Servers are now wiped, Santa is packing up and clearing out the bodies, 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, we're looking forward to the journey ahead in 2023!
Later this year will celebrate Rust's 10th Birthday, which has been an incredible journey. We have some big plans to finish out the year, we'll share details in the coming months.
In this blog, we'll look back at 2022, some of Rust's achievements, and give a sneak peek at what to expect from us in 2023.
What can you expect from us in 2023? More of the same! Guaranteed monthly updates every first Thursday of the month, along with occasional hotfixes and holiday events.
NEXT MONTH
In February, we'll release the industrial update, which includes the electric furnace, item piping and filtering, allowing you to automate many aspects of your base storage troubles.
Can't wait till February? Starting tomorrow Rust Staging Aux2 branch will be publicly playable, allowing everyone to test and give feedback.
HAPIS ISLAND RETIREMENT
Additionally, in February, we'll be permanently retiring Hapis Island map, this will be your last month to play Hapis.
We'll be launching another map maker competition in the coming weeks.
FORWARDS
We have a ton of content currently in development, if you're keeping an eye on our commits page, you'll already know. This year you can expect to see new monuments such as the Nuclear Missile Silo Monument, Ferry Terminal and more. New DLC such as building block skins, new items and weapons and so much more.
We're excited to announce that hJune has teamed up with Rustoria again for the next Trust in Rust tournament on Sunday, January 15th, 2023.
Tournament starts at 1:00PM PST / 9:00PM GMT.
THERE WILL BE TWITCH DROPS!
Some exclusives for the event and general drops you can earn from your favorite creator channels.
THIS IS A CHARITY EVENT!
Proceeds from exclusive store skins sales and event donations go to You Are RAD. Rise Above the Disorder is a non-profit mental health organization that provides counseling for a lot of the gaming community.
They are creating a fund for our very own Rust community. Anyone, anywhere, can have access to free therapy sessions regardless of their financial situation so they can begin on their journey of healing.
More details to come later. Watch socials and our community blog next week!
From everyone at Facepunch, we'd all like to wish you a Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone!
The Christmas Event is once again live! If you haven't been around for this before, here's what you can expect:
Every once in a while you will hear the sound of jingle bells. Run outside and look for a gift! Two gifts are spawned per player, in a radius of about 40m from where you are standing. Run up and bash it open to receive your Christmas presents. They come in three sizes: small, medium, and large. If you have enough small presents stashed, you can "trade up" to a medium or large. The contents of each present vary, but you'll find a mix of resources, weapons, and candy.
Once again, you will be able to find Santa hats and reindeer antlers, both of which can be worn and provide a decent amount of protection. There’s also a lickable candy cane club, and two types of stockings. If you hang a stocking inside your base when the jingle bells ring the stocking will fill up with loot. The larger stocking has a higher chance for better items and both last around 5-10 refills.
The advent calendar 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.
The Christmas event ends on January 5th @ 19:00GMT
Run, run fast as you can, the gingerbread men are coming! Gingerbread houses have mysteriously started appearing throughout the world, leading to an underground dungeon, smelling a little like grandma's baking, but be careful, it's not going to be a cakewalk if you enter!
Server owners can adjust the portal count using the xmasdungeon.xmaspopulation convar.
Please also be following the Rust Twitter so we can DM you. If we do not get a response within 1 week of the winner announcement a new winner will be chosen.
Evaluation
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 :)
Terms
This competition is run by Facepunch Studios Ltd at Concept House, Elmore Green Road, Bloxwich, Walsall, UK. The competition ends on January 5th 2023 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.
Rust turns 9 this month, that's 9 years of weekly and monthly updates. We’ll celebrate for one day only on 11th December with in-game birthday cake and hats.
In the January end of years blog, we'll talk more about how 2022 has gone, what we've achieved and what we learned as well as our upcoming plans.
Car keys have been removed from the game and replaced with code locks, which should be a lot more useful. These can be added at a vehicle lift in the same way key locks were added, and for the same price (75 metal fragments).
Features:
Add, change, or remove code locks from a car at any vehicle lift.
Code locks prevent mounting the vehicle - except for taxi modules - and also prevent access to storage. Players in a taxi module cannot swap seats to any other type of module.
To capture a car with code locks, you can reduce the health of a seating module to 20% or less, which will enable an option to break the lock.
Alternatively, if you can push the car to a vehicle lift, a new code can be set there. Note that locked cars cannot be pushed in safe zones.
