One of the emblematic locations from legacy Rust makes a comeback: Radtown.
We turned this monument from a bunch of blocky garage buildings, into a refreshed new gameplay space. We tried to preserve the proportions and purpose of each location while opening up new paths and adding way to improve the flow of movement and cover throughout.
Exteriors
Interiors
CLIFFS
We have completely reworked all cliffs in the game. The new cliffs come in two types, tall coastal cliffs placed close to the ocean and sloped inland cliffs covering hills and mountains.
A lot of effort was made into making them not only look realistic, but also easy to traverse. You can run up the inland cliffs with ease, while the coastal cliffs can be scaled by jumping on the rocky ledges and protrusions.
In addition we have added many new coastal rocks close to the shore to further spice up the world.
REVAMPED ROCK FORMATIONS
We have completely revamped all large rock formations in the game and decided to bring back some of the old fan favorites.
Formations such as the god rock, anvil rock and arch rock all return to the game. Completely new rock formations have been added and some of them even spawn off shore allowing for more base building possibilities than ever before.
UNIQUE ENVIRONMENTS
In Rust, you will now find several different canyons, lakes, and oasis of various sizes in each procedurally generated map.
Canyons, Lakes, and Oases – each offering a fresh way to play with their own pros and cons. Canyons provide narrow pathways for ambushes but can be risky to navigate. Lakes create opportunities for resource gathering and farming but leave you vulnerable in open water. Oases are lush safe havens with valuable resources but will become hotspots for fierce competition.
Canyons
These towering landscapes offer fresh opportunities for ambushes and base building. While the narrow pathways and steep drops make for thrilling combat and strategic locations.
Canyons can be rich in resources, but don't get too greedy and get caught out.
Lakes
These scenic water bodies add a new twist to the gameplay, offering great spots for fishing, resource gathering, farming and base-building by the shore. However, the open water leaves you exposed to attacks, and swimming can slow you down when trying to make a quick escape.
Oasis
These rare paradises amidst the harsh desert. These lush areas are perfect for setting up base, gathering, farming, and finding vital resources like water. But be warned: Oases will attract other players looking to take advantage of these havens.
RIVERS
Rivers are now longer, flow more naturally, and widen the longer they get. This as well as the new unique environments required a larger water system overhaul to support different water types at any altitude.
The ocean is now fully culled underneath the terrain, and lakes no longer stretch beyond their boundaries. Overall, it's a much more robust and future proof system.
The High Caliber Revolver is a hand-crafted, single-action revolver that uses 5.56 ammo. Built for precise, long-range shots rather than rapid fire, it demands a steady hand for maximum accuracy. Its slower fire rate reflects the single-action design, but the power and precision make each shot count.
Unlockable at a Tier 2 workbench, the High Caliber is for survivors who prioritize accuracy and impact over speed.
LEGACY WOOD PILE
Welcome back wood piles! These will spawn in the snow, and temperate biomes.
They function just like our traditional ore piles, but for wood! Harvestable with a rock, hatchet or chainsaw. A great source of wood early in the game to start off your Rust journey.
DIVE SITES
Ocean Wreck Buoys
We’ve remodelled the old floating bottle indicators on the surface of dive sites into more solid buoys. They are much more visible which will help with finding dive sites.
Dive Sites
The Dive Sites themselves have been refreshed this month, with an entirely new set of three possible options replacing the old sites. All sites now spawn the same amount of loot (6 crates). Each site has new unique environment art and topology.
Flora and Fauna
Alongside the new Buoys and Dive Sites, we've overhauled the underwater foliage with a graphical update, and tweaked the visuals on fish so they behave more naturally. You might even find a couple of other critters down there.
DIVER PROPULSION VEHICLE (DPV)
We've added small new handheld dive vehicle this month. The DPV can be crafted and kept in your inventory until you need it.
It's then used like so:
Select it and deploy it into any water that's at least 1 metre deep
Interact with the fuel tank and add some low grade fuel
"Mount" it to hold onto the handles and drive it around
Using the DPV, you can travel underwater significantly faster than you could by swimming. Once you're done with it, simply dismount and pick it up. Fuel will automatically be removed and added to your inventory, or dropped if you don't have any space.
Note: Currently players will need to manually remove fuel before picking up the DPV. This will be corrected in a hotfix asap
WATER WELL UPDATE
Waterwells aren’t exactly the most popular monument in Rust, so this month we decided to make them a little more interesting. You will now find a new vendor at some NPC’s that can offer a random selection of teas and farming equipment that shuffles every X minutes.
What’s special about this NPC is that this is the first vendor that is available in non safe zones. This means they can be killed! If that happens they will respawn after a while, but that won’t trigger the vendor to refresh or have any loot so there’s no real purpose. Try and be nice!
You will also find a new food cache with basic teas and high quality food items, and some planters that are automatically filled with random plants periodically. These plants have a high priority of having good genes, so they’re a great way to give your farm base a quick boost.
RADIOACTIVE WATER
We've added a new gameplay feature to the world: Radioactive Water! This is available at two locations in the new Radtown monument. Players will be able to harvest it with any regular water container, be it: a bota bag, water jug or the tanker module for vehicles.
Radioactive Water has a few properties: splashing it on plants will instantly kill them, splashing it on players (via throwing your water from a container, or via a sprinkler) will irradiate them. Carrying a large amount of it in your inventory will damage you, and finally looting a players body will irradiate you if there's enough radioactive water in their inventory.
These properties make Radioactive Water a great choice for a number of things: from instantly resetting your farm, to being a great counter to those players raiding you in full gear.
The backend work done on Radioactive Water opens up a number of gameplay possibilities in the future as any item (in code) can now be marked as Radioactive.
We can't wait to see what creations you come up with!
FRONTIERSMAN PACK
This month we're introducing a new addition to Rust's permanent store, the Frontiersman Pack.
The pack includes three items: Frontier Hazmat Suit, Frontier Hatchet, Blunderbuss
Frontiersman hazmat suit
The Frontiersman Hazmat is a handcrafted survival suit, built for those who brave the wilderness. Forged from durable felt and leather, it’s designed to shield its wearer from the harsh weather, unseen enemies, and the dangers of the wild. The Frontiersman suit is a hazmat replacement skin that can be applied while crafting the hazmat or skinned using the repair table. The Frontiersman suit offers no in-game bonuses.
Blunderbuss
The Blunderbuss is a handcrafted, frontier-inspired shotgun that brings a classic, rugged aesthetic to the Double Barrel. This skin reimagines the weapon, turning it into a more traditional tool of survival from a bygone era
Frontier Hatchet
Inspired by the traditional tomahawk, featuring a rugged design with several charms attached. This unique skin transforms the hatchet into a symbol of frontier survival.
Available now on the item store.
WALLPAPER CHANGES
Based on your feedback following last month’s wallpaper release, you can now place wallpapers on building block hardsides, but only inside your base!
Any exposed hardside wallpaper will be removed by the next decay tick.
QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES
Spray Can Improvements
Spray Can will now remember the shipping container colour through deaths and restarts
Note World Model
Note World Model Added
Underwater Visibility
Underwater visibility improved, allowing for enhanced long-distance sight
Repair Bench
The repair bench now displays icons alongside text for repair costs.
CHARITABLE RUST 2024 - TWITCH DROPS
October 12th - October 19th!
Join us and Rustafied for the annual Charitable Rust! The main event takes place on October 12th from 11:00AM EDT until 11:00PM EDT On Rustafied's Twitch channel. Tune in for tons of mini games, talent shows, and some of your favorite creators battling it out in Rust Reborn's Bedwars! Check out the full schedule here.
There will be 4 store items this year. Proceeds go toward the Direct Relief Charity. These store items will be account bound. Meaning, you will not be able to sell or trade them once purchased.
You will be able to collect all the Twitch drops for the remainder of the week on any Rust stream with drops enabled!
WORLD UPDATE 2.0 SALE - 40% OFF RUST
.
To celebrate the release of The World Update 2.0, Rust is now 40% off until October 8th!
Whether you want to role play, survive as a solo, find a new duo partner, or finally join your friend's clan, The World Update 2.0 is here to bring a fresh new feel to Rust for you to explore!
Or why not use The World Update 2.0 sale to gift Rust to that friend that would make a good survival partner?
There’s no better time to jump in to build, explore, raid, and survive with legacy items returning, new weapons and a hazmat, a new monument, AND the newly tuned terrain!
If you're a map maker, please note that next month, we'll be removing the old rock and cliff assets from the game. Map makers should update their maps with the new rock assets to maintain compatibility.
The reason we're removing the old assets is to ensure we're keeping the game running as optimal as possible and not needlessly loading unused assets into memory.
TIME TO KILL
DIGITAL CLOCK
Meet the Digital Clock, a new craftable item, a simple but powerful addition to your base's electrical setup.
When powered, it displays the current server time
Consumes 1 power
Available at the Tier 2 Workbench
Craftable for 100 Metal Fragments
The clock also allows you to set up alarms. When an alarm goes off, the power will pass through, allowing you to trigger any sort of circuit inside your base at specific times.
Whether you want to automate your farms, activate traps, or control lighting systems, you can set up to five alarms simultaneously.
CGO WEAPON ATTACHMENT
A powerful new cutting-edge experimental weapon attachment for those who crave more damage and speed in their shots. The Gas Compression Overdrive attachment boosts projectile damage and velocity, allowing you to hit harder.
