We're back with some amazing EpicDesk creator collabs for giant mousepads!














To order check out their website as each of these deskpad campaigns have different end dates and shipping dates! They are ALL limited editions. Once they end they are gone forever!




Coming Late July FancyOrb is bringing you Rust Global Warfare 2!

You won't want to miss this! There will be Twitch drops and all your favorite creators involved.



If you're a creator and you want to be involved with this event join the FancyOrb Discord for updates and how to sign up!




Charitable Rust isn't until October, however, if you are a skin artist and would like to be involved with designing charity items for the Item store or Twitch Drops - pay attention over the next few weeks!



Skin contest is slated to take place for the entire month of July!

1. Use #CR2024 as official contest tag in Steam workshop.
   
2. No re-uploading old or previously submitted skins.
   
3. Do not steal or use any copyrighted or otherwise trademarked content.
   
4. Must be 100% original work (can work with others if all are listed on workshop page).
   
5. Must follow all basic workshop submission rules and standards.
   
6. If using the charity’s logo, it cannot be used on any weapon skins. Only Charitable Rust logo may be used on weapon skins.
   
7. Submissions must be high quality and Hi-Res, normals properly done/baked.
   
8. Cannot contain offensive or sexual content.
   
9. Limit of 5 skin submissions per creator.
   
10. Skins must be submitted by midnight (23:59) PST July 31, 2024.

More info, rules, regulations, and branding assets can be found here: https://www.charitablerust.com/skins




Hedge, Monstera, daVinci, and a few others from the Art community made this googley-eyed glory shrine of our savior Helkus Maximus.





It's probably best if we don't ask too many questions.




I'm just going to leave this here...






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

Cover image by Furthi

This month we're adding the Seismic Sensor, a new electricity-powered deployable.



When powered, it will listen for nearby explosions and send a power signal when detecting any.

• You can configure its range from 1 to 30 meters (one foundation = 3 meters)
  
• It will output a different power value depending on the type of explosion detected

A non-exhaustive list of power values from explosives:

• 1 power = F1 Grenade, Beancan
  
• 2 power = Explosive ammo, Satchel
  
• 3 power = C4, Rocket

The idea is to let you detect and trigger circuits when you're being raided. Alarms, traps... the possibilities are infinite, we're excited to see what you will come up with!




Traditionally, we blocked all forms of building inside Monuments. This made sense back in the day when Monuments were small in size and number, but over the years, the amount of land they take up has increased significantly.

We want to reward players who pick a strategic location during a fight, but it's hard to pick a good location when you're in an empty field!

This is why barricades can now be placed on the terrain around Monuments. This allows you to take cover as you enter and exit monuments, as well as take cover inside the open fields inside Monuments.

Applies to:

• Wood barricade
  
• Stone barricade
  
• Concrete barricade
  
• Sandbags

Remember: Monument Structures, Concrete, and Roads still block barricades at this time.

Decay and melee protection has been adjusted to account for more relaxed placement

• 15 minute decay
  
• 8-10 hits with melee

Behold the ability to see what your teammate is placing and where it will be placed! This should clear up the exact location your teammate(s) are shouting while trying to build.

By default, it only will show your teammate's deploy guides when you are building. This can be changed via the options menu to 'Always Show' or to be disabled.






When allowing barricades to be placed into Monuments we realized... it's not that clear where the building blocked of Monuments actually starts!

You will now see a red outline around the edge of monuments.



This can be toggled in the options menu.

Server owners can disable it via a convar if conflicts with custom Monuments.
Monument building radius
We also took the opportunity to adjust the building blocked size of some Monuments.

• Gas Station
  
• Lighthouse
  
• Mining Outpost
  
• Super Market

• Dome
  
• Launch Site

• Arctic Research Base

Once a code is set, the "last used" button is much faster at entering the code

Bone fragments can now be used in a composter to create fertiliser

Window glass, shutters and bars now craft in 15s instead of 30s

See the name of skins at the Repair Bench, and a link to get them

Idle helicopters no longer drift down slopes

Horse armour doesn't slow your horse as much

+100% damage against deployables

Added HV Ammo & Incendiary Ammo to mixing table

Easier to search and setup industrial conveyors

Prevent players from stashing their explosives in TCs

Hammer always shows all options to reduce misclicks

Reduce volume of F15 by 50% to reduce strain on ears

Fixed monument prefabs appearing invisible from far

Hold Sprint to auto plant all held seeds in a single planter

Able to see the attachments on weapons for sale in vending machines

Adjusted the chainsaw hit radius to make it easier to hit the trees' X mark




While a queue is better than nothing (who remembers the days of spamming reconnect?), we want to avoid players getting stuck in a queue at all: especially when it's due to a crash.