A mounted player can flip the Central Locking switch in a cockpit module to unlock all doors, temporarily disabling code access. Code locks on the exterior of the car will light up green instead of red. If all players in cockpit modules dismount, the central locking is automatically re-engaged.
After entering the correct code, players are automatically whitelisted, and won't need to enter the code again.
We've added a static (non-moving, indestructible) train caboose at the Outpost, which has the standard casino games inside: Poker, Slots, and the new Blackjack machine - so now you can play without the constant fear of death!
The debris system was introduced in 2019 to prevent the ability to replace walls and doors during raids immediately, we feel this system has worked well but often still see raids won purely from spamming walls. To make it a little fairer for the raiders, from today, external walls and gates now have the debris system applied.
When external gates or walls are destroyed, they'll now leave debris for 2 minutes.
Players will now be automatically notified via a small UI prompt when world events begin, such as Cargoship, Oilrig crate, Ch47 Cargo etc. We hope this encourages players to engage with world events more actively and addresses a growing problem of players using third-party services to gain this information instantly before others and having an unfair advantage.
We acknowledge a UI notification is not the best solution, but for now, it'll put everyone on the same playing field while we work towards a better solution in the near future.
Burst Following last month's burst module implementation, I have made the following changes and improvements:
Burst can now be toggled using the "M" bind
Burst module slightly lowers aim cone
LR & MP5 The LR and MP5 has seen lower usage since the recoil changes, players who used to opt for the LR often now feel more confident using the AK, so we're experimenting with the following changes:
MP5 and LR now have inbuilt burst module
We'll continue monitoring and adjust accordingly in future updates.
Slug Ammo Slug ammo is regularly used over large distances effectively, whilst it's great to see slug ammo used to a greater effect with the recent changes, we agree with player feedback it's too effective. The slug should be a hard-hitting option in close to mid-range combat and less effective over larger distances, so I've made the following changes:
Slug now does 50% damage at 40 meters+ instead of 75% damage at 80+
Mining quarries have been updated to run on diesel fuel and output rates greatly improved. In the past, quarries have seen little to no use. We hope these improvements will encourage their use more. We'll be monitoring and tweaking accordingly.
In addition to spawning at the Dome, Oil Rigs and Junkyard, diesel fuel now spawns at the following monuments: Water Treatment Plant, Power Plant, Military Tunnels and Airfield.
For some background, network groups are what Rust servers use to figure out which entities to network to players. It basically divides the world up into chunks and tracks which entities are within each chunk. This way the Rust server just needs to network the few chunks around each player.
Previously the world was divided up into a two dimensional grid of chunks, and that worked great for a long time, but then we added the underground tunnels. Using two dimensional network groups means the tunnels would network to players up on the surface, and players in the tunnel are being networked things from the surface, which isn't great because they can't see any of that so it's just wasted work.
I updated the network group system this month to add support for vertical layers. So now, instead of a just a single two dimensional grid, it essentially stacks multiple two dimensional grids on top of each other and uses entity's altitude to figure out which layer it belongs on.
Tunnel entities will no longer network to the surface, and the surface will no longer network to players in the tunnels. We have found that this can save up to 0.4ms of frametime on the surface by not networking tunnel NPCs to the client.
I've made a few improvements to help with some of the complaints that people have with Junkpiles.
The bushes that spawn with junkpiles now block AI line of sight. This should make the Scientists easier to spot when they're shooting at you because they will no longer stand in the middle of a bush.
I've also made the junkpile Scientists more defensive in nature, and they won't engage from as far as they used to.
Lastly, I've tweaked the AI data for the junkpile cover positions so they're fully in cover, which has the knock on effect of reducing return fire.
I've added some biome and topology-specific functionality:
Animals will no longer roam directly to ocean-side locations, to help keep them away from beaches.
Polar bears will now only roam to arctic and tundra areas, and they will also now return to these areas if they need to leave briefly for any other reason.
I've added a menu option for eating world foods, such as berries, corn, mushrooms, etc, directly from the ground. Look directly at the food and hold E then select "Eat".
Building jump ups used to be difficult when you had to look down precisely to get it to snap to the correct place. It now will correctly try to attach to the top of walls.
Filling lockers was difficult with the amount of left click dragging required. You should now be able to mindlessly right click armor and have it go into all the correct slots.
As mentioned in last month's blog, Steam networking was planned to be switched to the default networking layer for Rust today. Due to several issues discovered recently (now fixed), we're postponing enabling Steam networking by default until January, by then, we hope to be completely satisfied with server stability.