However, this extra power comes with trade-offs, a slower fire rate and increased recoil. If you can handle the extra kick, this attachment is maybe for you.
The GCO attachment works on the following weapons: Thompson, SAR, SAP, M92, M39 and the Custom SMG.
WALLPAPERS
This month, we're adding wallpapers, a new way to decorate your base's interior.
Wallpapers can only be applied to the interior side of your walls. Purely visual, they don't provide any additional protection, are easy to remove and won't interfere with the deployment of any other items.
Default blueprint
Crafting cost: 20 cloth per wallpaper piece
Includes 'Vintage' default skin in 4 colours - blue, red, green and yellow
Just like other deployable items, wallpapers can be skinned during crafting, in a repair bench or after being deployed using the spray can.
Wallpaper Starter Pack
In addition to the 4 wallpapers skins unlocked by default, you can purchase the Wallpaper Starter Pack which features 22 extra wallpaper skins for styling your base.
Skins included in the wallpaper starter pack, as pictured above:
Clouds
Yellow Stripe
Blue Diamond
Fleur (3 variants)
Retro (3 variants)
Subway (2 variants)
Geometric (2 variants)
Polka Dots (3 variants)
Wainscotting (3 variants)
Venetian Plaster (3 variants)
The Wallpaper Starter Pack is available for purchase in-game or through the Steam's item store.
COLOURBLIND ACCESSIBILITY
As part of my Hackweek last month, I explored some ways we can make playing Rust more accessible for players that experience different forms of colour blindness. Colour blindness is experienced by up to 8% of men and 0.5% of women, so it likely affects a good portion of our player base.
We’ve tried to identify problematic areas in the game world, as well as in our UI, and then make those colours configurable so every player can customise the look of their game to meet their needs. Since colour blindness comes in many forms, we’ve exposed each option individually as well as some presets that we think will help for more common forms of the condition.
We’ve exposed the following options:
Tree marker colours
Health Bar colour
Hunger Bar colour
Hydration Bar colour
Team Name tag colour
Enemy Name tag colour
Ally Name tag colour (eg. marked friendly in the contacts system)
Monument blocked colour (the new radius that appears when building close to a monument)
Mushroom colour
We also adjusted the contrast of the icons in the Hunger/Health/Hydration bar to make them stand out a bit more when in snowy/very bright regions.
Please get in touch if we’ve missed a colour you find problematic to see, or if there are other accessibility options you think could help make playing Rust more comfortable. You can contact us via the F7 report menu, or opening a new Support ticket.
TUNNEL NETWORK VISIBILITY LAYER
Way, way back in the ancient times of December 2022, we shipped a feature that allowed us to separate the above ground and below ground networking groups, improving client performance and reducing network traffic. Unfortunately, we had to disable it pretty quickly on launch as we discovered an edge case where a small number of elevators that started in the above ground layer and ended in the below ground layer would teleport players into a void. To resolve this, we needed to rework how elevators functioned internally.
This work has finally been completed, so we’re re-enabling the feature this month. Fingers crossed the feature sticks this time! This change should be invisible to players and offer better performance.
ERRORS QOL
I think it was time to say goodbye to this debug gibberish spammed in chat everytime you try to build anything.
These errors have been moved from the chat to toast messages, which are just as responsive and most importantly, visible to players playing with the chat disabled.
We wanted to reduce the confusion by making these errors more specific, when possible.
The common "Cannot build in this area" now becomes "Blocked by X", mentioning the name of the entity blocking you. It works with deployables, vehicles, building blocks and players.
The infamous "Too close from another building" error message will now be "Too close to X". It will also briefly highlight the building block in question.
When trying to upgrade a building block, you'll now get a clear explanation of what exactly is preventing the upgrade.
We've also re-ordered the message priority of a few common deployables. So you now get "Must be placed on a construction" instead of "Not enough space" message when trying to place a bed on the terrain for example.
A new convar has been added if you prefer to keep the error messages in chat:
client.errortoasts_in_chat
LOCALIZATION
A lot of effort has been put into improving Rust's localization this month.
Most of the UI screens are now displaying right-to-left languages correctly
Many screens with truncated texts have been fixed
Unlocalized texts have been addressed
This is ongoing work, it's not finished yet, and more improvements are planned for the coming months.
Thanks to everyone contributing to Rust localization, dedicating their time to make the game more accessible to non-English speakers.
WORLD UPDATE PLAYTEST
Today, we're opening Rust Staging - Aux02 beta branch for public testing to gather feedback and bug testing ahead of next month's world update release, which is one, if not the most significant updates, this year.
The World Update aims to address many long-standing community requests surrounding the world. The update will revamp cliffs, rivers, dive sites, and add new, unique environmental areas such as canyons, lakes, and desert oases. Additionally, some throwbacks to Legacy Rust by bringing back an updated Radtown monument and Legacy Wood Piles.
There is plenty more to look forward to with a new weapon, the high-calibre revolver, new Hazmat skin, and so much more.
We're excited about this world update and want your feedback to allow us to adjust and tweak as necessary. As a note of caution, everything on the branch is subject to change, and map wipes will happen at irregular intervals over the month.
The world update will be released on October 3rd.
How to access
To access the playtest, please follow the steps below:
On Steam download Rust - Staging Branch
Right-click Rust - Staging Branch on your Steam library, and select Properties
Navigate to "Betas" tab
Next to "Beta Participation" select "aux02 - upandcoming"
Steam will begin to download and apply the update
Open Rust - Staging Branch via Steam and play
How to give feedback
To give direct feedback in-game, press F7 and fill out the form, additionally, you can join our Discord and discuss the changes in the channel "staging-aux2"
Mappers
An unfortunate side effect of this revamp is that new assets will be added, and old assets will be removed. This will cause some instability for custom maps and map makers, one example is the older cliff and rock formations will be removed.
We'll post updates on the exact changes in community mapping Discords and our social media closer to release.
TWITCH RIVALS : BASE INVADERS
Buckle up! Base Invaders is back!
This Tuesday, tune in from 8PM BST // 3PM EST as *20* teams of 5 battle it out for up to $1000 per player for the winning team, from a $50,000 prize pool! With a 20x gather rate and teams only being allowed one base and one Tool Cupboard at a time, players need to score points with kills, by controlling hard points, or by destroying enemy Tool Cupboards and more!
The teams feature a range of PvP community favourites, as well as creators from our recent Home-Brewed event, and more! For the full list of teams and rules head here.
Heads up:
The exclusive hoodie and pants Twitch Drops for the Twitch Rivals stream will only be live for roughly 5 hours on Tuesday the 10th of September, on the Twitch Rivals official channel.
The rest of the Twitch Drops will be available from the start of the event until Sunday 15th.
And remember - Facepunch will never DM you about Twitch Drops or giveaways. Beware of any fake websites and scams!
WELLIPETS X RUST
Wellipets’ iconic Frog Boots were added to Rust as a gift for players who owned the game while it was in Early Access between 2013-2018 - as a thanks for supporting us while we took the game from its very humble and janky beginnings, to becoming what it is today.
And now, we've officially partnered with Wellipets to unite both the digital and physical world - An IRL Frog Wellington Boot in original Rust colours (one green, one black), and an exclusive in-game Frog Boot Helmet if you buy the Rust edition of the boots.
Executed in black and Batrachian green and contrasted with their hallmark yellow eyes, these wellington boots boast a distinctive colour combination, both as a legacy Rust item, and now a real, practical but fashionable item. They feature a ladder grip outsole to provide improved traction during wet weather and are decorated with hand painted details at the logo and mouth.
Every physical pair comes with a key to unlock the new in-game item, once shipped. The boots are expected to start shipping at the end of November.
Heya! My name is Daniel, I'm a new member of the Rust development team - I've joined about a month ago. My primary objective is to work on Performance and it's various facets for Rust. I'm hoping to be posting about the ongoing work in the future.
In the coming update, I've made some changes to code that we'll be shipping that will break some mods that rely on our internal object pooling utility, Facepunch.Pool. If you're the owner of one of these mods that see errors around invalid use of "Pool.Free", then you should try switching to "Pool.FreeUnmanaged", and if that still doesn't work, then "Pool.FreeUnsafe"(in last case if you're using FreeUnsafe with a collection, make sure to clear it).
I'm making this breaking change because our old API were unsafe and allowed for memory leaks and bugs. Instead, I've introduced a couple replacements that aim to be stricter and as a result safer.
Pool.Free is now 3 separate methods:
Pool.Free where T : Pool.IPooled or a couple collections with T : IPooled. Calls Clear() and optionally returns each element back to Pool
Pool.FreeUnmanaged where T is a collection of non-IPooled-implementing types. Calls Clear() or an equivalent
Pool.FreeUnsafe for any T, just returns it back to pool
The following methods are marked obsolete and will be removed when October Update lands or have been removed:
Pool.GetList - obsolete
Pool.FreeList - obsolete
Pool.FreeListAndItems - obsolete
Pool.FreeMemoryStream - obsolete
Pool.ClearList - obsolete
Pool.FreeDynamic - removed
LINUX DEDICATED SERVER UPDATE
Our dedicated server builds on Linux currently support Debian 10 / Ubuntu 18 or later. Due to third party software we rely on slowly removing support for these platforms, we will soon be forced to change the minimum requirement for our Linux dedicated server builds to Debian 11 / Ubuntu 20 or later. If you're hosting your own server or offer managed servers to your clients, please update to Debian 11 / Ubuntu 20 or later as soon as possible.
