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.

The masterminds behind this project are: DaVinci, Philieve, Monstera, and Silverfox.

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.




Who is the greatest rock fighter in Rust? Can a "nobody" defeat the Rock - Boxing World Champion?


Balding Bus brings us a real toe-tapper Rust parody music video!


Our friend over at Real & Game has outdone himself once again.

Made an entire Rust electrical setup IRL.


Soon™




If you made something cool or saw something cool, reach out! Tag me on X or u/ErrnieGerrn Reddit.

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.



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.




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.




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.




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.




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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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!




This month we are taking care of our fellow electricians! Bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and major changes are coming to electricity.

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.

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

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.

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.


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

Power Consumption: 1 -> 0
Active Usage: 1 -> 0

• Won't drain any power when nothing is connected to its left side

Power Consumption: 1 -> 0
Active Usage: 1 -> 0

Power Consumption: 1 -> 0
Active Usage: 1 -> 0

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

Power Consumption: 1 -> 0
Active Usage: 1 -> 0

• Now passes power when ON and blocks power when OFF
  
• Now resets to OFF

Power Consumption: 1 -> 0
Active Usage: 1 -> 0

Power Consumption: 1 -> 0
Active Usage: 1 -> 0

• Fixed batteries getting drained when only one side is powered

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)

Power Consumption: 1 -> 0
Active Usage: 1 -> 0

• Side inputs won’t drain power any more
  
• Now configurable when unpowered

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

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

Power Consumption: 1 -> 0
Active Usage: 1 -> 0

• Fixed blocking power passthrough for a bit when triggered

Power Consumption: 1 -> 0
Active Usage: 1 -> 0

• Now deployable on any surface angle
  
• Tweaked handles position to make it easier to wire

• Fixed being powerable using only 1 power instead of 2

• Restored blue material emission when ON
  
• Tweaked handles position to make it easier to wire

• 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

• Fixed aux output passing 1 power regardless of the current energy

• Now drains 1 power correctly when ON

• Aux inputs won’t drain any power any more

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.

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.




Added new seed world model

Added mushroom world model

New dedicated CCTV station within monuments




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[wiki.facepunch.com].




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.


[rust.facepunch.com]

For the next week, every 24-38 hours in-game hours an Easter egg hunt will begin. You'll have 3 minutes to collect as many eggs as you can. The top 3 players are given special eggs as a reward. These eggs can be cracked open 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 painted eggs you collect can be upgraded to Bronze eggs once you collect 10. If you collect 10 bronze eggs then you can upgrade to a silver egg, eventually all the way to gold!

There are various items available to help you during your hunt. The Easter Basket will allow instant pickup of eggs and the Bunny Onesie and Ears will provide you with an advantage via Egg Vision.

Have fun!



This year we've added a new costume DLC attire, the chicken costume! The chicken costume is a lower body attire which can be crafted with cloth and wood.

You can find the clucking chicken costume in Rust item store along witht he rest of our Seasonal items!

A common story we hear from new players is that they have seen their friends/Twitch Streamer/YouTuber playing Rust, so they pick up the game and then bounce off it due to how harsh and unforgiving the new player experience can be. This month’s Tutorial Island is our attempt to provide new players with a safe environment to learn the basic controls and mechanics of Rust before being set loose in the main game with other players.

Everyone will be prompted to start the tutorial when they first spawn this month, if you’re a long term player feel free to decline the tutorial and we won’t ask you about it again. Once the player starts the Tutorial, they will be respawned on a dedicated island where an NPC will guide them through the first half hour of gameplay. This island is tightly controlled and cannot be reached by other players.

Throughout this process players will learn some key concepts:

• Basic movement
  
• Crafting
  
• Building bases
  
• Upgrading bases
  
• Respawning
  
• Basic combat
  
• Resources
  
• Looting containers
  
• Cooking
  
• Using Furnaces
  
• Workbenches
  
• Using a vehicle

This obviously isn’t an exhaustive list of everything there is to learn in Rust, but we feel like this is a good starting point for a new player. Our guiding principle when designing this sequence has been - if a player emulates exactly what they did on the Tutorial Island once they get into the main game, will they have a fighting chance?

