most of the issues with the above changes lie with Multi Stage Fights, with the main one being that players end up feeling frustrated or unrewarded for taking the helicopter.
The Tug of War system has been left virtually unchanged, with most of the following changes have been made to try and improve the Multi Stage Fight/Fleeing behaviour. Patrol Helicopter has been changed to work the following ways:
Will always flee towards a monument.
Flees will be capped to 1 grid maximum.
Flee location is now shown on the map.
Patrol Helicopter will no longer flee if you take it from nearby/inside a monument.
These changes are meant to preserve and improve the best parts of the previous changes (increased serverwide engagement and more PVP) whilst also trying to fix the issues players had with the multi stage fights.
It's possible these changes wont work, but I want to try them out.
We've improved the erosion simulation that is done as part of the procedural map generation with this update.
It will now do a better job of blending the canyons and lakes with the rest of the environment and generally make a larger impact in the generation of the world. The improved simulation adds a relatively small amount of time to the map generation, but is aggressively multi-threaded to try and mitigate this.
As of April 2024 we've been adding hand animated camera animation to our viewmodels via a new camera bone in the rig. For older viewmodels, we've continued using the code based system implemented back in 2017. While this was functional, the camera didn't accurately track the movements on screen as well as it could.
We are now able to assign any object to be the camera for our viewmodels, so we have intended to bypass the lack of a camera bone on these legacy assets, by creating hand animated movements directly in Unity. We have now completed these animations for all our older assets (pre 2017). Admires now have camera animation as well.
I want to take a moment to explain the bigger picture of our development process after noticing a large amount of outrage following a commit regarding "roof stability being fixed".
At Facepunch one of the core objectives of our mission statement is as follows:
Valuing Player Feedback: Our community is the lifeblood of Rust. We actively seek out and incorporate player feedback, ensuring that our development process is aligned with the desires and needs of our community.
We understand and respect that some bugs are better left in the game once they turn into important gameplay mechanics. Bunkers and External TCs are well known bugs that we have intentionally left in the game until we find a suitable official game mechanic to replace them. It's not ignorance: we actively keep an eye on them and only fix the variations that we feel cross the boundary from "cool mechanic" into "game breaking".
Roof stability bunkers and disconnect-able TCs were not considered game-breaking so what happened? Well, often these bugs end their life in the same way they were created: unintentionally.
After the Jungle Update we noticed players started making more pyramid bases and "Jungle Temples" but there was a problem: roofs would break after server restart and/or it would be impossible to build despite it showing enough stability. The root cause of this bug as well as disconnect-able TCs was the same: the stability system was using the lowest number of links to the ground instead of the highest stability for support. To fix pyramid bases meant disconnect-able TCs would also be fixed. We weighed the options and this seemed acceptable: there are many alternative bunkers in the game & you can still break external TCs manually before replacing the main TC.
I hope this gives a bit more clarity on why we fixed roof stability and gives a better explanation of our development process than a single line commit message did.
TLDR: We didn't break all bunkers in the game nor plan to, we fixed stability calculations primarily affecting stability with roofs which caused a single type of bunker to break.
Rust is fast approaching its 12th birthday. That’s nearly 12 years of guaranteed monthly updates - over 380 content updates and 2,500+ hotfixes since launch. This year, we passed 1 million positive reviews, making Rust the 6th most reviewed game on Steam. Thank you.
In 2025 we hit a huge milestone: over 20 million copies sold on PC alone.
We also shipped some of our most ambitious updates yet:
Primitive Update – Four siege weapons, a new bow, shields, and a new game mode. We also rolled out updates to horses, ragdolls, and more.
Crafting Update – A feast of changes: new ways to cook and craft, pet chickens, bees, pies, armor inserts, optimizations, and plenty more.
Jungle Update – A whole new biome! Climbable trees and vine swinging, deadly tigers and crocodiles, new monuments, boomerangs, blowpipes, and more.
Next month brings a Hardcore mode refresh alongside some long-requested quality-of-life improvements.
Later this year, we’re setting sail with the Naval Update - introducing modular, player-built boats complete, with cannons, of course and much more.
Also in the pipeline: AI and animal overhauls, including new animals, a Warhammer collaboration, and more we’re not quite ready to talk about yet.