STAY ALERT
TIN CAN ALARM
This month, we're adding the Tin Can Alarm, a new primitive trap made from hanging tin cans.
Crossing its wire will trigger the trap and cause a loud clatter, alerting anyone nearby to your presence.
You can deploy it anywhere from your base to inside monuments. Use it strategically to cover access points and defend your positions.
REPLICATED BUSH SOUNDS
This month, we are changing how the classic bush rustle sounds work. Bush sounds will now be audible to players around you. Just like with footsteps, you now need to take care of when you make noise in bushes. Going slower through a bush makes a quieter sound than when running through it.
This change will also cause the rustles made in hot air balloon tarps to be audible to players nearby, and operates in the same way as the bushes.
UNDERWATER ITEMS
Dropped items that end up in bodies of water will now sink more realistically instead of just dropping like they are still falling through air. As well as slowing down and getting shifted around by currents they will also emit some bubbles as they move and when they hit the ocean floor. This should make finding these items a little bit easier.
ZIPLINE IMPROVEMENTS
We’ve made several changes to the powerline zipline system this month to make it a bit more pleasant to use.
Ziplines will now pick the furthest possible destination instead of the closest
We’ve increased the maximum length a zipline can run from 150m to 185m
Ziplines can now terminate at a higher point on the powerline structure and will pick these higher destinations when possible, reducing the amount of climbing required to continue the zipline.
You can no longer get dismounted by trees when on a zipline. We already had several systems in place to prevent trees spawning in zipline paths, but it still happened very rarely.
These changes should result in longer, higher ziplines that are safer to use.
NPC VENDOR PRICE CHANGES
After looking over the data from last months wipe, it was clear that the dynamic vendor pricing system wasn’t operating as well as it could have. It tended to drop to 50% off all items relatively quickly in the wipe. We’ve made a couple of changes this month:
Price changes now operate in real time rather than based on in-game time. This should be more understandable and will work correctly on servers that manipulate in-game time.
Price changes now take place every 5 real time hours. Last month the prices changed every 15 minutes in real time by default, so this will make the prices change much more slowly.
As usual we’ll keep an eye on this and make changes going forwards.
QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES
Trains break barricades
Trains can break through barricades that are deployed too close to the tracks.
Bike fast turns
Hold the Crouch key while driving to perform a faster turn
Sidecar bike physics
Sidecar bikes now drive more like regular motorbikes.
Horse terrain holes
Horses can now enter terrain holes - Train tunnels, the launch site ramp etc.
Fire mode switch
Switching your gun firemode will now play a sound.
Storage Adaptors collision
Can now walk through Storage Adaptors attached to boxes.
Hurt screen overlay toggle
Can now turn off the blood on screen when getting hurt.
Saved code lock input
The last entered code is now saved between sessions.
SHOCKBYTE X RUST - PARTNERED SERVER HOSTING
We're extremely excited to be partnering with Shockbyte for managed server hosting rental!
After seeing their work with the Minecraft community, and hearing great things from existing Rust users, we've decided to partner with them in an official capacity - endorsing their stability and reliability. You can enjoy full file access, full customization, and oxide support.
Promotional Offer
As part of the promo, new customers can receive an in-game Tool Cupboard skin by renting a server of any tier! Once your new server is delivered Shockbyte will send you information about how to get your sweet freebie!
Here's Shockbyte's story so far:
"Born from a passion for multiplayer gaming in March 2013, Shockbyte has become a leading provider of game server hosting. Over the past decade, our team of dedicated gamers has delivered reliable multiplayer servers worldwide to over 700 thousand customers. Since October 2019, we have supported the Rust community, continuously improving our services based on feedback. Our mission is to simplify game server hosting, allowing absolutely anyone to create their own multiplayer community with ease.
With a growing network of global locations, comprehensive DDOS protection, and a commitment to 100% uptime, Shockbyte has become a trusted provider for Rust communities. We understand the complexities of server hosting and are beyond thrilled to now offer our expertise in a partnered capacity with Facepunch. We believe this is the most exciting era for gaming and are proud to provide community-driven hosting opportunities.
By harnessing player feedback we’ve recently completely revamped the hosting experience and we’re extremely excited to be soon rolling out this new modern experience alongside our partnership with Rust. Our top-tier global hardware and robust DDOS protection ensure the Rust community receives only the best multiplayer support. At Shockbyte, our focus is on delivering an enjoyable online experience, committed to innovation and excellence."
We look forward to hearing about your experiences with their servers and you can get the skin by signing up to any level of hosting through this link or use the button on the in-game menu!!
TWITCH DROPS!
Here we go again! We have worked in a group of your favorite Twitch Streamers and Youtubers that you might recognize!
Facepunch officially turned 15 not too long ago and we wanted to celebrate the occasion by making all of our games 50% off - including Rust and all Rust DLCs!
You can get your discounts on all Facepunch games through the Steam store. Rewind to 2009, when Garry, released Garry's Mod: a sandbox game with no rules, from a mod, to officially listing it on Steam. No objectives, just pure, unadulterated freedom. Want to create a giant robot out of bathtubs? Go for it. Fancy launching a thousand explosive barrels into the sky? Why not! Garry's Mod was, and still is, the ultimate playground for gamers with a wild imagination.
Fast forward to 2013, and we began work on Rust. This isn’t just any survival game; it’s a brutal, post-apocalyptic showdown where you start with nothing but a rock and a dream. Gathering resources, building shelters, forging alliances—or betraying them—Rust has taken survival gaming to a whole new level. It's a place where the only rule is: trust no one, but have fun trying.
And now, in 2024, we're working on our biggest update for Rust yet, with more Twitch events planned, and even more cool things to come to the game for all types of players. There has never been a better time to play Rust.
LOOTROOM 3D PRINTS
It's Official - You Can Now Get Licensed 3D Printed Rust Items!
After years of watching from the side lines, we're proud to officially announce that we've partnered with Lootroom!
Lootroom are now our partner for fully licensed 3D printed guns and more. So we're now working closer with them, providing this lovely and dedicated team with in-game assets to ensure that they continue to deliver high quality products to Rust fans.
Here's Lootroom's story:
"It's mid-2018 and during an exciting Rust weekend with good friends, we kept joking about the fact that furnaces in Rust always have to be running. This gave rise to the desire to have a small real Rust furnace on the desk - as a reminder of this great wipe. It didn't take long and it became clear: a 3D printer was needed!
The test phase went well and we were so impressed with the result that we published the furnace on various platforms and received a lot of positive feedback. When the first purchase requests came in, we knew that the whole thing had potential and that there were many Rust enthusiasts around the world who shared our interest in IRL loot.
After some preparation, a first small online store was created and the perfect name with the necessary domains was also found - Lootroom. Initially, our store only consisted of the furnace in various sizes, followed by the Eoka and the P2. But after countless requests, the Rust AK default was added in May 2020 after a slight delay due to Covid-19 - a real monster compared to the smaller products we had previously offered. For us, this also involved a learning and conversion process, as our previous way of working was geared towards the smaller items. For example, we needed new shipping boxes.
Lone Design, the online store for Rust server plugins, became aware of us quite early on and we were also able to offer our products there - and thus reach even more Rust players. At the same time, we also set up a successful Etsy store and have since broken the magic mark of 1k sales and 100k turnover.
As we became better known, we received more and more requests for different skins and other irl loot. We created internal ranking lists with the most requested items, which we then gradually worked through. Over the years, we have continuously expanded our store and now stock more than 70 different Rust items.
A special milestone was achieved in September 2021: together with one of the most successful Rust content creators ever - Blooprint - we had his Blooprint SAR on offer for a limited time. The demand was overwhelming and it gave us great pleasure to see how much gamers around the world celebrated our products.
We invested in more and more modern 3D printers, a new online presence and founded the official Lootroom GmbH in September 2022, based in Nuremberg, Germany. We now operate more than 20 3D printers that print IRL loot almost continuously. Our factory is streamed live on Twitch, Kick and YouTube to give anyone interested an insight into the creation process.
Naturally, we prioritize the quality of our handmade products while also maintaining a consistent stock to ensure prompt shipping. Customer service and engagement with the Rust community are equally important to us. We have already shipped to over 45 countries around the world and look forward to every new customer that we can make happy with our IRL Loot. We put a lot of passion into our unique products. All of this now leads to the possibility to offer our products as officially licensed Rust IRL loot. We are very hyped and incredibly excited to be working with our friends at Facepunch."
Please go and show them some love, and place an order for your favourite weapon or prop.
They look fantastic as decorative items and we have many around the office and a few of us even have them up in our homes!
TWITCH DROPS
FancyOrb's Global Warfare 2!
FancyOrb's Global Warfare is soon here, with all your favorite creators will be involved with Twitch drops!
Wonder if we could convince Lego to do something official?
YOUTOOZ
We're starting to see everyone's Youtooz figures reach their new homes and we're curious, do you keep yours in the box or do you let them out in the open?
And where in your base are you placing your in-game items?
We loved working on these with Youtooz and we can't wait to show you what else we've got cooking up with them...
The limited edition run of the Heavy Scientist and the Hazmat figures ends soon - get yours here!
Motorbikes can now be found at several monument locations. One is a single-person bike and one has a sidecar as well, where a second player can sit and use weapons.