The tutorial itself should take less than 30 minutes if you’re familiar with general FPS controls and concepts, likely around an hour if you are not a regular FPS player. Once complete you will be dropped off into the main game with the same resources as any other player - completing the Tutorial Island does not give you any advantages in regular gameplay.

For server owners running mods that change core gameplay features, you may find that parts of the tutorial don’t work or maybe showing the tutorial isn’t appropriate for your server (minigame servers for instance). You can control whether the tutorial is active via the “server.tutorialEnabled” convar - it's false by default. While false players won't be prompted to start the tutorial on your server and they will not be able to manually start the tutorial. We’ve added a server tag to help players find and filter servers by their tutorial compatibility, add “tut” to your server tags to advertise your tutorial compatibility. Brand new players will have this filter on when they first use the server browser.



Our outdated tooltip popup for checking vendor stock urgently needed an upgrade. It felt out of place when compared with the marketplace UI. Thus, a plan was devised to merge both into a single unified system. This update will be rolled out in two parts, with this being part one. This first part fully replaces the old blue tooltip popup with an interface that's clearer, more user-friendly, and scalable. Now, it's easy to understand what you're purchasing and how much is costs. Overall, this first pass on the vendor UI provides a great foundation to expand on.

Items are now displayed clearly with the cost and stock counts easily visible.

Accordions are used to hold vendors with large amounts of listings. This keeps everything easy to read, whilst still giving users flexibility to add a bunch of listings.

While working on this, we noticed some QOL issues with finding items before purchasing. The marketplace offers useful features like search and filtering that the standard map doesn't have. It would be great to have these abilities everywhere.

Part two will unify the marketplace UI with the new vendor UI. You will still have to travel to the marketplace to buy things via drone, but the actual underlying UI will be merged together. This will provide the same search/filtering functionalities as enjoyed at the marketplace to the regular map vendor UI, whilst bringing the improved style and ease of use of this new vendor UI to the marketplace.



Today, I'm addressing an issue we often hear about from the Rust community. Navigating the game during nighttime. While the night cycle is a cruicial element of the rust gameplay loop, it can be a literal stumbling block not seeing what's directly ahead. The problem of "gamma hacking" (where players unfairly enhance their night vision by tweaking monitor settings), has been a thorn in our side, necessitating a pitch-black darkness (RGB 0,0,0) to counteract such exploits.

To that end I've come up with the "Nightlight" feature. Basically it's a shader that subtly illuminates a small radius around the player, mimicking the effect of natural moon light. This localized lighting ensures that while you can see just enough to navigate at night, the vast darkness beyond remains dark. Distant pixels are kept at absolute darkness (RGB 0,0,0), effectively rendering gamma hacking useless for spotting far-off threats or resources. ( beyond a few meters)

We believe this approach strikes a good balance, enhancing the night experience without compromising fair play. I hope it helps!




Rangefinder added to binoculars

Attack helicopter flares now take 30 seconds to reload

Metal detectors no longer able to find loot in safezones

Visual feedback when switching attire conflict



This month, we’ve made improvements to the store interface. These changes are part of a UI overhaul for the menu screen that we’re currently working through. One of the main improvements is adding in a custom view for each of the general store items, giving a better look at what an item looks like or what is contained within a pack. For example, the Abyss pack, we now show a cut-down version of the trailer, the items contained within the pack in a 3D turntable, media and a bit of information about the pack.

These changes are aimed at improving the experience of using the store, more transparency in regards to what you’re potentially purchasing, and improving it from a visual point of view too.

Re-designed view, with improvements in regards to scaling and legibility of the items.

We've improved the interface for the model that appears when you tap on an item. A new key addition being an animated 3D version of the skin.

We've added a new view for each general store item. Some of these include cut-down trailers, items contained within as a 3D turntable as well as media and general information about the item. These new views hopefully give a better understanding of what you're getting in the purchase.


Hapis Island and Observer Island custom maps are being retired today from Facepunch servers. Observer Island was first released in November by community members CollapsedOrange and wheatleymf and Hapis Island was brought back to celebrate 10 years of Rust.

If you're a server owner and wish to host your own Hapis or Observer Island, you can check them out at the following links:

• Observer Island - Lone Design[lone.design]
  
• Hapis Island - Lone design[lone.design]

What's the future for custom maps? We're going to continue working with our amazing map-maker community and highlight and host custom maps.