We have made a few changes to allow players recently kicked from any server to skip the queue.

• Holds your spot
  
• 5 minutes max
  
• Any type of disconnect (kick, internet outage, crash, alt + f4)

When using the wire tool, you can now adjust the amount of slack in your wire using your mouse wheel while holding LEFT SHIFT.

It's purely visual, it doesn't change anything gameplay-wise, and it also works with hoses and Christmas lights!




I worked on a bunch of improvements for sign painting this month based on community feedback. There's a mix of QoL and bug fixes, but they should all improve your painting experience!

• Made the painting UI follow your UI scale option
  
• Added a convar to switch which side the painting UI is on (paint.leftsided)
  
• Increased the maximum brush size to 100 (was 32)
  
• Fixed brush sizes below 2 drawing nothing sometimes
  
• Fixed drawn brushes overlapping within the same stroke
  
• Fixed weird color blending behavior for the softest brush
  
• Fixed portrait and landscape frames using an incorrect aspect ratio paint texture (no more squishing and export inconsistency)

1. This makes painting behave more like other apps
   
2. Fixes low opacity values not actually actually being low because the brushes overlap

Reduced medium battery size by ~15%, now fits under half walls

Tesla Coils and Igniters are now healed by your tool cupboard overtime

Now automatically turned ON or OFF depending on whether they have power

Added a new input to switch your SAM Site targeting mode using electricity

Solar panels no longer take conditional damage when picked up

Vehicles no longer prevent you from wiring components




We’re making several fishing changes this month to try and shake up the broader fishing meta. Our current issue is that it’s quite trivial to endlessly produce fish from a safe zone, then converting that fish to scrap. It’s not the fastest way to earn scrap but it is pretty reliable.

Our intention with the range of fish available to catch was always that you would work your way up the chain - catch a sardine, use that to catch a trout, use that to catch a shark. By allowing raw fish meat to be used as a bait you could easily gut one fish and catch dozens more fish with that meat, which could then be converted into even more fish.

To break this loop, this month raw fish meat is now only worth 0.5 bait (and can be used in stacks of 3) - whole fish can (and should) be used as bait but you now run the risk of losing that fish when casting out. The idea is to introduce a risk/reward mechanic. Do you cash out with your current trout catch or do you put them on line and go for the sharks?



To balance out this reduction in bait, we’ve made several other forms of bait more useful. Several bait types can now be “stacked” - if a fish requires 5 bait to be caught and you stack two Worms worth 2.5 each, you can now catch that fish. This behaviour is applied across worms, grubs, berries and small fish, making these baits more viable. We’ve also increased the bait value of human meat (1 -> 3), bear meat (5 -> 10) and wolf meat (5-> 10). The stack amount can be seen next to the bait value when selecting the item in your inventory.

The Survival Fish Trap became a bit neglected after we introduced the Fishing Rod, so this month we’ve adjusted it to make it more relevant. The trap now uses the same underlying fish/bait system as the rod, meaning you can catch different fish in different water sources as well as catch better fish based on the bait provided. The only mechanical difference between these two fish sources is that the trap cannot catch the same fish as it has used as bait and the trap has a 50% chance to lose the bait without catching the fish.




In order to save some space in bases, I’ve modified the Tech Tree menu to now allow you to browse and unlock techs from lower Tech Trees (eg. Access T1 techs from a T2 bench, access T1 and T2 trees from a T3 bench). Use the tabs in the top left of the screen to switch between available tech trees.

The workbench tax from last month's update is applied based on the Tech Tree level, so there will be no scrap cost changes as a result of this change. The tech tree also now opens immediately when accessing the workbench, saving you a click.




In hack week this month, I explored ways to reduce our memory usage, an area that is a real priority for us this year. While a lot of my experiments weren’t workable, one did actually end up saving several hundred megabytes of memory for very little cost, so it’s shipping as disabled by default this month.

A renderer in this case is simply a thing that is visible to the player - a crate, a rock, part of a structure, etc. Importantly for performance each renderer has LODs (Level of Detail) - lower quality versions of each renderer that we switch to based on the distance to the players perspective. In Unity each of these LODs typically lives on a child object of a master parent object, so Barrel01 will have a child Barrel01_LOD0, Barrel01_LOD1, etc that we switch to. What I discovered during hack week is that in a proc gen map of 4.5k size, we can have upwards of 1.3 million objects in the world, each of these objects has some overhead (we need to store its position, rotation, what the object does, etc). In a renderers case, for every single renderer we had 3-5 child objects, one for each LOD level.