These are relatively fast and nimble vehicles, useful for quickly traversing the map using low grade fuel. If damaged, they can be repaired with a small amount of Metal Fragments.
BICYCLES
Bicycles can now be found across the map on roadsides, and also at several monuments. The standard bike takes one player, but a three-wheeled variant allows a second player to sit and shoot from the rear.
The bicycles aren't as fast or strong as the new motorbikes, but they're easier to acquire, and they don't use any fuel. Instead, they slowly consume your own food and water levels.
Holding Sprint while biking will have the driver stand up and give you a bit more temporary power and speed. Sprint mode will also automatically engage if you're struggling up a hill. This feature wears out after a few seconds and needs time to recharge.
HANDCUFFS AND PRISONER HOOD
Take your enemies captive with the new Handcuff and Prisoner Hood items!
Use the Handcuffs on a surrendering (friendly gesture) or downed player to take them prisoner - restricting their inventory, belt, use and interact options.
Handcuffed players can be pushed around and forced into vehicles and other mountables.
Place the new Prisoner Hood on your victim to block their vision and disable their map access, preventing them from seeing where you are taking them.
Handcuffed players can hold their attack button to progress the unlock minigame. Fill the progress bar and the Handcuffs break, releasing you! Unlock progress is tied to the Handcuff item condition so that you can always eventually get free - but being damaged or pushed will temporarily interrupt your breakout attempt!
Additionally, performing the friendly gesture - at any time - lets other players inspect your full inventory and modify your belt - a great way to show you're not a threat or hiding something valuable!
TRAVELLING VENDOR
We've added a brand new event! The Travelling Vendor. The vendor will spawn naturally on maps with ring roads (4000+) and traverse the roads.
The vendor sells a selection of wares: from basic building materials to some of the best items in the game. Each time the vendor spawns a random selection of items are chosen to sell, along with a different price each time. If you're lucky, the vendor will decide to sell something at a discount, so keep an eye out!
To get the vendor to stop just run up to it, but don't stand blocking its way for too long or you will be ignored. It can't wait on you forever! It doesn't take too kindly to gunfire or selling to hostiles so make sure you're on your best behaviour.
I want to say a huge thanks to the Rust Discord Community for their incredible work in helping debug and improve the vendor.
QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES
Ceiling Light Wiring Ceiling lights IO points are now easier to target
Improved Barricade Placement Can now place barricades on rocks and dirt roads
DYNAMIC VENDOR PRICING
To introduce a little more variety into the NPC vending system, this month we have introduced a change that increases or decreases the sale price of items purchased with scrap based on that item’s popularity.
The way it works is we now keep a running total of the average number of items sold every 6 in-game hours. Every 6 hours if the number sold is less than the average then the price of the item will drop by 5% for the next 6 hours (down to a minimum of 50%). If the number of items sold has increased above the average then its price will be increased by 10% (to a maximum of 100% extra, or twice the price). We will be starting prices at 200% so they will likely drop for a while before settling to the “market” price.
An example of the logic:
The average amount of SAM sites purchased in a 6 hour window is 150, and the current price has no increases or decreases.
At the end of a 6 hour window we check and see that 155 SAM sites have been purchased.
Since the average has gone up, we raise the price by 10%.
Since the price is now more expensive, sales drop to 120 over the next 6 hours.
Since this is below the average we then drop the price by 5%, which results in a 5% price increase in total.
You can see the current discount and price when looking at an item on the map or in-person, the price displayed is the final price and there’s a small indicator that communicates what the current price change is and what that item’s initial price was. You can easily tell at a glance what items are cheap and what items are expensive, as well as how much they’ve changed price to make informed purchasing decisions.
We’ve only applied this to sales where the currency paid is scrap - vending machines that offer scrap in exchange for items (fish market, resource exchange, etc) are unaffected. This will also not apply to player created vending machines.
Why are we making this change? We believe the NPC vending meta can be shaken up a bit and this seems like a fairer change than us just arbitrarily changing a bunch of prices across the board. This way the prices will increase and decrease based on player behaviour and will vary from server to server. As usual we’ll monitor how this goes over the next month and make changes as necessary.
FURTHER MEMORY IMPROVEMENTS
Building on last month's work to reduce the overall number of objects in Rust to save memory, this month we are rolling out even more improvements. We applied the same principle (reducing the number of objects by combining them when possible) but at the project level, so that most assets are already combined and streamlined in the build and don’t need to be processed when starting the game up. The streamlining process we use here is even more aggressive and results in even greater memory savings while also reducing time spent processing assets.
As well as these optimisations, we’re going to be making last month's renderer improvements now enabled by default.
We believe this approach combined with last month's improvements has resulted in about a gigabyte of reduced memory usage on a fresh server.
This was a huge effort as it involved manually modifying hundreds of assets across the entire game. Thanks to the valiant efforts of our QA team we’ve identified many cases where slight unintentional material and colour changes occurred but it’s possible some more snuck through into the release so please let us know if you see anything that looks incorrect!
Just like last month, we have more improvements in the pipeline for next month including memory improvements to monument foliage and a new process for loading monuments that will hopefully reduce loading times and further reduce memory usage.
UNDERWATER VISIBILITY
Underwater visibility has been messed up for a while now. It was an unintended consequence of us rewriting the way we shade things underwater, to make it more flexible.
That low visibility has now been fixed, but we might continue to tweak it some more in subsequent patches.
ANTI-CHEAT UPDATE
Since our last anti-cheat update back in April, we have banned an additional 65,181 accounts, 10,297 of these were temporary, and the remaining 54,884 were permanent bans. Here's the breakdown per patch:
June - Seismic Shift:
14,949 permanent bans
5,898 temporary bans (86.39% of which were automated)
117,554 reports
May - Meta Madness:
19,876 permanent bans
2,755 temporary bans (91.80% of which were automated),
111,094 reports
April - Waves of Change:
20,059 permanent bans
1,644 temporary bans (94.67% of which were automated)
96,473 reports
NOTES
Patch-specific report data is only from Facepunch Official servers due to data reliability originating from non-official servers, the total number of reports across all server since April is 3,645,165.
Bans that were later reverted are excluded from these metrics.
Bans are placed for multiple reasons. The numbers above do not strictly reflect only cheat-related bans, but cheat-related bans make up the vast majority of bans.
A single player can receive multiple bans, for example, if a user is temporarily banned and then later switched to a permanent ban, this is counted as 2 bans in the above metrics.
Over the last 31-days, we've had 1,751,457 unique players, and close to half a million daily active players. Using the metrics above, it could be interpreted that 1.2% of the player base are cheaters, it's very common for cheaters to use many accounts over the course of the month. Cheaters often receive an account suspension, get another account, receive another ban, rinse and repeat inflating the true number.
The above is to provide context and transparency, not to state we're doing a good job, there is much more to be done in this area, and we are continuing to work on it.
NEXT
In the last anti-cheat blog update, I discussed how we've limited the information cheaters can read and abuse from network data, such as knowing players health and buried stash locations, authorization lists from turrets and tool cupboards. The holy grail would be not networking nearby players and items you can't see.
If a player is behind a hill and you can't see them, don't network the player. If a tool cupboard is inside a base, don't network the tool cupboard. This is server occlusion, and it's difficult to get perfect. We're currently experimenting with this and hope to do a slow rollout over the coming months, pending further internal testing.
Additionally, we're currently working on many experimental features to disrupt cheats, some of these changes are nearly completion and will be deployed Soon™.
Last month, we teamed up with a third party to handle takedowns on our behalf. One of the core objectives is aimed at cheat-related material. The takedowns will be made at the request of Facepunch staff after manual review. There is no automation, and there is no room for innocent content to be taken down.
In the past 30 days, we've taken down over 300 cheats-related media on social platforms
We're working on several other legal fronts, which are too early to discuss
The next anticheat update will be in November
CREATIVE MODE
Creative mode is a new set of native tools Paddy and I have added which allows players to freely build, place and experiment without needing additional plugins. You can enable creative mode for everyone on your server using the server convar "creative.allUsers" or enable it just for a specific player using “creative.toggleCreativeModeUser PLAYERNAME”.
Once enabled, there are several convars you can enable which overrides standard build and placement restrictions:
creative.freeRepair - allows resource free repairs and bypass the repair cooldown
creative.freeBuild - makes all building blocks free and adds the option to spawn blocks in a specific grade. Also allows the Hammer to upgrade and downgrade blocks for free.
creative.freePlacement - removes most placement restrictions when deploying objects. Will allow building in building blocked zones, in other TC zones and when intersecting other objects.
creative.unlimitedIO - allows an unlimited amount of line points and raises the distance limit when wiring IO entities to 200m. Also adds an invisible colour option in the colour wheel.
This was originally made to help our Media team more efficiently build and film content, but we also see this being helpful for QA purposes as well. Hopefully you find it helpful too!
TWITCH DROPS - JULY 26-AUG 2ND
FancyOrb's Global Warfare event takes place and all your favorite creators will be involved with Twitch drops!
We're back with some amazing EpicDesk creator collabs for giant mousepads!
BLOOPRINT
SEBBYK
OILRATS
To order check out their website as each of these deskpad campaigns have different end dates and shipping dates! They are ALL limited editions. Once they end they are gone forever!
SAVE THE DATE!
Coming Late July FancyOrb is bringing you Rust Global Warfare 2!
