It turns out y'all really like your post-apocalyptic nude survival games. Rust has now sold just over three million copies on Steam, as revealed by Facepunch's Garry Newman this very morning. And that's not the only Rust stat doing the rounds: Newman has plastered a load of infographics over on the official site, and they're pretty interesting!

DID YOU KNOW, for example, that 48% of Rust owners have played for more than 20 hours? And that around two-thirds of sales happened during the game's first year of sale? Also, there's this picture of a bear looking down a shaft, which is pretty swell:

Rust is currently enjoying its biggest sale ever on Steam: 50% off. (Cheers, PCGamesN.)

The latest Rust devblog is here, and as ever it's an interesting read: a mixture of stuff that's going to be implemented, stuff that's probably going to be implemented, and stuff that maybe who knows hey wouldn't it be cool if this was a thing in Rust? NPC scientists are in the last category, I'm afraid, but if we all poke Facepunch with a big stick until they agree to include them, I reckon they will definitely include them.

Here's how NPC scientists will work, when Facepunch relent and add them to their game:

"I want these guys to have a weird, unsettling feeling," says Facepunch's Paul Bradley. "I felt like you could capture this by hiding their faces completely behind dirty face masks. I also think it would be cool if they somewhat ignored the player as they went about the island conducting their research, only really acknowledging you if you got too close and threatened them. It would be cool if you could hear them communicating to each other with muffled, distorted voices so you can t really understand what they re saying. Just to add to the creepy factor."

The rest of the stuff in the devblog is less exciting, but there are few gratuitous shots of digital bums and willies, if you're interested. Also some lovely sky textures, plus work on dungeons continues apace. (Thanks, RPS!)

Head over to the Rust store page on Steam and you'll notice a new option offering "Items available for this game," including clothing and firearms, that can be purchased for real money. It's the first (and, as far as I know, only) implementation of "Item Stores," a function introduced in the latest update to Steam that enables developers and community creators to sell in-game items directly to players.

The Rust Item Store exists, and will continue to exist, alongside the Community Market, and pricing will often be different. The Red Shine Pistol on the Rust Item Store, for instance, goes for around $3, but costs just under $5 on the Community Market; the Forest Camo T-shirt, on the other hand, costs the same $3 on the Item Store but can be had on the Market for 5 cents. That might sound a bit sketchy, but product descriptions on the Item Store very visibly include the Community Market pricing as well.

"Part of the reason for having the market prices next to the listings is to make it clear to people if the price is lower somewhere else. Items will come and go from the item store, but they'll be available on the market as long as people are selling them," Facepunch Studios mastermind Garry Newman explained. And while the Rust Item Store currently features studio-made items "as a test for the system," it's mainly in place for community-created items.

Newman acknowledged that the Item Store bears some surface similarities to the paid mods fiasco that caused so much upset earlier this year, but noted that the products it sells are strictly cosmetic, and they're also given to players through random, timed drops in the game, meaning that nobody will be excluded.

"I think the [paid mods] launch on Skyrim gave a really negative vision of what the future looked like. Instead of showing how it would lead to better, more supported mods, it showed how you were going to be asked to pay for the shit you were getting for free yesterday," he said. "Pretty much all the modders I've spoken to would at least like the choice to sell their mods. Personally I think they deserve to be able to make that choice themselves. It's not a choice that should be made by us, or Valve or by the neckbeards on Reddit."

He expanded upon that thought in a post on his personal blog, in which he said that Valve's approach is good for everyone, including people who can't, or don't want to, spend money on this stuff. "They hate traditional microtransactions because it s a paywall. But on Steam they play the game and get random drop items, and can then sell and trade those items on the marketplace," he wrote. "It s not unfeasible that a player will make more money selling items than the game itself cost."

Newman said the backend for Item Stores has actually existed for some time now, and that as far as he knows it's available to any developer who wants to use it. "Steam doesn't really partition features off for certain people, everything they add is there to be used by all developers," he said. "We're just agile enough to have gotten there first."

I imagine it won't be the last.