I realised that in most cases each LOD object was just sharing a duplicate of all the information except for a different model, so I modified the system to detect when this happens and consolidate all needed information into a single object, then delete the child objects. By applying this to every renderer in the world, I was able to delete 385 thousand objects from the world, which had a combined memory saving of 484mb - pretty significant!

This combination process is run every time the game is launched, we’re currently working on a change to make most of these modifications before we build the game, which should yield further savings next month.

Due to how risky this change is (deleting 385 thousand objects has had some unintended side effects that we’ve now fixed), we’re shipping this new feature off by default, but we’ll monitor it’s usage through the month and likely turn it on by default sometime next month. The convar is graphics.collapseRendererLOD and you’ll need to restart your game after turning it on or off. Let us know how it goes for you!

tldr: 400k less objects
500mb less RAM




It would be amiss to say horses have not had their share of issues over the last few months. So following community feedback I looked into a solution that would resolve the difficulties players have had with horse navigation.

Alongside some minor adjustments to prevent horses from getting stuck and preventing unnecessary stamina depletion, I introduced the ability for horses to walk backwards. This seemed like the most logical approach to alleviate horses getting stuck and should be an overall improvement to navigation.




I've added a few more cinematic entities this month for Rust creators to use in their video and image projects. These can be spawned by server owners/admins and can be hidden via console with pre-assigned group numbers.

The new additions include:

• More spot and point light (red/blue/green variants)
  
• Unlit backdrops and cyc walls (green/blue/black/white/grey variants)
  
• Flags/cutters (small/medium/large variants)

Cinematic entities assigned to different groups which allows them to hidden if desired. Use the command cinematicentity.hideobjects followed by group numbers to hide them.

Cinematic entities are now assigned to specific group numbers which allows them to be hidden if desired. Use the command cinematicentity.hideobjects followed by one or more group numbers to set their visibility to hidden.

The groups are setup like so:

• 0 = nothing (makes all entities visible)
  
• 1 = lighting
  
• 2 = backdrops
  
• 3 = props
  
• 4 = misc (flags/cutters)

You can hide one or multiple groups in the same command line - for example:
cinematicentity.hideobjects 1 - Hides lighting only (keeps light effect but hides the mesh)
cinematicentity.hideobjects 1 2 - Hides both lighting and backdrop meshes
cinematicentity.hideobjects 0 - Shows/un-hides all cinematic entities

You can also hide cinematic entity groups in demos with cinematicentity.demohideobjects followed by the same group numbers above. To revert to the visiblity of the entities back to their original states from the demo recording, use cinematicentity.removedemooverride




There will be Twitch drops so be sure you get synced!



Please be aware of scams. Facepunch will never contact you. Only ever use our official website.
https://twitch.facepunch.com/




Turret interference has been effective at preventing players from surrounding their base in 100s of turrets, however it lacked feedback on how exactly to stay under the limit.

Turret interference will now be shown while holding a wire tool and looking at a turret.



It will also be shown in the hotbar while building.



While this is accurate most of the time keep in mind this only counts turrets you are authed on (it ignores enemy turrets). This mismatch is required to prevent players from holding a turret and seeing how many turrets are inside an enemy's base.


FULL DEVBLOG HERE

Any movement in rust would modify your baseline Aimcone so that shots taken while in motion were somewhat inaccurate. This was supposed to discourage "running and gunning". The problem with this is that *any* kind of motion while in a firefight puts you at a disadvantage (minor dodging) and increases the amount of RNG experienced by the player.



What I've done is reduced this penalty to zero to start, and blend it up to the full amount after 4 rapid fire shots. This means is you can now strafe and dodge while tap firing and not experience a huge aiming penalty, however full auto will be penalized.

I've also adjusted the Aimcone curve modifiers for a few weapons so that more shots have a higher probability of landing closer to the center. This has been applied to the Custom SMG, SAP and LR300.





Weapon mods have received some love this month.

The duration between bursts while using the burst mod has been significantly reduced to 2x firerate instead of 3x firerate.

The holosight mesh has had its edges thinned so that less of your vision is obscured while using it. This is a stopgap until we produce a new model for it. I've also fixed the Holosight reticle being affected by motion blur.

Both the muzzle brake and muzzle boost have had their negatives reduced, they now have less damage reduction and less damage falloff and should prove to be far more useful.