You won't want to miss this! There will be Twitch drops and all your favorite creators involved.
If you're a creator and you want to be involved with this event join the FancyOrb Discord for updates and how to sign up!
CHARITABLE RUST
Charitable Rust isn't until October, however, if you are a skin artist and would like to be involved with designing charity items for the Item store or Twitch Drops - pay attention over the next few weeks!
Skin contest is slated to take place for the entire month of July!
Contest Rules
Use #CR2024 as official contest tag in Steam workshop.
No re-uploading old or previously submitted skins.
Do not steal or use any copyrighted or otherwise trademarked content.
Must be 100% original work (can work with others if all are listed on workshop page).
Must follow all basic workshop submission rules and standards.
If using the charity’s logo, it cannot be used on any weapon skins. Only Charitable Rust logo may be used on weapon skins.
Submissions must be high quality and Hi-Res, normals properly done/baked.
Cannot contain offensive or sexual content.
Limit of 5 skin submissions per creator.
Skins must be submitted by midnight (23:59) PST July 31, 2024.
This month we're adding the Seismic Sensor, a new electricity-powered deployable.
When powered, it will listen for nearby explosions and send a power signal when detecting any.
You can configure its range from 1 to 30 meters (one foundation = 3 meters)
It will output a different power value depending on the type of explosion detected
A non-exhaustive list of power values from explosives:
1 power = F1 Grenade, Beancan
2 power = Explosive ammo, Satchel
3 power = C4, Rocket
The idea is to let you detect and trigger circuits when you're being raided. Alarms, traps... the possibilities are infinite, we're excited to see what you will come up with!
BARRICADE PLACEMENT
Traditionally, we blocked all forms of building inside Monuments. This made sense back in the day when Monuments were small in size and number, but over the years, the amount of land they take up has increased significantly.
We want to reward players who pick a strategic location during a fight, but it's hard to pick a good location when you're in an empty field!
This is why barricades can now be placed on the terrain around Monuments. This allows you to take cover as you enter and exit monuments, as well as take cover inside the open fields inside Monuments.
Applies to:
Wood barricade
Stone barricade
Concrete barricade
Sandbags
Remember: Monument Structures, Concrete, and Roads still block barricades at this time.
Decay and melee protection has been adjusted to account for more relaxed placement
15 minute decay
8-10 hits with melee
SEE DEPLOY GUIDE OF TEAMMATES
Behold the ability to see what your teammate is placing and where it will be placed! This should clear up the exact location your teammate(s) are shouting while trying to build.
By default, it only will show your teammate's deploy guides when you are building. This can be changed via the options menu to 'Always Show' or to be disabled.
VISUAL FEEDBACK FOR BUILDING BLOCKED
When allowing barricades to be placed into Monuments we realized... it's not that clear where the building blocked of Monuments actually starts!
You will now see a red outline around the edge of monuments.
This can be toggled in the options menu.
Server owners can disable it via a convar if conflicts with custom Monuments. Monument building radius We also took the opportunity to adjust the building blocked size of some Monuments.
Larger
Gas Station
Lighthouse
Mining Outpost
Super Market
Slightly Larger
Dome
Launch Site
Smaller
Arctic Research Base
QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES
Faster Code Locks
Once a code is set, the "last used" button is much faster at entering the code
Bone Fertiliser
Bone fragments can now be used in a composter to create fertiliser
Faster Window Crafting
Window glass, shutters and bars now craft in 15s instead of 30s
Skin Names
See the name of skins at the Repair Bench, and a link to get them
Helicopter Handbrake
Idle helicopters no longer drift down slopes
Reduced Speed Penalty
Horse armour doesn't slow your horse as much
Salvaged Hammer Buff
+100% damage against deployables
Mixing Table Ammo Recipes
Added HV Ammo & Incendiary Ammo to mixing table
Industrial Conveyor UI
Easier to search and setup industrial conveyors
Block Explosives In TCs
Prevent players from stashing their explosives in TCs
Hammer UI Consistency
Hammer always shows all options to reduce misclicks
Reduce F15 Volume
Reduce volume of F15 by 50% to reduce strain on ears
LOD Improvements
Fixed monument prefabs appearing invisible from far
Planter Autofill
Hold Sprint to auto plant all held seeds in a single planter
Vendor Attachments
Able to see the attachments on weapons for sale in vending machines
Chainsaw hit radius
Adjusted the chainsaw hit radius to make it easier to hit the trees' X mark
INSTANT REJOIN
While a queue is better than nothing (who remembers the days of spamming reconnect?), we want to avoid players getting stuck in a queue at all: especially when it's due to a crash.
We have made a few changes to allow players recently kicked from any server to skip the queue.
Holds your spot
5 minutes max
Any type of disconnect (kick, internet outage, crash, alt + f4)
WIRE SLACK
When using the wire tool, you can now adjust the amount of slack in your wire using your mouse wheel while holding LEFT SHIFT.
It's purely visual, it doesn't change anything gameplay-wise, and it also works with hoses and Christmas lights!
PAINTING IMPROVEMENTS
I worked on a bunch of improvements for sign painting this month based on community feedback. There's a mix of QoL and bug fixes, but they should all improve your painting experience!
Changes
Made the painting UI follow your UI scale option
Added a convar to switch which side the painting UI is on (paint.leftsided)
Increased the maximum brush size to 100 (was 32)
Fixed brush sizes below 2 drawing nothing sometimes
Fixed drawn brushes overlapping within the same stroke
Fixed weird color blending behavior for the softest brush
Fixed portrait and landscape frames using an incorrect aspect ratio paint texture (no more squishing and export inconsistency)
This makes painting behave more like other apps
Fixes low opacity values not actually actually being low because the brushes overlap
ELECTRICITY QOL
Medium battery size
Reduced medium battery size by ~15%, now fits under half walls
Tesla Coil & Igniter healing
Tesla Coils and Igniters are now healed by your tool cupboard overtime
Electrical Furnace
Now automatically turned ON or OFF depending on whether they have power
SAM Site
Added a new input to switch your SAM Site targeting mode using electricity
Solar Panel
Solar panels no longer take conditional damage when picked up
Wiring near vehicles
Vehicles no longer prevent you from wiring components
FISHING CHANGES
We’re making several fishing changes this month to try and shake up the broader fishing meta. Our current issue is that it’s quite trivial to endlessly produce fish from a safe zone, then converting that fish to scrap. It’s not the fastest way to earn scrap but it is pretty reliable.
Our intention with the range of fish available to catch was always that you would work your way up the chain - catch a sardine, use that to catch a trout, use that to catch a shark. By allowing raw fish meat to be used as a bait you could easily gut one fish and catch dozens more fish with that meat, which could then be converted into even more fish.
To break this loop, this month raw fish meat is now only worth 0.5 bait (and can be used in stacks of 3) - whole fish can (and should) be used as bait but you now run the risk of losing that fish when casting out. The idea is to introduce a risk/reward mechanic. Do you cash out with your current trout catch or do you put them on line and go for the sharks?
To balance out this reduction in bait, we’ve made several other forms of bait more useful. Several bait types can now be “stacked” - if a fish requires 5 bait to be caught and you stack two Worms worth 2.5 each, you can now catch that fish. This behaviour is applied across worms, grubs, berries and small fish, making these baits more viable. We’ve also increased the bait value of human meat (1 -> 3), bear meat (5 -> 10) and wolf meat (5-> 10). The stack amount can be seen next to the bait value when selecting the item in your inventory.
The Survival Fish Trap became a bit neglected after we introduced the Fishing Rod, so this month we’ve adjusted it to make it more relevant. The trap now uses the same underlying fish/bait system as the rod, meaning you can catch different fish in different water sources as well as catch better fish based on the bait provided. The only mechanical difference between these two fish sources is that the trap cannot catch the same fish as it has used as bait and the trap has a 50% chance to lose the bait without catching the fish.
TECH TREE COMBINING
In order to save some space in bases, I’ve modified the Tech Tree menu to now allow you to browse and unlock techs from lower Tech Trees (eg. Access T1 techs from a T2 bench, access T1 and T2 trees from a T3 bench). Use the tabs in the top left of the screen to switch between available tech trees.
The workbench tax from last month's update is applied based on the Tech Tree level, so there will be no scrap cost changes as a result of this change. The tech tree also now opens immediately when accessing the workbench, saving you a click.
RENDERER MEMORY SAVINGS
In hack week this month, I explored ways to reduce our memory usage, an area that is a real priority for us this year. While a lot of my experiments weren’t workable, one did actually end up saving several hundred megabytes of memory for very little cost, so it’s shipping as disabled by default this month.
A renderer in this case is simply a thing that is visible to the player - a crate, a rock, part of a structure, etc. Importantly for performance each renderer has LODs (Level of Detail) - lower quality versions of each renderer that we switch to based on the distance to the players perspective. In Unity each of these LODs typically lives on a child object of a master parent object, so Barrel01 will have a child Barrel01_LOD0, Barrel01_LOD1, etc that we switch to. What I discovered during hack week is that in a proc gen map of 4.5k size, we can have upwards of 1.3 million objects in the world, each of these objects has some overhead (we need to store its position, rotation, what the object does, etc). In a renderers case, for every single renderer we had 3-5 child objects, one for each LOD level.