If you would like to start making your own map, check out Rust's wiki[wiki.facepunch.com].




Rust and DayZ have teamed up for a bundle featuring both games at 40% off!

The Pioneer Survival Pack on Steam features both titles at 40% off from March 7th 6PM GMT to March 14th 6PM GMT.

Both DayZ and Rust celebrated their 10th anniversaries in December, with in-game events, limited items, and Twitch Rivals competitions, marking many years of updates, changes, and content to the games that have kept them thriving with old and new players alike.

DayZ, with its realistic post-apocalyptic world, has evolved far beyond its origins as a hardcore survival mod. It now stands as a deeply immersive experience that continually draws in players with its intricate blend of survival mechanics, open-world exploration, and player-driven narratives, all while fostering a strong and passionate community.

Rust has transformed from a mere survival game to a global phenomenon. There’s always something interesting or dangerous (or both) happening on the island, captivating all kinds of players with its unique blend of challenges, creativity, ways to play, and community spirit.

Head here to grab both games now!



On March 21st at 19:00 GMT we'll be releasing an optional update to enable this years Easter events and releasing the Chicken costume.

During the Easter event every 24-38 hours in-game hours an Easter egg hunt will begin. You'll have 3 minutes to collect as many eggs as you can. The top 3 players are given special eggs as a reward. These eggs can be cracked open for various types of loot ranging from scrap all the way up to an M249!

Some old and some new. Few names in the art scene you all might recognize! This is our rust art appreciation post. We love you!!

Monstera gracing us with awesomeness. Definitely someone to tag into your next Rust event if you like having your base decorated!

These were collabs with Rust daVinci.

Who doesn't love a good timelapse! 10 years of Rust.
Something from the man himself.

This art gallery though...
This is an oldie but goodie from TimTardashian from Charitable Rust last fall!

Annnd then there's this lil guy.


Periodically we gather a metric ton of stats and put them into these very digestible graphics.

You all recycle a lot of rope!

Stay tuned for the next round!




Ok Philieve Rust did this mind blowing project to showcase how crazy you can get with the electrical system in Rust.

He made a HUGE calculator and explains how he did it!


Did you know we have a creator program?

There are some eligibility requirements and if you don't qualify just yet please do apply in the future!

[facepunch.com]

• Minimum of 50 or more concurrent viewers on livestreams for 30 days OR 8000 average views on video content in the past 30 days with a subscriber count of 5000 or more while playing Facepunch games.
  
• Facepunch games are an active part of your channel.
  
• Adhered to our TOS[facepunch.com] and Code of Conduct[facepunch.com].
  
• An engaged, active audience that you interact with regularly
  
• Have been creating content for the last 3 months consistently
  
• Age 16+

Check out our website[facepunch.com] and fill out an application with all your creator channels and socials. If eligible, you'll receive an invite!




If you made something cool or saw something cool, reach out! Tag me on X or u/ErrnieGerrn Reddit.

Cover image by MonsteraRust!

Happy Lunar New Year to everyone! This year, we celebrate the Year of the Dragon.
In Chinese culture, the dragon is a symbol of courage, power, and majesty.
And to help everyone get in the spirit, we have added both new and old Lunar New Year items to the Steam item store.

But don't forget to decorate your bases with trees (symbolizing wealth and good luck) and wearing this year's lucky colours (yellow and red)!


Prim locked? This magnificent Chinese spear is for the fearless primitive warriors of Rust. This spear is a skin replacement for the wooden spear. Crafted with precision and adorned with intricate engravings, this weapon is not just a tool for battle. It's a work of art that tells a story of power and elegance.


To celebrate the Year of the Dragon, we have created a beautiful dragon themed rocket launcher with both unique visuals and sound effects.

Differing from Western culture, the Dragon in Chinese mythology is auspicious and supreme. Dragons have the great power to control weather elements, but most importantly, soar through the skies - much like your ejecting rockets.

The dragon rocket launcher is a reskin of the rocket launcher.




There's a variety of community-made Lunar New Year items on the Steam store as well!

Backpacks have been one of Rust's most highly requested additions for several years, and what is a survival game without backpacks? This month, we're excited to bring you the small and large backpack, allowing players to carry more loot.

Inventory space has become more scarce as more items have been added to Rust over the years.