Streaming Rust or any other open-world survival game for that matter  can be a little dangerous. If a griefer wants to target you they can tune into your stream, enter your server and troll you relentlessly with the advantage of knowing your every move. 

Facepunch has noticed this phenomenon, and patched in a tool to stop it from happening. As part of a major patch which rolled out late last week, Streaming Mode is an attempt to curb the griefing. "First of all it tries to hide all server names, so if you re streaming and you accidentally press escape, your audience won t see the server name," the Facepunch spokesperson wrote on the official Rust website.

"Secondly, it changes everyone s name to something random. The names are based on their steamid, so the same guys will always have the same names. You ll recognise your friends because they will always have the same random name."

That's not all the patch introduces: there s a new NPC attack chopper, "holosights for weapons, new perimeter fence gates, an engine update, and loads more." Go forth and survive in peace.

Thanks, Rock Paper Shotgun.

The Rust devblog continues to be a fun regular read, even if, like me, you've not yet set foot in its world of postapocalyptic naked rock-wielding murderous cavepeople. Devblog 73, like the 72 before it, details what developers Facepunch have been up to over the last week, offering an early look at some of the features, fixes and additions coming to the survival game in the coming weeks.

Look at these lovely new balaclavas, for example. They look like the heads of hollowed-out Sackboys.

Rust is also (probably) getting bandanas and a quiver, along with some funky makeshift backpacks. On the fixes side of things, we can expect a revised hitbox system that will stop players from shielding bullets with their hands, the return of hit indicator sounds and visual effects, loot table changes, muzzle flashes and, oooh, lots more. At the end of the post, there's also a changelog for the most recent update—I'll paste that below.

• Lots of tweaks to weapon deploy/swing/reload sounds
• Rocket launcher volume fixes
• Hitmarker sound tweaks
• Gunshots and bullet impacts can be heard from further away
• Large deployables new foundations
• New room in Satellite Dish monument
• Linux fix
• Added improvised balaclava
• Added boonie hat
• Vagabond Jacket is less rare
• Avoided Unity crash when starting with headphones plugged in
• Fixed certain situations that could cause rubberbanding
• Optimized server game saving
• Airdrop event now pauses auto-saving
• Fixed framerate spikes the first time an effect is triggered
• Optimized ragdoll initialization
• Made protocol mismatch message more descriptive
• Headlook direction is now networked
• Added mesh batching to compound walls and barricades
• Improved server backup system
• Reduced rain probability some more
• Fixed duplicate barrels and crates after server restart
• Drowning water level now matches underwater camera effects
• Tweaked water drop overlay when swimming
• Fixed console UI not refreshing when entering console commands that don t reply with anything
• Added hit notification with convar controls
• Slightly increased depsawn times for bodies and dropped items
• Dropped items despawn slower if they are more rare
• Research Table success chance rounds down to match UI
• Updated muzzle flashes to be non blocking
• Updated hitbox damage scales
• Wood armor is no longer default
• Bone armor is no longer default
• Viewmodels have less sway when aiming down the sights
• Loot table balance for BP fragment system

Female models are now partially live in Rust, which is to say that they're in the game, but work on them remains to be done. For now, all admins will be switched to the female model to help with testing, and once the models are fully implemented, a player's sex, like his or her race, will be assigned at random.

"We still have some stuff to work out, like making alternate clothing models for her, but if you re an admin on a server you ll be the female model," Newman wrote in the latest devblog. "To clear up some confusion, when we it does go live you won t get a choice of whether you re female or male. We re not 'taking the choice away' from you. You never had a choice. A man s voice coming out of a woman s body is no more weird than an 8 year-old boy s voice coming out of a man s body."

Newman confirmed in email that all admins will be set to female automatically, although "that just for testing right now." And yes, like other physical characteristics, sex will be assigned to specific Steam IDs, and cannot be changed.

The devlog also answers questions about the game's integration of Steam inventory, because, Newman said, "I know this shit makes people nervous." Items being added to the inventory are purely cosmetic, and more significantly, Facepunch isn't charging for them; instead, they'll be awarded based on playtime. There are currently no plans to sell blueprints, which he said the studio sees as "more like a card collecting game where the cards are something you actually want," but it could happen in the future.