I realised that in most cases each LOD object was just sharing a duplicate of all the information except for a different model, so I modified the system to detect when this happens and consolidate all needed information into a single object, then delete the child objects. By applying this to every renderer in the world, I was able to delete 385 thousand objects from the world, which had a combined memory saving of 484mb - pretty significant!
This combination process is run every time the game is launched, we’re currently working on a change to make most of these modifications before we build the game, which should yield further savings next month.
Due to how risky this change is (deleting 385 thousand objects has had some unintended side effects that we’ve now fixed), we’re shipping this new feature off by default, but we’ll monitor it’s usage through the month and likely turn it on by default sometime next month. The convar is graphics.collapseRendererLOD and you’ll need to restart your game after turning it on or off. Let us know how it goes for you!
tldr: 400k less objects 500mb less RAM
HORSE IMPROVEMENTS
It would be amiss to say horses have not had their share of issues over the last few months. So following community feedback I looked into a solution that would resolve the difficulties players have had with horse navigation.
Alongside some minor adjustments to prevent horses from getting stuck and preventing unnecessary stamina depletion, I introduced the ability for horses to walk backwards. This seemed like the most logical approach to alleviate horses getting stuck and should be an overall improvement to navigation.
CINEMATIC ENTITIES
I've added a few more cinematic entities this month for Rust creators to use in their video and image projects. These can be spawned by server owners/admins and can be hidden via console with pre-assigned group numbers.
The new additions include:
More spot and point light (red/blue/green variants)
Unlit backdrops and cyc walls (green/blue/black/white/grey variants)
Flags/cutters (small/medium/large variants)
Visibility Commands
Cinematic entities assigned to different groups which allows them to hidden if desired. Use the command cinematicentity.hideobjects followed by group numbers to hide them.
Cinematic entities are now assigned to specific group numbers which allows them to be hidden if desired. Use the command cinematicentity.hideobjects followed by one or more group numbers to set their visibility to hidden.
The groups are setup like so:
0 = nothing (makes all entities visible)
1 = lighting
2 = backdrops
3 = props
4 = misc (flags/cutters)
You can hide one or multiple groups in the same command line - for example: cinematicentity.hideobjects 1 - Hides lighting only (keeps light effect but hides the mesh) cinematicentity.hideobjects 1 2 - Hides both lighting and backdrop meshes cinematicentity.hideobjects 0 - Shows/un-hides all cinematic entities
You can also hide cinematic entity groups in demos with cinematicentity.demohideobjects followed by the same group numbers above. To revert to the visiblity of the entities back to their original states from the demo recording, use cinematicentity.removedemooverride
TWITCH DROPS
Join us for the Bellum Redemption event June 10th-17th!
There will be Twitch drops so be sure you get synced!
Please be aware of scams. Facepunch will never contact you. Only ever use our official website. https://twitch.facepunch.com/
TURRET INTERFACE VISUAL FEEDBACK
Turret interference has been effective at preventing players from surrounding their base in 100s of turrets, however it lacked feedback on how exactly to stay under the limit.
Turret interference will now be shown while holding a wire tool and looking at a turret.
It will also be shown in the hotbar while building.
While this is accurate most of the time keep in mind this only counts turrets you are authed on (it ignores enemy turrets). This mismatch is required to prevent players from holding a turret and seeing how many turrets are inside an enemy's base.
Any movement in rust would modify your baseline Aimcone so that shots taken while in motion were somewhat inaccurate. This was supposed to discourage "running and gunning". The problem with this is that *any* kind of motion while in a firefight puts you at a disadvantage (minor dodging) and increases the amount of RNG experienced by the player.
What I've done is reduced this penalty to zero to start, and blend it up to the full amount after 4 rapid fire shots. This means is you can now strafe and dodge while tap firing and not experience a huge aiming penalty, however full auto will be penalized.
I've also adjusted the Aimcone curve modifiers for a few weapons so that more shots have a higher probability of landing closer to the center. This has been applied to the Custom SMG, SAP and LR300.
WEAPON + ATTACHMENT UPDATES
Weapon mods have received some love this month.
BURST MOD
The duration between bursts while using the burst mod has been significantly reduced to 2x firerate instead of 3x firerate.
HOLOSIGHT
The holosight mesh has had its edges thinned so that less of your vision is obscured while using it. This is a stopgap until we produce a new model for it. I've also fixed the Holosight reticle being affected by motion blur.
MUZZLE BRAKE & BOOST
Both the muzzle brake and muzzle boost have had their negatives reduced, they now have less damage reduction and less damage falloff and should prove to be far more useful.
LR300 TWEAKS
In addition, I've made some changes to the recoil, damage fall off, bullet velocity, and burst mode of the LR300. This should now be the best in class AR.
Everything subject to change.
SAFEZONE RECYCLERS
Starting today, Recyclers in safezones have been nerfed. Their cycle time has been increased to 8 seconds and they now yield 80% of what they used to. This is the price you now must pay for safety.
However, the recyclers found at monuments have the same cycle time as before but now yield 120%! This is to reward players taking the risk out in the open.
While I am aware that a great many keyboards may be smashed as the death screen fades in over the droning hum of the active recycler, I still have hope this helps usher in a new era of roaming and monument combat.
SALE SALE SALE!
Some great items were not used because they were way too expensive. To that end I've made the following changes:
HV Ammo - Gunpowder cost reduced significantly, and the yield per craft increased to match non HV ammo.
Torpedos - Craft yield increased from 3 to 5.
Incendiary Rockets - The cost has been drastically reduced and their damage + flame spread increased.
Drones - Tech trash is no longer a requirement for drones.
HMLMG - Gear cost has been reduced.
EXTERNAL STRUCTURE CHANGES
Large External Gates and Walls now require the player to stand still for 1.5 seconds when placing, making them less useful for immediate PvP encounters in the wild. We felt that being able to place down such large structures in a short amount of time felt at odds with our style of combat that rewards situational awareness and environmental tactics.
WOODEN BARRICADE RESIZE
To fill the void left by the external wall changes regarding dynamic cover during PvP, we have doubled the size of the deployable wooden barricade. The wooden barricade remains instantly deployable and provides a moderate amount of cover on-demand without being overpowered or polluting the landscape with large, unsightly deployable.
This is without a doubt a large shift to PvP, we'll be monitoring these changes carefully
BRADLEY CHANGES
Some further tweaks to the Bradley this month.
Scientists now spawn in stages, based on the Bradley's health, and there's some Heavy scientists thrown in the mix now, too.
At 80% health, 2 scientists will spawn
At 60% health, 4 more will spawn
At 40% health, 6 final scientists will spawn
There's also been some tweaks to make some of the Scientists more aggressive and use varying attack angles.
DOOR CONTROLLER
You can now use door controllers without worrying about raiders abusing them to open your doors! This is accomplished by unpairing door controllers once your TC is destroyed & requiring code lock authorization for pairing.
They also are much easier to setup as they can now be placed just like code locks.
This should reduce the pain of constantly opening and closing the doors of your base... especially when your teammates tend to leave them open.
Now deployable on doors like code locks
Automatically paired when placed
Added 2 new side inputs : 'Open' and 'Close'
Unpaired when the associated tool cupboard is destroyed
We also carried on improving electricity by adjusting components and fixing various bugs this month. Thanks again to the community for reporting bugs and suggesting ideas.
We know the latest helicopter changes had some mixed feedback, so we've revised them. No go zones should feel a lot more fair, and most major bugs experienced with heli since the last update are now patched.
Monument Crashing - the helicopter will now attempt to crash at a nearby monument on death. It won't crash at monuments with safe zones: outpost, fishing village, etc. This can be disabled by server owners via: patrolhelicopterai.monument_crashing
Flee Behavior - heli would previously flee when it sometimes didn't mean to. Damage to start a flee has been tweaked, ensuring a flee every time you quickly remove 30% of its overall HP.
Numerous Fixes & Improvements - heli will now properly target you on boats, cargo, trains and other moving entities. Targeting fixes and performance improvements have been made throughout the code. More legacy bugs: such as heli not exploding immediately on impact with certain terrain are also fixed.
LAUNCH SITE LOOT
The Launch site loot had received an overhaul. Before, the loot inside the main building shared the same respawn group as the rest of the launch site, meaning loot inside the main building was never guaranteed. Loot had a chance to spawn elsewhere at the monument, which felt discouraging when completing the puzzle and running the main building.
The main site building now has a dedicated respawn group, which guarantees 23 loot crates when the puzzle resets.
Additionally, more loot now spawns throughout the monument.
UNDERWATER IMPROVEMENTS
Underwater vision has been improved substantially. You can now see much farther when using goggles and even more so when viewing out a submarine porthole.
In addition, the surface accuracy of submarine torpedoes has been vastly improved and torpedoes were made cheaper to produce by way of an increased craft yield. Lastly, the duo submarine fires torpedoes slightly faster than the solo.
BUILDING QOL
Tool Cupboard Auth Friend
Can authorize other players on a tool cupbard
Demolish High Walls
Can demolish high walls & gates for 10min after placement
Fixed High Wall Snapping
Hold SHIFT to disable snapping
Foundation Placement
Fixed foundation placement under roofs & floors
Foundation Debris
Foundations now drop debris
Floor Debris
Floors now drop debris
TECH TREE CHANGES
We’re making some changes to how the Tech Tree works to try and incentivise new styles of play. Starting this month you will notice that the T2 and T3 workbench tech trees now have a tax rate applied to them which will increase the cost of unlocking items. We’re starting this at 10% for T2 and 20% for T3. This cost increase only applies to unlocking via the Tech Tree, researching items via the Research Table is unchanged.