The Steam Summer Sale is here! And with just a few days left, why not pick up a copy for that potential clan partner mate you've been trying to convince to join? Get it to gift here.
One of the loudest bits of feedback we heard after last month's Jungle update: “I can’t find anything!” Fair. The jungle was a bit too good at being a jungle.
Wild hemp has been reworked with taller stalks and purple flowers, so you can actually see it against the overgrowth. (Player-grown hemp remains unchanged.)
More ore nodes now spawn throughout the jungle thanks to increased rock formation density and a general boost to ore availability.
Berry bushes have their own dedicated Jungle population to help keep food distribution more even across the map.
Cars and bikes now spawn along jungle road sides, you’ll no longer feel stranded in the canopy.
Players no longer spawn directly in the jungle biome. It’ll still generate near spawn areas, but you won’t be dropped in the middle of the Jungle unless you choose to live there.
Additionally, we've added several new trees that did not quite make it into the initial release.
We’ve also made a pass on monument distribution. This has been a long-standing issue, and it worsened with last month's Jungle update. Good news, it's fixed! overall, you can now expect a healthy increase in the number of monuments per map.
Some key highlights in testing a world side of 4500:
Airfield +37%
Trainyard +34%
Excavator +45%
Military Tunnels +28%
Powerplant +17%
Water Treatment +16%
Sewer Branch +14%
Overall, we hope all these changes bring Jungle into a balanced position.
I've made some changes to make this dart less OP, but still useful.
There's now a blur and dim effect instead of the full screen blackout, and the fade speed has been decreased.
The movement speed reduction duration has also been decreased from 6 to 4 seconds, to match the blur duration.
We have worked for the past couple of months on lighting improvements for the game interiors.
Simply put, in the past our lighting model would darken the entire world if you were located indoors. This caused disadvantage for players looking out and advantage for players looking in as the interiors were fully lit from outside.
Thanks to the efforts of the team we now have a spatially aware solution to this problem that also brings some benefits such as soft physical transitions in and out of interiors.
We are still improving this new system and while this goes on, some trickier interior spaces such as large pipes and complex cylindrical buildings remain on the old system temporarily.
We’re making several changes to the silencer system this month, introducing two new silencer types and making the existing silencer non-craftable (now renamed to Military Silencer).
The Soda Can Silencer is the cheapest to make (40 metal fragments, Workbench 1) and will last around 12 shots on an Assault Rifle firing standard rounds. It also mildly decreases shot damage and velocity.
The Oil Filter Silencer is a bit more expensive (10 HQM, Workbench 2) and will last for around 48 shots on an Assault Rifle firing standard rounds.
Both new silencers will apply a decrease to damage and velocity compared to the Military Silencer.
Our goal here is to ensure Silencers remain a powerful tool for ambushes and surprise tactics, but don’t become a default tool to keep on your weapon during a full firefight. The existing Military Silencer’s durability is unchanged so it will still last quite a long time and should hopefully become quite a valuable item to find in high end monuments.
Seat swapping keybinds
New keybinds have been added to let you switch directly to specific seats in vehicles
Interaction crosshair
You can now customize how much information is displayed on your crosshair
HBHF Sensor
The range of the HBHF sensor can now be adjusted
Neon signs
New inputs have been added to neon signs, allowing you to control which frame is displayed
Propane Explosive Bomb
Propane explosive bomb crafting recipe no longer requires explosives
Monument Heaters
Heaters at the small and large oilrig now provide heat and comfort
Water Pump Protection
Pump health doubled
LR300 Rifle
Quicker LR300 deploy and improved animation
MP5 Durability
MP5 Durability increased, allowing for an additional 300 rounds before needing to be repaired
Vending Machine Order Editing
Can now edit orders in a vending machine without having to recreate them.
Shelf pick up
Can now pickup shelves if they have nothing on them.
IO Wire snapping
Hold Shift to snap wires in 90 degree increments.
Lighting Polish
Wires, Most Electronics, and even some Light Fixtures have gotten visual update to make your base even more cozy.
I made some improvements to building this month. There were quite a few issues with our line of sight checks, leading to some frequent frustrating "Line of sight blocked" error messages when building.
This is much better now, the checks are more forgiving and more consistent.
This month, we’re expanding wallpaper to floors and ceilings.
Wallpapers can now be applied to foundations, floors and roof building blocks. Like the original wallpapers, they are entirely visual and do not provide any additional protection.