"The thing I guess to understand is that Rust is STILL in Early Access and we need to take advantage of that fact," he wrote. "This is the time for experimentation—because once it s not in early access we won t be able to do these kinds of game changing things—and we ll wish we had."

Other changes to the game include the addition of Bone and Wood armor, changes to player movement and "Head Freelook," various visual improvements, and quite a bit more. By all appearances, it's been a busy week. Full details are up at PlayRust.com.

Rust s unique approach to character creation—that is, giving players absolutely no control over character creation—is one of the bolder experiments by a developer on its player population. In March, when Rust began randomly selecting players skin color for them, an attribute permanently bound to your character, it sparked a range of interesting reactions, from anger and delight to confusion.

Tomorrow, as part of Rust s usual Thursday update, penis size will become a variable element of your character. And surprisingly, Facepunch say that the feature wasn t a deliberate addition at first, but something that emerged as part of the package of algorithms that drive random generation of stuff like head size and jaw definition. The dick thing wasn t really planned, it just so happens that it has a separate bone there for the censorship cube that we can scale independently, Facepunch founder Garry Newman told Kotaku.

But the decision to keep it in the game was deliberate. We're hoping like hell for more dick jokes. We might all range from 20-40 years old at Facepunch, but we're all eight years old at heart., says Newman. I heard SteamDB is adding a way to track your RDS (Rust Dick Size). Then again, Newman doesn t expect the Rust community to react dramatically to the change, partly because the maximum size of a character s junk is limited by the fixed size of Rust s censorship box. You've really got to be lining players up and comparing them to see any real change, says Newman.

The expected range of sizes is small, but players who have bigger penises will actually get the short end of the stick; taking a crotch shot in Rust deals more damage than a hit to some other areas of the body. All the hitboxes are scaled. People with a bigger dick get a bigger dick hitbox, people with a bigger head get a bigger head hitbox, says Newman.

To Newman, the broader point of randomizing something like penis size is that there s value in putting players in a position to play with what they re given. We did consider a player customization system, says Newman. We looked a bunch of them, we watched them on YouTube. In some cases people were spending a couple of hours designing their character. The character design part of the game had more work put into it than the game itself. And these were games where what you looked like was completely irrelevant, where it was obviously just on some list that a publisher handed a developer.

So we thought fuck all that. Fuck spending months making a character designer, lets make the game about the game. Then the more we started thinking in that direction the more we liked it. Assigning based on steamid means that everything we add gets evenly spread across the playerbase. We don't end up with 90 percent male white guys. We end up with a full spectrum. Players have to live with and accept who they are. They are recognizable, so more gameplay mechanics emerge. The long term goal in the back of our heads is to hide player names and have them only recognisable by familiarity. I think we are approaching that.

"Players have to live with and accept who they are. They are recognizable, so more gameplay mechanics emerge."

Facepunch is the process of finishing a female player model to Rust. The body will vary, like the males, but we're not sure to what level. We're trying not to sexualize the nudity in Rust, says Newman. That's easy for the male model because there's nothing sexy about a limp penis, in fact it's probably got an inverse sexual properly. With boobs that's different maybe.

Rust s unique approach to character creation—that is, giving players absolutely no control over character creation—is one of the bolder experiments by a developer on its player population. In March, when Rust began randomly selecting players skin color for them, an attribute permanently bound to your character, it sparked a range of interesting reactions, from anger and delight to confusion.

Tomorrow, as part of Rust s usual Thursday update, penis size will become a variable element of your character. And surprisingly, Facepunch say that the feature wasn t a deliberate addition at first, but something that emerged as part of the package of algorithms that drive random generation of stuff like head size and jaw definition. The dick thing wasn t really planned, it just so happens that it has a separate bone there for the censorship cube that we can scale independently, Facepunch founder Garry Newman told Kotaku.

"Players have to live with and accept who they are. They are recognizable, so more gameplay mechanics emerge."