Our thinking behind this is that we feel the Tech Tree progression path has become a little stale and needs to be shaken up, but we don’t want to lose the advantages that the Tech Tree brought to progression - making difficult to find blueprints attainable in a way that felt fair and not as at the mercy of RNG. While there are a number of avenues we can use to try and make both forms of progression feel more balanced this feels like a simple and understandable starting point.
As with all of our changes we’ll be closing a close eye on this and will likely make further changes in the future.
CARGO SHIP CHANGES
It’s been great to see the reception to last month's Cargo Ship/harbor update, we hope you’ve all enjoyed some very (very) intense firefights. Based on the feedback we received we’re making a couple of changes this month:
The Cargo Ship will now dock at both harbors (if they exist) on a map before leaving. Note that any containers that have already been placed on a ship will be deleted when it starts its approach to the next harbor.
You can now mouse over the ship on the map to see if it has already docked.
The containers that are spawned to be placed on the Cargo Ship will now be spawned when it starts its approach (about 100m away from the harbor) rather than when the ship arrives at its dock, giving you more time to hide in the containers.
The container spawn points have been mildly tweaked so that all of the containers should be accessible, although you might need to do some climbing.
We hope these changes make the event a bit more understandable at a glance as well as make the combat encounters more interesting.
VIEWMODEL RENDERERS
Since implementing a dedicated viewmodel renderer system back in April 2021, all of our viewmodels have been split between the old and new system. The primary stumbling blocks were viewmodels with lots of particle effects and lights (torches, flamethrowers, etc). While we covered most of the high impact cases of viewmodel jittering by supporting guns (how often do you use the birthday cake on oil rig?) we’ve been wanting to consolidate everything for a while. This month we’ve updated all of the viewmodels to use the new renderer so they should appear smooth and jitter free regardless of where you are in the world. The affected viewmodels:
Both flamethrowers
Water Bucket
Beancan Grenade
Molotov Cocktail
Flashlight
Birthday Cake
Garry’s Mod Toolgun
Poker playing cards
Lunar New Year spear
Minigun
Paddle
You should see no visible changes if it's all working correctly.
AI PERFORMANCE FIXES
I've investigated and addressed a couple of AI performance issues that were causing the AI to take longer to process than necessary, especially on servers that have been running for a while.
This should help with AI server performance across the board.
EFFECTS PERFORMANCE
After noticing occasional framedrops during gunfights, I've spent some time investigating the issue and found out that our impact effects prefab warmup wasn't working as intended.
All impact effects are now warmed up correctly during loading times.
This should drastically reduce the stuttering when spawning a big amount of effects prefab for the first time (e.g when a fight starts and bullets start flying). This has a very little if no impact on loading times.
MAP UPLOADING
Procedural maps are now automatically uploaded from game servers to our backend so players can just download them instead of generating them when they first join the server.
This should significantly reduce the time it takes to join a server for the first time after it wipes. It may also reduce the number of players seeing "Rust is not responding" popups while joining servers for the first time.
HARMONY 2
Harmony is Rust's built-in modding platform shipped with the server. It powers modding frameworks like Oxide & Carbon, as well as standalone mods.
We upgraded from Harmony 1.2 -> Harmony 2.3 which brings us up to date with the latest features & additional stability.
This requires mod authors to recompile their Harmony mods. Fortunately the majority of mods only need to change a single line.
Before using Harmony;
After using HarmonyLib;
Players shouldn't need to worry as the majority of large servers already started updating their mods before the update went live. Server owners please keep an eye out for mod updates as every Harmony Mod will needed to be updated.
ELECTRICITY CHANGELOG
Tesla Coil, Igniter To stop them from self-destructing, they are now disabled upon reaching <10% of their max health. No longer take damage when picked up
Electrical Branch Reduced minimum branch out power from 2 to 1
Button Reduced press time from 5s to 1s
Storage Monitor Will now recognize partial stack changes and pass power through when removing or adding a items to a stack
Splitter Fixed power distribution issue when not all outputs were used
Memory Cell Fixed side inputs triggerable by 0 power circuits
Timer Switch Fixed an issue where its side input was triggered inconsistently by circuits update (e.g: industrial conveyor updating its state)
Counter When set to 'Show Passthrough', it now displays its passthrough even if nothing is connected to its output No longer requires a connection to its output to display its passthrough when set to 'Show Passthrough'
AND, OR, XOR Switch No longer emit light when unpowered
Industrial Conveyor Can be placed upside down again
Industrial Light No longer referred as Simple Light when looking at IO connection handles
Smart Switch No longer referred as Switch when looking at IO connection handles
COMMUNITY UPDATE 260
RUSTIC REEF AMUSEMENT PARK
Last blog I showcased many of the big-hitters in the Rust Creative Arts community. This month they have literally combined forces to play together for an entire month and managed to make a giant amusement park on the water!
I present to you: Rustic Reef
From a life size DDR game, to a roller coaster. They even managed to mimic a ferris wheel.
Philieve breaks down who's doing what and how the whole project came about.
DaVinci gives us the scenic tour!
And pyromaniac Silverfox shows off his firework skills.
I'll try and do a better job of giving you all a heads up next time they do a project like this so people can experience it in real time! Absolute legends.
ROCK - BOXING CHAMPION
Who is the greatest rock fighter in Rust? Can a "nobody" defeat the Rock - Boxing World Champion?
COUNTING SARS
Balding Bus brings us a real toe-tapper Rust parody music video!
IRL RUST ELECTRICAL
Our friend over at Real & Game has outdone himself once again.
Made an entire Rust electrical setup IRL.
TWITCH DROPS
Soon™
SHOW ME THE STUFF!
If you made something cool or saw something cool, reach out! Tag me on X or u/ErrnieGerrn Reddit.
WAVES OF CHANGE
CARGO SHIP DOCKING
We’ve given both Harbors a fresh coat of paint this month, with a significant amount of visual and gameplay changes. These changes support the new Cargo Ship docking process, which allows the ship to adjust it's course and dock with the harbor.
Each harbor has a new island that can be reached by crossing a rotating bridge, floating containers or a daring set of jumps across cranes. This island becomes a stronghold once the Cargo Ship docks as it becomes sheltered from the rest of the harbor.
The ship will pick the first harbor it passes to dock and will only dock once. Once docked, the cranes in the Harbor will spring into life and move several containers from the docks onto the deck of the ship. These containers have openable doors and can be hidden in, so they present a new way to smuggle aboard the ship and another threat for players already on the ship to contend with. These containers will be deposited in locations that are generally above the deck, in some cases by several meters. This should present an interesting tactical situation when attacking the ship as well as defending it.
We’ve also added two ship doors above the water line that allow access to the lower interior level of the ship and provide additional ways to board or traverse the monument while the ship is docked.
By default the Cargo Ship replenishes it's loot every 10 minutes - up to 3 times. When the ship docks at the harbor it will attempt to trigger one of those loot refreshes, although if all three have already happened it will be unable to spawn any more loot.
The Cargo Ship horn will sound 60 seconds prior to it's departure - once you hear that horn it's time to get moving or you might end up back out at sea.
We think these changes combined will lead to Cargo Ship being a much more contested PvP environment for groups of all sizes. We're also interested to see how a traditionally lower intensity monument like the Harbors adjust to periodic bouts of high intensity action.
OILRIGS
The Oilrigs receive an upgrade this month, with an underwater access. This new way to get onto the Oilrig will add a path into both structures Level 3 floors.
This provides a different, and possibly safer way into the monument. It is also a way to counter the players on board by short circuiting the docks at the rigs water line.
The extra rooms inside see the addition of a CCTV desk that allows you to observe in place the camera feeds of the monument.
MINIGUN
The iconic minigun has been added to the game which is used by the Heavy Scientists. It takes a moment to spin up, but when it does, it unleashes a massive amount of ammunition, making targets much easier to hit.
It's a rare drop useable by players and you must be at a workbench level 2 to add ammunition to it as it cannot be reloaded in the field. It also takes 1.5 seconds to spin up and lowers your movement speed while the spin is engaged.
RETRO TOOL CUPBOARD
We're thrilled to announce Rust's first-ever tool cupboard DLC skin! The Retro Tool Cupboard can be crafted as usual using the skin picker or applied to an existing Tool Cupboard using the Spray can item.
The Retro Tool Cupboard monitors display live information such as upkeep time, resources, and the number of blocks used to calculate upkeep costs. However, the data is only visible on the monitors when authorized.
The Retro Tool cupboard doesn't require power, the lower half of the Retro Tool Cupboard behind the glass panel displays current inventory upkeep amounts and tools.
When approaching the Retro Tool cupboard design, we felt aesthetics were critical. The tool cupboard is the heart of any base and should be instantly recognizable.
You can purchase Retro Tool cupboard skin in-game or at Steam's item store.
MILITARY FLAMETHROWER
In addition to the minigun, the Heavy Scientists have had their arsenal upgraded with a new, military tier flamethrower. This weapon deals massive damage to targets up to 12 meters away and creates walls of fire - which can be used for area denial.
I've also modified how flamethrowers deal damage to players making them an extremely effective PvP weapon.