In addition, I've made some changes to the recoil, damage fall off, bullet velocity, and burst mode of the LR300. This should now be the best in class AR.

Everything subject to change.




Starting today, Recyclers in safezones have been nerfed. Their cycle time has been increased to 8 seconds and they now yield 80% of what they used to. This is the price you now must pay for safety.



However, the recyclers found at monuments have the same cycle time as before but now yield 120%! This is to reward players taking the risk out in the open.



While I am aware that a great many keyboards may be smashed as the death screen fades in over the droning hum of the active recycler, I still have hope this helps usher in a new era of roaming and monument combat.




Some great items were not used because they were way too expensive. To that end I've made the following changes:

• HV Ammo - Gunpowder cost reduced significantly, and the yield per craft increased to match non HV ammo.
  
• Torpedos - Craft yield increased from 3 to 5.
  
• Incendiary Rockets - The cost has been drastically reduced and their damage + flame spread increased.
  
• Drones - Tech trash is no longer a requirement for drones.
  
• HMLMG - Gear cost has been reduced.

Large External Gates and Walls now require the player to stand still for 1.5 seconds when placing, making them less useful for immediate PvP encounters in the wild. We felt that being able to place down such large structures in a short amount of time felt at odds with our style of combat that rewards situational awareness and environmental tactics.






To fill the void left by the external wall changes regarding dynamic cover during PvP, we have doubled the size of the deployable wooden barricade. The wooden barricade remains instantly deployable and provides a moderate amount of cover on-demand without being overpowered or polluting the landscape with large, unsightly deployable.

This is without a doubt a large shift to PvP, we'll be monitoring these changes carefully




Some further tweaks to the Bradley this month.

Scientists now spawn in stages, based on the Bradley's health, and there's some Heavy scientists thrown in the mix now, too.

• At 80% health, 2 scientists will spawn
  
• At 60% health, 4 more will spawn
  
• At 40% health, 6 final scientists will spawn

There's also been some tweaks to make some of the Scientists more aggressive and use varying attack angles.




You can now use door controllers without worrying about raiders abusing them to open your doors! This is accomplished by unpairing door controllers once your TC is destroyed & requiring code lock authorization for pairing.

They also are much easier to setup as they can now be placed just like code locks.

This should reduce the pain of constantly opening and closing the doors of your base... especially when your teammates tend to leave them open.

• Now deployable on doors like code locks
  
• Automatically paired when placed
  
• Added 2 new side inputs : 'Open' and 'Close'
  
• Unpaired when the associated tool cupboard is destroyed

We also carried on improving electricity by adjusting components and fixing various bugs this month. Thanks again to the community for reporting bugs and suggesting ideas.

The full change log of each component can be read in the section at the bottom of the blog.




We know the latest helicopter changes had some mixed feedback, so we've revised them. No go zones should feel a lot more fair, and most major bugs experienced with heli since the last update are now patched.

• Monument Crashing - the helicopter will now attempt to crash at a nearby monument on death. It won't crash at monuments with safe zones: outpost, fishing village, etc. This can be disabled by server owners via: patrolhelicopterai.monument_crashing
  
• Flee Behavior - heli would previously flee when it sometimes didn't mean to. Damage to start a flee has been tweaked, ensuring a flee every time you quickly remove 30% of its overall HP.
  
• Numerous Fixes & Improvements - heli will now properly target you on boats, cargo, trains and other moving entities. Targeting fixes and performance improvements have been made throughout the code. More legacy bugs: such as heli not exploding immediately on impact with certain terrain are also fixed.

The Launch site loot had received an overhaul. Before, the loot inside the main building shared the same respawn group as the rest of the launch site, meaning loot inside the main building was never guaranteed. Loot had a chance to spawn elsewhere at the monument, which felt discouraging when completing the puzzle and running the main building.



The main site building now has a dedicated respawn group, which guarantees 23 loot crates when the puzzle resets.

Additionally, more loot now spawns throughout the monument.




Underwater vision has been improved substantially. You can now see much farther when using goggles and even more so when viewing out a submarine porthole.

In addition, the surface accuracy of submarine torpedoes has been vastly improved and torpedoes were made cheaper to produce by way of an increased craft yield. Lastly, the duo submarine fires torpedoes slightly faster than the solo.





Can authorize other players on a tool cupbard
Can demolish high walls & gates for 10min after placement
Hold SHIFT to disable snapping
Fixed foundation placement under roofs & floors
Foundations now drop debris
Floors now drop debris




We’re making some changes to how the Tech Tree works to try and incentivise new styles of play. Starting this month you will notice that the T2 and T3 workbench tech trees now have a tax rate applied to them which will increase the cost of unlocking items. We’re starting this at 10% for T2 and 20% for T3. This cost increase only applies to unlocking via the Tech Tree, researching items via the Research Table is unchanged.