We’ve also made significant improvements to its functionalities:
The wallpaper item is now the Wallpaper Tool
It works like a building plan and consumes cloth when placing wallpaper down
Walls, floors and ceilings have a different skin sets - each only works on its appropriate surface
You can select your skin using right click
You can easily reskin placed wallpaper by simply placing it again
The wallpaper tool includes 8 new default skins, 4 for floors and 4 for ceilings.
Floor & Ceiling Wallpaper Pack
In addition to the 8 floor and ceiling wallpaper skins unlocked by default, you can purchase the Floor & Ceiling Wallpaper Pack which features a hefty 34 extra floor and ceiling wallpaper skins for decorating your base.
Skins included in the Floor & Ceiling Wallpaper Pack, as pictured above:
Floors
Carpet (2 variants)
Parquet Painted (3 variants)
Parquet Wood (4 variants)
Marble Tiles (2 variants)
Metal Treadplate
Asbestos Tiles (4 variants)
Tatami Mats
Ceilings
Plaster (2 variants)
Parquet Wood
Parquet Painted (5 variants)
Subway Tiles (5 variants)
Metal Sheets (3 variants)
Wood Beams and Plaster
The Floor & Ceiling Wallpaper Pack is available for purchase in-game or through the Steam Item Store
You can now drop items to the ground around you in the direction of your choosing.
I've added a new keybind option which you can set under the keybinds UI. Look for "Directional Drop".
With this key held, drag the item icon in the direction you wish to throw it - dragging directly up will throw it in front of you, dragging to the right will throw it to your side, etc.
To make it easier to drop items with a direction, holding the keybind also lets you drop items by dragging them anywhere on the UI, even over other inventory slots. This means you don't need to drag an item all the way off the inventory UI in the correct direction. The item icon will turn red to show the item is always going to be dropped, not moved.
The TC friend list authing UI and functionality has now been extended to the Tugboat, making it much easier to auth your friends or team mates to your Tugboat.
I've made a couple more QOL upgrades to the recipe UI for these tables.
Any recipes that you currently have all the ingredients for will appear at the top of the list. This will also update as your inventory content changes.
Additionally, the colour of recipe text now also updates correctly with inventory changes instead of only when the UI is first opened. This also matches ingredient availability - recipes you have all the ingredients for are bright white, other recipes are grey.
Wooden external walls and gates can now be upgraded directly to the adobe versions if you have the correct items in your inventory, without needing to go through the long winded process of upgrading to regular stone and then reskinning them.
Large, non-pickup, deployed items can now be demolished using the hammer within 10 minutes of their placement.
The initial list includes:
Large Furnace
Refinery
Watchtower
Barricade variants
Wind turbine
Large paddling pool
Water catchers
You'll need building privilege to be able to demolish large deployables with the hammer.
Something members of the community have been asking for is a blue light to accompany the red, green and white lights in the Industrial Lights pack that was released in November 2021. We’ve listened and have added it to the pack!
If you already own the Industrial Lights Pack, the new blue light skin will automatically be added as a proper skin option for the white Industrial Wall Light.
We’ve seen some very industrious ideas for the possibilities with this new light, and we can’t wait to see what the community comes up with. Check out the Industrial Lights pack here.
The catapult is a fun tool for inflicting pain on your enemies, but it hasn’t fulfilled its potential without the Bee Bomb.
The Bee Bomb is a new Catapult Projectile. On impact it will create a few Bee Swarms.
Earlier this year, we introduced a few new teas, but they were missing some key ingredients - namely, consistency. These teas didn’t have advanced or pure crafting options.
That’s now sorted.
Advanced and Pure variants have been added where they were missing for warming, cooling, harvesting and crafting teas. These teas offer enhanced and longer duration of buffs. Some of the basic tiers have released a slight nerf.
We’ve taken a swing at reducing barricade spam in PvP fights - a bit too effective (and a bit too annoying).
The wooden barricade stack size has been halved from 10 to 5. This should help curb the Insta-maze spam in close quarters without gutting their utility entirely. You'll now have to use them more strategically.
Barricades on train tracks will no longer stop trains dead in their tracks. You can still be a nuisance, just not a locomotive-destroying one.