The small handmade backpack provides 12 slots & can be crafted for 50 cloth and five sewing kits at a T1 workbench. It is a default blueprint and will take 30 seconds to craft.


The military-grade backpack carries a whopping 28 storage slots and is uncraftable, found in military loot.


Both are worn in the backpack slot and drop off your character on death. They can be looted on the ground (be careful if dropping one in a safe zone!) or from inside your own inventory. They take 3 seconds to pickup off the ground and despawn slower when filled with valuable items (up to 2 hours).

Currently, there are no negative effects from using a backpack.



To help differentiate regular player remains from the new backpack models we’ve given the player remains a visual refresh. This new model has a new open and closed visual state so you can tell at a glance if a bag has been opened by anyone. There is also some visual debris around an opened bag if the bag has more than 3 items in it.


The new metal detector allows you to find metal objects hidden beneath the ground.

Use the green lights to find the general area of an object, then when the green lights are all fully lit, hold the right mouse button to start sweeping the ground more closely and illuminate the yellow lights.

When all the yellow lights are also lit up, a flag will be placed. Dig this flag up with any melee tool and grab your treasure!

Different areas of the world will yield different types of loot, for example, what you may find on the beach will be different than what you find at the roadside or fields.



I've modified the animations for the SAP/SAR and they should feel a bit less floaty and more snappy when reloading and aiming. I've also reduced the additional recoil added while moving when using the SAP. Over the coming months I plan to take a look at each and every weapon and do another pass at balancing them. This means timings, handling, recoil, and aimcone. I'm not saying the changes will be drastic but I'm aware there are elements that need changing. Stay tuned.



Players can now only have one shelter placed at any one time

When attempting to log out in a safe zone a warning now appears

Death marker now appears on the compass UI

Some deployables such as the autoturret were unintentionally expensive to repair, this is now fixed.

Doors, hatches and embrasures can now be rotated while being deployed using R

Increased all plants ripe stage duration from 4h to 14h



A recurring community comment is the on-screen hurt, cold, warm and radioactive post-processing is hash, it impacts the screen too much. To address the comments we have made the post-processing more mild.

Above are a few examples, you can find more here[commits.facepunch.com].



As mentioned in our start of the year blog post[rust.facepunch.com], memory usage is a key area of concern this year. One aspect I’ve been looking at lately is entity counts. Anything that gets networked in a Rust server is an entity, so every tree, building block, player, vehicle, etc. What might seem counterintuitive is that many Items in your inventory are also entities, specifically an entity we call a Planner. This is the blue sheet your player visually equips when they are deploying something (eg. a sleeping bag). Any Item that can be deployed in your inventory will have a corresponding Planner entity. This entity is created when the item is created, and will exist on the server (typically in the players hands or at the world origin if they are in a container) until that item is used or destroyed. We need this entity as it handles all the logistics of spawning the deployed version of the item.

To illustrate how many entities this creates we looked a list of entities on Facepunch EU2 towards the end of the November wipe last year. Out of 362,299 entities, 32,455 of them were Planners and are the largest count of entity (the next largest was Walls at 26,015). Since Planners are technically only needed when the player has the item equipped on their belt, this is a big waste of memory and processing time as well as needlessly bloating server save files.

This month we’ve rolled out a change that will only spawn a Planner for these Items once the Item is in a players inventory, then delete the entity when it is moved back into an inventory. This should dramatically cut down on the number of entities taking up memory for no real reason.

We also applied this change to Syringes and Bandages, specifically because these item types also don’t need an Entity if they aren’t in the players inventory and are often stored in large quantities (5,769 and 1,206 respectively in the above EU2 sample). Syringes in particular have been a performance bottleneck for the Industrial system due to the need to create and destroy an Entity every time the item is moved, so this change should have flow on server performance improvements there as well.

We think this change should reduce entity counts on the server by roughly 6-9% but we’ll be monitoring the results over time.



We received reports from several servers this month with Industrial performance issues. After investigating we found some extremely complex conveyor systems moving large amounts of Syringes as the culprit. The above changes to Entity counts will largely solve the issue, but I’ve also added a new convar (Server.industrialTransferStrictTimeLimits) to better handle time budgeting in these situations. While the Industrial system is time budgeted per frame (eg. Only process three conveyors per frame) it struggled if one conveyor took an excessive amount of time (eg. One conveyor takes 15x the allocated budget).