As a reminder: This change requires servers to have a separate Steam query port set via the -queryport server startup parameter. When no query port is set, the server will default to either game port + 1 or rcon port + 1, depending on which number is larger.
Hosts of shared servers will need to ensure the query port is forwarded correctly, which is why we are making this announcement ahead of time. Servers can be switched over to Steam Networking for testing via the -swnet startup parameter, which we recommend doing ahead of time in order to ensure a smooth transition.
On November 19th Rustafied held their 8th annual Charitable Rust event. They had event servers up where hundreds of content creators all took part in fun custom games, bed wars, carnivals, boat combat contests, and much more.
The community raised over $27,000 in donations alone.
We also put up some unique charity skins on the Rust item store for a week and the proceeds to that go towards the charity as well.
While we do not have exact totals yet and the skin sales take a few weeks to come in but we guestimate $150,000 in total, going to World Central Kitchen.
We're very proud of everyone involved and thank you to those that helped out in any ways to make this event possible!
We will have an array of Charity skins on the item store for sale as well, starting Thursday the 17th. These will be account-bound (cannot trade or sell them) as the proceeds from them go to World Central Kitchen.
Rust is going to be celebrating our 9th Birthday on December 11th, 2022!
There will be an active server event enabled for the day. You spawn with cake and party hats. Many loot boxes around the map will have balloons on them. Just a little slice of fun in your day of death and destruction :)
Special thanks to our community for your continued support and helping us make it this far!
This month we have your resident building inspector, Dust!
"Yo! My name's Dust, I'm a Rust YouTuber with a focus on base build videos, but also high quality cinematics and full length gameplay movies! My friend convinced me to download Rust in 2018 and I’ve barely seen a blade of grass since. What really hooked me was watching awesome content by Evil Wurst, Blooprint, Tesla, Frost, aloneintokyo and a ton of other insanely talented creators.
I started YouTube pretty recently and things quickly took off. Even though I started as a build channel, there’s been a ton of demand for more movies so I’m working on putting out more action packed wipe content! Stay tuned!
On a real note, my favorite part about this whole journey has been the friendships that I’ve made along the way. Rust is a super unique game where you’ll end up spending hundreds or thousands of hours with people, so you’ll tend to build some really strong and genuine friendships. The creator community in Rust is also super collaborative and filled with some awesome people."
Arms manufacturers contracted by Cobalt were tasked with producing a new side arm to meet the personal defense requirements of the organization. After an exhaustive review of potential candidates, the Prototype 17 was selected. This new weapon has a magazine capacity of 18 and fires in deadly 3 round bursts with the single pull of the trigger.
In addition, it features tritium sights for rapid target acquisition and engagement under low light conditions. It has been noted that some survivors have scavenged and reverse engineered the weapon, extracting some of its components and allowing them to augment their own weapons with the 3 round burst ability.
We've added a new train carriage that you might find on sidings.
Inside you'll find a poker table with four seats, two slot machines, and a brand new blackjack computer that can handle 1-3 players.
All the features of blackjack are here, and blackjack pays out 3:2. The computer hates to lose, but he plays fair. You can make an initial bet of between 5 and 500 scrap. Just keep an ear out for what's going on nearby - this isn't a safe zone!
For the past few months I've been working on a new system to improve how we render monuments at a distance while maintaining or improving the current performance. It uses a technique called HLOD (Hierarchical Level of Detail) and involves baking the monument as it should be seen at a distance down into a single mesh. A key requirement was to make sure this didn't add any extra work for our environment artists, this process is almost entirely automated.
The final performance improvements were minimal, but the increased visual fidelity at a distance still seemed worthwhile to ship. You should notice more geometry and detail, as well as entire monuments that will now be visible when they weren't before.
We have plans in place to switch the default networking layer of Rust servers from RakNet to Steam Networking in late November or early December, further communication will follow.
This change requires servers to have a separate Steam query port set via the -queryport server startup parameter. When no query port is set, the server will default to either game port + 1 or rcon port + 1, depending on which number is larger.
Hosts of shared servers will need to ensure the query port is forwarded correctly, which is why we are making this announcement ahead of time. Servers can be switched over to Steam Networking for testing via the -swnet startup parameter, which we recommend doing ahead of time in order to ensure a smooth transition.
Halloween events have come to an end, good job survivors at closing all of Cobalt's project R.U.I.N portals! Hopefully, that's the last of them we see...
This is one for you illuminati tin foil hatters. Raynbirds takes a deep dive into what it means when a gun flops down on the ground in a certain direction.