Small changes, but they should make PvP a little less about throwing down walls and a bit more about the fight itself. We're not opposed to reducing the stack size down further, we'll be monitoring these changes closely.
While creating the Advanced and Pure versions of the crafting tea we noticed that the random chances weren't quite what we had initially planned when implementing the feature. We've made some adjustments to bring them in line with our original vision.
Old chances:
No slot: 50%
1 slot: 20%
2 slots: 10%
3 slots: 20%
New chances, no teas:
No slot: 50%
1 slot: 25%
2 slots: 15%
3 slots: 10%
New chances, Standard tea:
1 slot: 50%
2 slots: 30%
3 slots: 20%
New chances, Advanced tea:
2 slots: 60%
3 slots: 40%
New chances, Pure tea:
2 slots: 33%
3 slots: 66%
A new internal weapon attachment is available this month, allowing you to use the Ping system without having to switch to the binoculars. This should help players in teams more effectively call out locations and points of interest. Costs 10 HQM and 1 Tech Trash to craft and requires a Workbench 2.
Earlier this year, in the primitive update, we introduced bow turrets, which were added to support the primitive gamemode, but the vanilla meta has shifted to players spamming turrets early game with bows, we don't feel this is a healthy meta.
Today, bow weapons placed in turrets now have reduced damage and longer reload times. We will keep a close eye on these changes, and I'm sure the topic will continue to be a highly debated subject within the community.
We are currently exploring broader, more significant changes over the coming months to turrets.
We’ve reworked how ground foliage is rendered - shifting to a more GPU-driven system with smarter, per-instance camera culling.
In plain English: your system should now spend less time and effort rendering grass you can’t even see.
You’ll notice improved performance, especially when sprinting or flying across the map. This update reduces load on both GPU and CPU, keeping things smoother even in foliage-heavy areas.
Several water based vehicles use camera rotation that involves rolling the camera from side to side, either in response to waves or input. That sort of camera rotation can be disorientating to players that are more sensitive to motion sickness.
In the case of Boogie Boards and Inner Tubes, their camera rotation was entirely due to ocean waves, which was likely made worse with the latest ocean refresh. I've entirely removed the camera rotation while using these vehicles.
In the DPV's case the rotation is due to player input which was intended but is quite severe. To solve this I've added a new option in the Accessibility menu that will remove the rolling behaviour.
The food spoiling system from the Crafting Update is being extended to include fruit, vegetables and eggs. These items will spoil into a generic Spoiled Produce item and will last 48 hours outside of a fridge, making them a more long term food item.
With the increasing popularity of higher population servers, we’ve heard a lot of feedback about how fast loot can spawn on these servers. Our loot spawning scales have been static for quite a while and were never really intended to scale beyond the 500 player mark.
To improve this, we’ve added a new server convar called “Spawn.population_cap_rate" which is set to 300 by default. Our loot respawning system will now cap how many players it considers on the server by this number, meaning the loot spawn rate will not increase beyond 300 players regardless of how many players are on the server.
The results on a standard monument crate spawner:
1 Population: 15m-30m refresh
1000 pop with no cap set: 50s-100s refresh
1000 pop with cap of 300 set: 3.75m - 7.5m refresh
Various monuments use different timers and mechanics to respawn, but this should illustrate just how fast loot was spawning as player counts increased.
Setting this convar to 0 will restore the loot frequency to it's previous rate.
Obviously changes like this are very hard to test in isolated testing environments, we felt 300 was a good starting value but we’ll adjust as needed once we see how this plays out on live servers.
As part of our ongoing efforts to provide you with regular updates and transparency on our anticheat initiatives, I'm pleased to announce that this year we've doubled the size of our dedicated anticheat support team and are currently recruiting for developer positions with a anticheat focus.
These support staff are dedicated to investigating players from your reports and other sources. They're actively joining servers, watching and enforcing fair gameplay.
In March, we released premium servers, and we've seen strong and healthy retention across these servers. They're doing an excellent job at gatekeeping cheaters out. Very happy with how this is working. At present, the $15 price point is working well and see no need to raise the barrier to entry.
In May, we enabled server-side player culling by default across all servers. As a reminder, this is tech which no longer networks players behind terrain and rocks, preventing or limiting several high-impact cheat features.
In April, we opened our Hackerone program to the public, allowing the reporting of security vulnerabilities and exploits in exchange for a bug bounty. We've set up a dedicated security page on our website that makes submitting reports extremely easy, secure and straightforward. We've now paid a total of $261,000.00.