This new convar will allow the conveyor system to stop half way through a transfer if it is taking too long. Crucially it will then resume the transfer from where it left off on the next tick, so the final results should be the same, they may just take longer in real time. From the players perspective, this may result in conveyors splitting things in unintuitive ways (eg. a conveyor splitting into three boxes might do 2 on the first tick, then the last one on the last tick) but it should eventually produce the same result. Therefore we’d recommend turning this on selectively if a server is experiencing Industrial performance issues.

As well as this new convar some general performance optimisations were made, so things should be a little faster across the board in the Industrial system.



Despite having some guards in place, asset memory can easily run ouf of control. We keep adding awesome new content and, unfortunately, it keeps increasing our memory footprint. In order to be able to sustain this rate of content expansion, memory usage has to be low and stable, regardless of world complexity. Until we can implement more aggressive and effective streaming, every once in a while we have to sit down and look at what we missed and make the necessary corrections.

On this update we nuked almost 3 GB of memory usage in shader assets, plus a few hundred MB on textures and meshes. This is a bit of a soft start, in regards to textures and meshes, but we expect to reduce memory usge by a few more gigabytes in the coming months.

We do care about memory and performance, and we're actively working on it. This is just the first stage of many that will target not only improve memory usage but also frame rate.



Modern games universally depend on asset compression to maximize the efficient utilization of available system memory. To justify the efforts invested in compression, developers often turn to lossy techniques, which, particularly in the realm of textures, frequently lead to a compromise in image quality. Rust was long overdue for a texture quality review. Below is a before and after.

The improvement in detail and color fidelity can be striking in some cases (right). This is an ugly texture but it's a good example of how compression can ruin a high frequency image. Regions of pixels get merged together and color shifts slightly (left).

Texture compression was being used quite aggressively and, after tweaking some settings, we were able to significantly improve image quality without sacrificing memory. In the end, because a lot of textures had untapped potential for savings, we actually ended up saving runtime memory, at the cost of disk space, while still improving overall image quality.



These were quite mis-aligned while wearing NV Goggles, especially near the screen edges, where they would sometimes float above seemingly nothing. This has now been fixed.



Doors and Gates have been cancelling their open/close animation when hitting a vehicle since Modular Cars were introduced, however that would sometimes lead to cases where the animation cancelling would crush vehicles if they hit the Door/Gate from the opposite side. This has been improved this month and colliding with an animated Door/Gate in the direction that it is moving will no longer cause the animation to cancel. This should lead to less cars getting crushed.

Servers are now wiped and Santa is packing up and clearing out the bodies, but we hope you enjoyed the Holiday Season. We're getting back to work after a couple of weeks off, which is why this blog is lighter than usual, but we're looking forward to the journey ahead in 2024!

This year, we celebrated Rust's 10th Birthday, which has been an incredible journey. Rust is continuing to see year-on-year growth and for a 10 year old game, that's a rather impressive feat.

At a glance, here are some key gameplay features we added in 2023:

• Industrial system
  
• Drones
  
• RF Detonated C4
  
• Security Camera
  
• Player controlled turrets
  
• Pings
  
• Double horse saddle
  
• Missile silo monument
  
• Wipe event
  
• Building skins
  
• Sleeping bag limits
  
• Building upgrade effects
  
• Water refresh
  
• Tugboat
  
• Ferry Terminal monument
  
• Wounded info
  
• Chat emoji
  
• Attack helicopter
  
• Homing missile launcher
  
• Parachutes
  
• Armored hot-air balloon
  
• Above and below rail linking
  
• Underground train signals
  
• M4 shotgun

Alongside a metric ton of improvements.

Rust continues to be a labour of love from all of us at Facepunch, and we couldn't have done it without your passion and feedback. Rust has evolved around player feedback. It's not the game we initially set out to develop, but it's a game we're incredibly proud and passionate about to keep developing.

Thank you for being an integral part of this incredible journey, we look forward to delivering updates for the years to come.

If you're interested in learning more about Rust's history or a further look back at 2023, you can view the timeline[rust.facepunch.com] here: https://rust.facepunch.com/rust10




What can you expect from us in 2024? More of the same! Guaranteed monthly updates every first Thursday of the month, along with frequent fixes, quality of life changes, improvements and holiday events.