Seems possibly useful on Hardcore servers that don't have maps if you feel like chucking guns on the ground!
The Halloween events are now enabled! Once roughly every two in-game days, a candy hunt event will begin. You'll have 3 minutes to collect as many candies as you can. The top 3 players are given special loot bags as a reward. These candies and loot bags can be opened for various types of loot ranging from scrap all the way up to an M249!
If you don't make the podium, that's okay. The candies you collect can be upgraded for better loot.
There are various items available to help you during your hunt. The Pumpkin Bucket will allow instant pickup of candies and the Scarecrow Wrap and Ghost Costume will provide you with an advantage via Candy Vision.
Cultists are said to have been opening portals throughout the world, others believe it's a Cobalt experiment code-named R.U.I.N gone horribly wrong. Not much is known about these portals or what they do, only a few chads have entered and made it back alive.
Do you dare to enter?
Server owners can adjust the portal count using the halloweendungeon.population convar.
To start building your own monster, first, you must slay scarecrows and mummies that roam the lands. Once you've collected a head, torso and legs, craft yourself a Frankenstein's table and place the body parts within the table. Awaken your new pet monster and control it by pressing "P".
The monster will follow your orders without question. It'll follow you around the map, defend you if attacked and help slay foes you wish to attack.
If you're having trouble accessing the pet menu or already have a key bound to "P" then use the following console command: bind X +pets or open the in-game controls menu.
This month we're introducing a new addition to Rust's permanent store, the Lumberjack Pack. The Lumberjack Pack contains five items, four tools and one hazmat reskin.
Lumberjack suit
The Lumberjack suit is a hazmat replacement skin that can be applied while crafting the hazmat or skinned using the repair table. The Lumberjack suit offers no in-game bonuses.
Tools
The Lumberjack additionally comes with four craftable tools. The concrete tools are reskinned versions of the stone tools, and the prototype tools share the same stats as the metal tools.
The Lumberjack pack is available now from the Steam store and in-game store.
As a part of a large long term menu UI revamp I have made several improvements to the server listing UI this month. Here are the most note worthy changes:
Added regions server tags.
Update tag search behavior to find servers with all of the selected tags instead of any of them.
Add a button to clear filters to the server browser.
Additionally, I reimplemented dropdown menus in the options menu. This should make life easier than clicking endlessly to find certain options such as screen resolution.
The campfire is one of Rust's oldest models, dating back to pre-2015. It was time for an update to reflect Rust 2022. Issac has worked his magic and updated the model which can be seen below.
Along with the new model comes new visual effects courtesy of Petur.
Petur has updated the effects on the campfire, large furnace, furnace and cauldron. These updated effects not only look better but also offer better performance.
We received a lot of feedback surrounding the Workbench Techtree on hardcore since its launch last month, many wanting it removed completely from this game mode. While weighing options we've decided to explore a tech tree tax. Unlocking items directly from the Workbench Techtree will now cost additional scrap,
Tier 1 - 20%
Tier 2 - 40%
Tier 3 - 60%
The research cost from using the research bench remains unchanged.
We're aware the server performance has degraded since the release of EAC EOS update on September 30th, we're actively working with EAC to remedy these issues. Server owners can expect hotfixes over the coming days and weeks.
Proton Support
You know, we switched to EAC's new platform with the intention of providing support for the Steam Deck, and so far we haven't done that. So when is it coming?
Well, short answer is we don't know. We don't know if it is. When we discontinued linux support in 2019, one of the core reasons was how the cheating community was exploiting the Linux platform. That's not to say that cheating was super widespread on Linux, but it was safer for cheat developers. And that's not good in a game like Rust where a cheater can ruin weeks of hard work.
Enabling proton support would mean we're asking the EAC team to provide support for a whole other platform, which we fear would reduce their ability to support Windows - our main platform. We don't know whether we should enable one platform at the disadvantage of another.
The one thing we don't want to do is to enable Proton support to only discontinue it six months later. We don't want to encourage players to spend their money on a Deck to play Rust and then be in a position where we want to take that ability away.
For now, we're still weighing up the risks and will continue to explore options with EAC. Don't expect to see Proton support in the near future, but we hope to have it enabled someday.
Starting from today till Oct 12th 23:59UTC Agustabell and several of the biggest names in the Spanish streamer community will be participating in a 7-day event! Twitch drops are enabled for selected Spanish Twitch streamers. You can earn special and unique skins simply by watching your favourite Spanish Rust Twitch streamers.