Within the past few weeks, our anticheat partner, EAC, has begun additional efforts targeting recoil cheats, often referred to as scripting. As always, they're working very hard in the background to ensure Rust and many other games are cheat-free.
These are just a few of the efforts we're willing to talk about, there have been many cheat-related exploits fixed or limited, new preventions and detections.
Below, are some in-depth ban insights.
Our ban volume has remained steady, even as we left the busy seasonal period. Some additional metrics have been included to help understand the scale of the problem in the form of the percentage of players banned relative to the daily active users.
Rest assured cheaters make up a tiny fraction of the players in the game and we are actively combatting them on a daily basis through both automated and manual measures.
We have been observing a notable decrease in identified cheaters via cheat reports over the last few wipes, and our conclusion based on other metrics is that we believe this is a reduction in cheating activity. Let us know your thoughts, have you been observing more or less cheaters recently?
We have observed a clear decrease in the time cheaters are able to spend in-game before they are banned over the last few months which is a great thing to see and we hope players are able to enjoy their wipes with minimal cheater interruption.
In total this year we've banned over 142,000 cheaters and we hope to keep this momentum up as we work towards our goal of ensuring a fair and competitive environment for all players.
With this update we'll be releasing an update to Server Profiler that will allow server owners and mod developers to more easily catch anomalous memory consumption. Server Profiler gains the "Allocation Tracking" capability - once enabled, it'll start to continuously record allocations for each frame and counting relevant metrics. Once one of the metrics passes a user-defined limit, it'll trigger the export of a snapshot, containing 1 frame of data. This snapshot will only contain allocation events, with each allocation event having a callstack recorded with it.
Here's an example of snapshot:
To start, run watchallocs \ \
Name (default “Allocs“, no extension, max 32 chars) - controls generated snapshot filename
MaxStackDepth (default 16) - controls how much of the allocations callstack to record
To stop, run stopwatchingallocs
The following server-var metrics are available as server vars and can be changed at any point:
NotifyOnTotalAllocCount (defaults to 16000) - will snapshot once all threads during 1 frame exceed allocation count across all threads
NotifyOnTotalMemKB (defaults to 8096, aka 8MB) - will snapshot once a frame allocates more than specified memory across all threads
NotifyOnMainAllocCount (defaults to 0, aka disabled) - will snapshot once main thread exceeds allocation count during 1 frame
NotifyOnMainMemKB (defaults to 0, aka disabled) - will snapshot once main thread exceeds total memory allocated during 1 frame
NotifyOnWorkerAllocCount (defaults to 0, aka disabled) - will snapshot once all worker threads exceed allocation count during 1 frame
NotifyOnWorkerMemKB (defaults to 0, aka disabled) - will snapshot once all worker threads exceed total memory allocated during 1 frame
Allocation tracking is not free and will impact the performance - it’ll be worse the more allocations are made. This tool should be used for debugging for a limited amount of time.
Server Profiler is getting to the point of where it has enough features to be complete, with only incremental improvements to do. These are my outstanding plans(not in a particular order):
Expose method filtering to users as a json config
For Allocation Snapshots, attempt to visulize recorded callstack as slices (so it looks closer to performance snapshots)
Add ability to record user scopes and associated metadata with those scopes
The command block is an admin-only deployable, and an exciting new tool for creative mode enthusiasts.
Once set up, it can store any server command and execute it when powered. Chain multiple together to create more complex circuits.
We look forward to seeing what creative use cases you can come up with!
Join us from the 25th of June to the 2nd of July as the Spanish speaking Rust community returns to Twitch for all out action, adventure, and unprecedented amounts of raiding in Bellum: Conquest!
All Twitch Drops and participating creators will be available to view in the coming weeks.
Please be aware of scams. Facepunch will never contact you.
Only ever use our official website: https://twitch.facepunch.com/
About
This page aggregates Steam news feeds, patch notes, and developer announcements for Rust, sourced from official Steam community posts.
Major updates, balance changes, and seasonal events often correlate with player-count spikes — cross-reference announcements here with the live charts on the main Rust statistics page.
Articles link back to Steam for full changelogs. SteamScope refreshes news entries as new posts are published to the game's Steam hub.