On February 1st, we'll release the backpack update. Backpacks will be a new craftable attire, allowing the player to carry more items.

Can't wait till February? Backpacks will be publicly playable on Staging next week, allowing everyone to test and give feedback.

Next month we'll also limit the number of shelters players can have placed at any one time.

We have a ton of content currently in development, and if you're keeping an eye on our commits page[commits.facepunch.com], you'll already know some of them. This year, you can expect to see new and revamped monuments such as the compound, a tutorial system for new players, motorcycles, revamped server listings UI, new weapons.

A hot topic we see is improving the world and the environment. We have multiple patches lined up in 2024 to improve the world, creating unique buildable areas such as canyons and lakes and improving rivers. Procedurally generated caves, additionally, we'll be exploring and improving cliffs and rock formations.

We also plan to address the defender's advantage of sea-based monuments and events like the cargo ship. We are to rework the harbours, and the cargoship will soon dock with the harbours.

Outlined above is skimming the surface of only a few key features. We have a lot more planned.

Performance is always an ongoing process. We're constantly adding and improving new features monthly, often hidden in changelogs. There is no magic button to increase performance. Instead, it is a slow process of small gains.

Our immediate attention is on bringing memory usage down, which can provide a more stable and consistent FPS experience for some users. We've already got several improvements ready for internal testing and hopefully release in the coming month or two.

This year, we'll be bringing onboard new hires with a strong focus on performance.

We'll continue to share news on performance in our monthly development blogs.

We first announced Global networked bases in September. Global rendering aimed to reduce bases popping in, significantly increase the view distance of player structures and reduce some performance overhead when rendering bases. Immediately we ran into some issues, applied fixes, re-released, and ran into further problems, this process repeated a few times and then went into development limbo.

It was clear to us that we pushed this out too soon, with a lack of internal testing. We're making time over the next two months to thoroughly test and evaluate global rendering with the hope of releasing it publically again in March.

If you follow our public commits page, you'll know we worked on pets for several months and suddenly stopped. For several reasons, we halted this project, and it will not be released this year.

Our goal is still to have pets in Rust, but we have several obstacles to overcome first.

We're currently hiring a game AI programmer[facepunch.com] to join the Rust team to help improve our AI and eventually assist in pets development.

Again, if you follow our public commits, you'll have seen the Nexus system. What is the Nexus system? In short, the Nexus system allows us to cluster servers together and enable players to travel from server to server to server using flight and boats, effectively linking an unlimited amount of servers, creating an environment where you can interact with tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of players and explore multiple maps without the need to move servers permanently. Nexus opens many doors to us, for example, dedicated arctic maps and maps with advanced AI and high-yielding resource maps but with a dangerous environment.

We don't plan for Nexus to replace the current existing server format as you play currently, but rather an optional new way to play Rust if you wish if you choose to do so.

We plan to release Nexus in 2024 when ready, but much work is still ahead of us.

Another hot topic within the community, for years between 2015-2019, we experimented with brighter nights. Whatever we tried, we saw many players using third-party tools to gamma boost to see at night and gain an unfair advantage over other players. It's a complex issue to address, if we increase light levels at night, we'll reopen old lessons which we know did not work in the past. Night time acts as a natural time for players to take a break, craft, build or use the cover of darkness to move loot or harvest resources, we want to retain this and allow players to use darkness to their advantage with the use of night vision and light sources.

We do agree that being unable to see entirely at night and unable to navigate around is not a good or fun experience, and we plan to revisit the subject early this year. The aim of the change is to allow players to navigate around at night more easily, if you want to PvP at night, then flashlights and night vision are still a must-have.

A hugely complex topic. We work closely with Epic Games' Easy Anti-cheat, to aid in detecting and banning cheaters in Rust. We don't disclose what we do and don't do when it comes to anti-cheat for good reason. The more information we disclose publicly, the more it can assist cheaters and cheat developers to circumvent measures, it's a huge cat-and-mouse game.

One of the best anti-cheat measures is obscurity. The fewer people know what EAC and we are doing, the better. This comes with the drawback of not communicating enough, on the outside, it appears we're doing nothing. Almost every month, we're shipping improvements or fixing/restricting cheat features. We've fixed several high-priority exploits upon discovery or disclosure within hours through hotfixes we don't note publicly. EAC sometimes pushes several improvements weekly, which are applied when you start the game.