PATROL HELICOPTER IMPROVEMENTS
The patrol helicopter was one of the largest banks of 'older' code still in the game. It's stood up well, but there were a bunch of fixes and improvements that needed to happen. Let's start with the improvements.
Orbital Strafing/Strafing Changes
The regular helicopter attack strafe was getting pretty old. It followed a regular pattern and most of our values were fixed internally. This has been changed. During an attack run the helicopter will randomise a bunch of values, including: rocket amount, drop off distance, turn speed etc. These are relatively minor adjustments, but they should help make each new fight with the helicopter feel a little more fresh.
We also added a new attack phase in the strafing run. The helicopter will turn, begin orbiting your position and pummel you with rockets from all directions. This will randomly happen after each strafe. It's super fun to play, and helps bring back the excitement and danger of taking heli.
Aggro Improvements
A new 'zones' feature has been introduced. These are invisible to the player. When a player damages heli a zone is updated/created and the zone is assigned a score. This score is based on how much damage heli has taken from that specific zone.
Heli will now seek out targets based on zones and damage scores rather than the perceived randomness of before. When there are minimal players and by extension - minimal zones. Heli will work similarly to before, but when more zones are introduced heli will prioritise attacking the people that are attacking it, in a more controlled and deliberate manner.
You are still free pickings to the side gunners, but your house shouldn't be blasted anymore in the confusion.
No-Go Zones
When taking heli, the basic principle is to get, and keep aggro. No-Go zones make this a little more difficult, and now encourage some movement when taking heli. When a zone performs enough damage to heli too quickly, then that zone is marked as a no-go zone. Heli will flee the area, and attempt to avoid it as best as it can. This is to encourage heli to get out of areas that are going to kill it too quickly. Encouraging bigger groups to chase, build defenses as they go and bring more PVP to the whole map.
Bug Fixes/Changes
A bunch of legacy bugs that existed with heli are now patched. These include being stuck on targets, disappearing mid-fight, not exploding in the ocean, as well as a bunch of proxy issues that were fixed by the aggro adjustments. Other adjustments have also been made to how heli patrols work, and you should see it moving around a bit more now, rather than just sticking to the monuments.
Server Convars
patrolhelicopterai.use_danger_zones - this will enable/disable the no go and aggro zones. When turned off, the helicopter will largely behave the way it used to with target picking and aggression.
patrolhelicopterai.flee_damage_percentage - this sets the required percentage of damage done to heli in order for it to flee and create a no-go zone. A value of 1 or over will effectively disable no go zones and stop the flee mechanic.
It will no doubt need some further revisions and changes after this release. Keep us updated on how your heli takes go. Have fun!
ELECTRICITY
This month we are taking care of our fellow electricians! Bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and major changes are coming to electricity.
CHANGES
First of all, we removed any power requirements from all logic gates.
Being creative and adding logic to your circuits won't be at the expense of acquiring a linear or exponential amount of power any more. While being a great quality of life for master electricians, we also believe that removing this pain point will increase the use of electricity in general.
Therefore, the following components won't require power or drain batteries anymore:
Splitter
Electrical Branch
Blocker
Root Combiner
Memory Cell
RAND Switch
XOR Switch
AND Switch
OR Switch
Timer
Switch
Smart Switch
Counter
Pressure Pad
Button
Any other active components like turrets, sensors, lights, etc.. remain unchanged and will still need power to function.
BUG FIXES
These power limitations were also overly amplified by a multitude of power drain bugs and unintended behaviors that we worked on fixing.
Here are the most important ones:
Fixed AND, & OR gates draining batteries on both sides instead of only the side with the highest power input
Fixed auxiliary inputs/outputs draining power unnecessarily
Fixed memory cell draining battery on both sides instead of from the active output
Prevent electrical branch from draining power when nothing is connected to its branch out side
Fixed unpowered components draining batteries, much more common now that branches do not waste power anymore
QUALITY OF LIFE
Along these changes, we worked on improving how you deploy electrical components: Fixed the differences between the deploy guide and the actual position where your component is placed Components are now aligned to walls and won't rotate based on your view angle You can now align your components together when deploying them on walls by holding left shift
This applies to all electricity, industrial and fluid items. We're planning on extending it to any type of deployable in the future.
NEXT STEPS
There as more fixes and improvements that didn't make it into this patch. Expect more in the coming months, including plans to rework some components and extending their functionalities.
Many thanks to our electricians community for pointing out bugs and suggesting ideas.
FULL CHANGELOG
Splitter
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
Now distributes power evenly across all outputs and add any remaining power to the earliest outputs, ensuring no power loss
Electrical Branch
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
Won't drain any power when nothing is connected to its left side
Blocker
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
Root Combiner
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
Memory Cell
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
Fixed draining battery on both sides instead of from the active output
Fixed power passthrough being shown on both outputs instead of on the active one
Side inputs won’t drain power any more
RAND Switch
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
Now passes power when ON and blocks power when OFF
Now resets to OFF
XOR Switch
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
AND Switch
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
Fixed batteries getting drained when only one side is powered
OR Switch
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
Fixed batteries getting drained on both sides instead of only the side with the highest power input (if both input have the same power, the first input is chosen by default)
Timer
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
Side inputs won’t drain power any more
Now configurable when unpowered
Switch
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
Fixed aux inputs draining power
Fixed aux inputs passing power through
Fixed red LED not showing up when receiving power but toggled off
Counter
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0 Max target number: 100 -> 999
Side inputs won’t drain power any more
Fixed power passing power through when under their target value
Pressure Pad
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
Fixed blocking power passthrough for a bit when triggered
Button
Power Consumption: 1 -> 0 Active Usage: 1 -> 0
Laser Detector
Now deployable on any surface angle
Tweaked handles position to make it easier to wire
Ceiling Light
Fixed being powerable using only 1 power instead of 2
Flasher Light
Restored blue material emission when ON
Tweaked handles position to make it easier to wire
Reactive Target
Now resets itself automatically only after being knocked down
Won't generate and pulse 1 power when lowered manually
When both lower and reset inputs are powered, the one with the highest power takes over
Industrial Conveyor
Fixed aux output passing 1 power regardless of the current energy
Industrial Crafter
Now drains 1 power correctly when ON
Small Generator
Aux inputs won’t drain any power any more
ANTI-CHEAT UPDATE
At the beginning of the year, In the development blog Surviving a Decade, I mentioned, "This year we're dedicating more resources into anti-cheat than ever", this is a commitment we're dedicated to, and I want to share more information about what we've been up too.
Over the past couple of months, we have slowly eliminated or limiting information leaks which cheaters abuse to aid them in several ways. For example, players health, Tool Cupboards and turret authorization lists could be read in the network data, allowing cheaters to use and gain a further unfair advantage. These are now fixed.
In continuing efforts to battle cheaters and clean up many long-standing issues, especially around information leaks, buried stashes are no longer networked, meaning cheaters will no longer know where stashes are buried.
There is much more to be done in this area, and we are working on it.
Expanding the support team size over the past year has allowed us to get more support staff focusing on anti-cheat, which includes going in-game and dealing with and disrupting cheaters directly based on player reports. Some staff over the coming months will be dedicated solely to anti-cheat measures full-time. This isn't limited to Facepunch servers, but across the board.
In addition to the above, we've deployed some stricter measures surrounding anti-cheating, eliminated several priority exploits, and will deploy further measures soon.
In the last month:
26,954 bans have been applied
22,542 of which were permanent
4,412 of which were temporary
949,422 cheating reports received
90.8% of bans were applied automatically
Since the 1st January 2024:
84,753 bans have been applied
71,371 of which were permanent
13,382 of which were temporary
3,116,133 cheating reports received
92.9% of bans were applied automatically
Based on fiscal quarters:
72,849 bans applied in 2023 Q1
65,608 bans applied in 2023 Q2
81,682 bans applied in 2023 Q3
55,672 bans applied in 2023 Q4
81,084 bans applied in 2024 Q1
Notes
Bans are placed for multiple reasons, the numbers above do not strictly reflect only cheat-related bans, but cheat-related bans do make up the vast majority of bans.
A single player can receive multiple bans, for example, if a user is temporarily banned and then later switched to a permanent ban, this is counted as 2 bans in the above metrics.
BRADLEY SCIENTISTS
The Bradley has some new passengers this month!
Scientists can now deploy from the Bradley to help defend it with some extra firepower.
This applies to both the Launch Site Bradley and the Bradley that spawns along roads at the end of the month.
IMPROVEMENTS & FIXES HIGHLIGHTS
Seed Sack World Model
Added new seed world model
Mushroom World Model
Added mushroom world model
Monument CCTV Station
New dedicated CCTV station within monuments
SRV DNS SUPPORT
I added support for SRV DNS record to Rust. This means you can now create nice domain names for your servers without needing to specify the port (or be forced into the default port).
I also used this added information to improve the favorites list. Servers that have a working DNS record set up would save the domain name when favoriting so that favorites should never break as long as the domain name is pointing to the right place.
More information on how to set this up is on the wiki.
PING ESTIMATION
If you have searched for new servers in the browser you probably noticed the large amount of fake ping: it's impossible to have 30ms ping to both a US and EU server. This is a side effect of certain forms of DDOS protection and has forced us to create a custom system to estimate ping rather than use steam's ping value.
There is a new checkbox below "Use Cache" called "Estimate Ping". We will enable this by default in the future once we confirm the estimated values are more accurate than the existing ones.