Saturday November 19th & Sunday November 20th, 2022
For 2 days Rustafied will be hosting a charity event to raise money for World Central Kitchen. WCK is first to the frontlines, providing meals in response to humanitarian, climate, and community crises all over the globe.
To kick things off we're starting with the skin contest. These very limited skins will be part of the Twitch drops & Item store purchases surrounding the event.
If you are a skin creator and want to have a shot at getting your work into the game, this contest is for you! All proceeds go towards charity!
Contest Rules
Use #CR2022 as official contest tag in 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 World Central Kitchen logo, it cannot be used on any weapon skins. Only the 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.
Don’t forget upload limit for the amount of skins you may submit.
Skins must be submitted by midnight(23:59) PST September 30, 2022.
If you're a content creator/streamer and want to participate check out their info on how to sign up!
We'll post more info about the event as we get closer.
Hemp Base Empire
@matt.zan in TikTok does a little bit of movie magic to show us his hemp empire little 2x2 with an extension on the back.
Original vid:
Outside reveal:
Creator Spotlight
This month we have a lil penguin you might know as BlizzardID!
"I got into Rust after watching a Frankieonpc video in 2013, back when the game was still on browser. At the time, I was playing a lot of the Arma2 DayZ mods so figured it was right up my alley. I played it on and off but wasn't properly hooked until early 2016. I had just dropped out of University and finally had the right amount of time to enjoy the game.
What's always made me fall back in love with this abusive relationship of a game, is the thrill of having all of your hours of effort taken away, but on the flip side being able to do it to others too. It makes everything feel so much more exhilarating and gives fights a lot more meaning than in any other game I've ever played.
After watching some Trausi and Bchillz I decided to post some of my clips and videos on Youtube, which did pretty well for that time. Sadly I was also an anxious mess having my motivation fade in and out. Youtube's income was basically a coinflip and I wanted a bit more stability. That's when I decided to take a break from things for the next 3 years and got a degree.
In that time is when I would really come to enjoy streaming, mainly due to the back and forth jokes you can get from chat. I'm happy that my caveman ass got to meet so many people through this weird game of hitting rocks with rocks."
Big Brain
It's it every day your base build restrictions line up with a doorcamper in your airlock, but when they do... Kira seized the opportunity.
Reddit Bits
User _Dareon_ asked his noob friend to start a compound and, well..
A major part of Rust is its brutal nature and ruthless PvP, when we added the softcore gamemode last year we saw and have continued to see feedback that many of you want a game mode which takes away the standard Vanilla comforts we've added throughout the years and gives a more ruthless, hardcore experience, so we've done just that.
Introducing Hardcore mode - a new game mode in Rust aimed towards veteran players, gone are the comforts such as safezones, team system and maps but don't worry, the vast majority of our servers will still be regular vanilla Rust.
During this first pass, you will find the following changes on Hardcore servers:
Added:
Local chat (100m range)
Limit of 5 sleeping bags & beds
In-game changelog (top left of inventory)
Removed:
Contact system
Compass
Crawling when wounded
Global chat
Rust+
Team system
Map
MLRS
Safe zones
Changed:
Blueprints wipe monthly
We believe this is a good starting place for a less forgiving game mode of Rust and we will continue to iterate and improve on it moving forward. If you're a server owner and wish to enable hardcore use the following var in your server startup config "-gamemode hardcore"
10 new official servers will be launching today with this new game mode.
Furnaces & cooking interfaces were cumbersome and not intuitive for newer players to use, requiring precise splitting of stacks to smelt efficiently, online calculators and guides to manage efficiently. We disliked this and felt we could do better, so we revamped the UI and some functionality.
They smelt and cook at the same speed & capacity (or better!) as before while being quick and easy to use.
With this update, you'll no longer be able to store non cooking/smelting-related items inside your cooking deployables (furnace/campfire), to address this see storage buff below.
Over the past couple of years, we've quadrupled the number of in-game items and switched over to the component system, all of which require large amounts of additional storage. Now with the cooking and smelting UI revamp and removing the ability to store items within these deployables (campfire, furance etc) it was overdue we took a look at storage.
Today we've increased the small wooden storage capacity to 18 from 12 and the large wooden box to 48 from 30.
In the future expect to see new types of storage solutions.
I made some simple improvements to the coaling tower that aired in our last update inside the Trainyard monument.
These changes include a new way to access the tower from the top where the suspended bridge is located. This will make retreat from the building easier when the area is contested.