Our promise to you is we're actively monitoring and combating cheaters daily. Our internal systems keep improving, as do EAC. Last year, we overdoubled our support team to aid in player support issues, which included anti-cheat matters. This year we're dedicating more resources into anti cheat than ever and exploring some more radical measures.

We've set aside multiple months in our internal roadmap of light or no content. These gaps are deliberate to allow us to be versatile and adaptive to community feedback, time to focus and address old content, and improve recent content. We have a lot we can keep building upon, not all content we add to Rust is supposed to become meta, but rather adding yet another way of achieving a goal.

At a quick glance, here are just some of the changes ahead:

• Older monument reworks and improvements
  
• Continue experimenting and making meta changes to gunplay
  
• Softcore game mode Improvements
  
• Hardcore game mode experimenting
  
• Experimenting with progression
  
• Improvements to AI
  
• Improvements to events such as the patrol helicopter, Launch site APC and Cargoship
  
• World environment
  
• Underwater exploration
  
• Missions
  
• Using our data analytics to identify less commonly used items and balancing
  
• Experimenting with new ways/events to encourage players to engage with PvP

Several server-side ragdolls improvements and fixes following last months changes

Pressing F now focuses the players position when the map is open

Long item descriptions now scroll




We're excited to announce that hJune[www.twitch.tv] has teamed up with Rustoria[rustoria.co] again for the next Trust in Rust tournament on Saturday, January 13th. Trust in Rust will be raising money for cancer research this year.

[twitch.facepunch.com]Some exclusives for the event and general drops you can earn from your favourite creator channels.

Proceeds from exclusive store skins sales and event donations go to Cancer Research[tiltify.com]. Cancer Research is the world's leading independent cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through research, influence and information.

Thank you to everyone that nominated Rust into the final round of voting for the Steam Awards!

Voting is simple - you can vote for us above in the Labor of Love category. We need you to do it!

But it just so happens that over the last two weeks, we’ve been celebrating 10 years of Rust.

Here's a recap of the last 10 years of development, community, and more - it brought a tear to our eyes!

We’ve seen an unprecedented amount of new and returning players, and the community is now bigger and more engaged than ever before.
With teams working around the clock, on almost every continent, we still continue to spend every day monitoring, maintaining, and nurturing the game.
And we release monthly updates - without fail - delivering new content, lore, plus regular Twitch drops, and seasonal events.

We had many kind words about all the work we put into Rust and it was clear to many that over the past 10 years, the game has transformed from a mere survival game to a global phenomenon, captivating all kinds of players with its unique blend of challenges, creativity, ways to play, and community spirit.
From groundbreaking procedural generation, to some of the most intense player interactions, Rust stands out as a testament to our creativity and we feel, the creativity within the wider gaming industry.

Recall those heart-pounding moments when survival meant outsmarting both the environment and other players. Rust's innovative gameplay has set the standard for emergent storytelling and PvP in the gaming world.

Rust's journey wouldn't be as remarkable without its vibrant and engaged community from all over the world. We, the developers at Facepunch Studios have continually embraced player feedback, ensuring that the game evolves with the input and creativity of its dedicated and growing player base.
In the last 10 years, the game has undergone some huge changes, including graphic, physics, and engine updates and rebuilds, all because we’ve wanted to make Rust what it is, and what it could be.

Why vote for Rust? Let's take Rust to new heights!
Winning the Labor of Love Steam Award would be the perfect way to honour Rust's incredible journey and the passionate community that has been an integral part of it.

How to Vote:

Make Your Voice Heard!
Voting for Rust in the Steam Awards is quick and easy. Here's a step-by-step guide:

Visit the Steam Awards Page:
Head over to the Steam Awards page on Steam.

Select the "Labor of Love" Category:
Find the "Labor of Love" category, a perfect fit for Rust's emphasis on our commitment to the community and collaboration.

Cast Your Vote for Rust:
Click on Rust to cast your vote and show your support for the game that has defined a decade of survival FPS.

As we celebrate Rust's 10th anniversary this month, let's unite and propel the game to new heights for many more years to come!

Vote for Rust! ːsteamthumbsupː