But the decision to keep it in the game was deliberate. We're hoping like hell for more dick jokes. We might all range from 20-40 years old at Facepunch, but we're all eight years old at heart., says Newman. I heard SteamDB is adding a way to track your RDS (Rust Dick Size). Then again, Newman doesn t expect the Rust community to react dramatically to the change, partly because the maximum size of a character s junk is limited by the fixed size of Rust s censorship box. You've really got to be lining players up and comparing them to see any real change, says Newman.

The expected range of sizes is small, but players who have bigger penises will actually get the short end of the stick; taking a crotch shot in Rust deals more damage than a hit to some other areas of the body. All the hitboxes are scaled. People with a bigger dick get a bigger dick hitbox, people with a bigger head get a bigger head hitbox, says Newman.

To Newman, the broader point of randomizing something like penis size is that there s value in putting players in a position to play with what they re given. We did consider a player customization system, says Newman. We looked a bunch of them, we watched them on YouTube. In some cases people were spending a couple of hours designing their character. The character design part of the game had more work put into it than the game itself. And these were games where what you looked like was completely irrelevant, where it was obviously just on some list that a publisher handed a developer.

So we thought fuck all that. Fuck spending months making a character designer, lets make the game about the game. Then the more we started thinking in that direction the more we liked it. Assigning based on steamid means that everything we add gets evenly spread across the playerbase. We don't end up with 90 percent male white guys. We end up with a full spectrum. Players have to live with and accept who they are. They are recognizable, so more gameplay mechanics emerge. The long term goal in the back of our heads is to hide player names and have them only recognisable by familiarity. I think we are approaching that.

Facepunch is the process of finishing a female player model to Rust. The body will vary, like the males, but we're not sure to what level. We're trying not to sexualize the nudity in Rust, says Newman. That's easy for the male model because there's nothing sexy about a limp penis, in fact it's probably got an inverse sexual property. With boobs that's different maybe.

In many ways, Rust has always been something of a digital social experiment: What happens when people are thrown together in a primitive, isolated environment, with no rules beyond "survive?" (Answer: It's Lord of the Flies, every single time.) Back in March, the experiment got a little deeper (and the uproar, a little louder) when the game was updated to arbitrarily assign unchangeable faces and skin tones to players, and now an even more sensitive bit of anatomy has been adjusted in a manner that will likely please some players more than others.

The hot tip came from Reddit, of course, (via PCGamesN), in the form of a video showing the effects of different Steam IDs on penis size. The actual workings of the system remain a closely-guarded mystery, but Rust creator Garry Newman confirmed that the report is accurate. "Like tallness, face, head size, jaw definition, race, and limb size, penises are also randomized," he said. And, like those other features, it's tied to your Steam ID and cannot be changed; if you come up short, so to speak, you're just going to have to deal with it. Maybe buy a big pickup truck or something.

Despite the many variations in "features," everyone in Rust shares one common attribute: They're all dudes. That may change in the not-too-distant future, however, as Facepunch revealed in its latest blog post that it has begun the process of adding a female model to the game. But don't get too wound up over the prospect of being trapped on an island filled with naked swimsuit models.

"We really don t want to make the female model unrealistic in the sense of her being aesthetically idealized," Tom—presumably Facepunch artist Thomas Butters—wrote. "In the same way that our male models aren t perfect specimens of the male body, neither should the female be. No huge boobs nor four-inch waists here."

That's as it should be, and as it has to be, really. Unlike the ESRB, I don't have a problem with nudity in videogames, but a game filled with male schlubs and female supermodels would look pretty weird. Butters added that in-game testing of the female model could begin as soon as next week.

Facepunch Studios have outlined the new features, changes and stuff coming to Rust, which includes a practical candle hat for keeping your surroundings illuminated, and your pate nicely coated in melting wax. That striking image courtesy of the latest devblog, which also details the new weapon ammo wheel, barricades and ouchy floor spikes, plus the return of the location-dependent headshot sound from the 'Legacy' build.

Interestingly, Facepunch's Petur has "added a single high-yield, zero-radiation facility in the middle of the island. Noobs probably need not apply, as you ll need warm clothing to survive a night there". Here's what the new facility looks like:

Check out the full list of new Rusty stuff at this link (there's quite a lot of it).