Our thinking behind this is that we feel the Tech Tree progression path has become a little stale and needs to be shaken up, but we don’t want to lose the advantages that the Tech Tree brought to progression - making difficult to find blueprints attainable in a way that felt fair and not as at the mercy of RNG. While there are a number of avenues we can use to try and make both forms of progression feel more balanced this feels like a simple and understandable starting point.

As with all of our changes we’ll be closing a close eye on this and will likely make further changes in the future.






It’s been great to see the reception to last month's Cargo Ship/harbor update, we hope you’ve all enjoyed some very (very) intense firefights. Based on the feedback we received we’re making a couple of changes this month:

• The Cargo Ship will now dock at both harbors (if they exist) on a map before leaving. Note that any containers that have already been placed on a ship will be deleted when it starts its approach to the next harbor.
  
• You can now mouse over the ship on the map to see if it has already docked.
  
• The containers that are spawned to be placed on the Cargo Ship will now be spawned when it starts its approach (about 100m away from the harbor) rather than when the ship arrives at its dock, giving you more time to hide in the containers.
  
• The container spawn points have been mildly tweaked so that all of the containers should be accessible, although you might need to do some climbing.

We hope these changes make the event a bit more understandable at a glance as well as make the combat encounters more interesting.




Since implementing a dedicated viewmodel renderer system back in April 2021, all of our viewmodels have been split between the old and new system. The primary stumbling blocks were viewmodels with lots of particle effects and lights (torches, flamethrowers, etc). While we covered most of the high impact cases of viewmodel jittering by supporting guns (how often do you use the birthday cake on oil rig?) we’ve been wanting to consolidate everything for a while. This month we’ve updated all of the viewmodels to use the new renderer so they should appear smooth and jitter free regardless of where you are in the world. The affected viewmodels:

1. Both flamethrowers
   
2. Water Bucket
   
3. Beancan Grenade
   
4. Molotov Cocktail
   
5. Flashlight
   
6. Birthday Cake
   
7. Garry’s Mod Toolgun
   
8. Poker playing cards
   
9. Lunar New Year spear
   
10. Minigun
    
11. Paddle

You should see no visible changes if it's all working correctly.






I've investigated and addressed a couple of AI performance issues that were causing the AI to take longer to process than necessary, especially on servers that have been running for a while.

This should help with AI server performance across the board.






After noticing occasional framedrops during gunfights, I've spent some time investigating the issue and found out that our impact effects prefab warmup wasn't working as intended.

All impact effects are now warmed up correctly during loading times.

This should drastically reduce the stuttering when spawning a big amount of effects prefab for the first time (e.g when a fight starts and bullets start flying). This has a very little if no impact on loading times.




Procedural maps are now automatically uploaded from game servers to our backend so players can just download them instead of generating them when they first join the server.

This should significantly reduce the time it takes to join a server for the first time after it wipes. It may also reduce the number of players seeing "Rust is not responding" popups while joining servers for the first time.




Harmony is Rust's built-in modding platform shipped with the server. It powers modding frameworks like Oxide & Carbon, as well as standalone mods.

We upgraded from Harmony 1.2 -> Harmony 2.3 which brings us up to date with the latest features & additional stability.

This requires mod authors to recompile their Harmony mods. Fortunately the majority of mods only need to change a single line.

Before
using Harmony;

After
using HarmonyLib;

Players shouldn't need to worry as the majority of large servers already started updating their mods before the update went live. Server owners please keep an eye out for mod updates as every Harmony Mod will needed to be updated.




Tesla Coil, Igniter
To stop them from self-destructing, they are now disabled upon reaching <10% of their max health.
No longer take damage when picked up

Electrical Branch
Reduced minimum branch out power from 2 to 1

Button
Reduced press time from 5s to 1s

Storage Monitor
Will now recognize partial stack changes and pass power through when removing or adding a items to a stack

Splitter
Fixed power distribution issue when not all outputs were used

Memory Cell
Fixed side inputs triggerable by 0 power circuits

Timer Switch
Fixed an issue where its side input was triggered inconsistently by circuits update (e.g: industrial conveyor updating its state)

Counter
When set to 'Show Passthrough', it now displays its passthrough even if nothing is connected to its output
No longer requires a connection to its output to display its passthrough when set to 'Show Passthrough'

RF Receiver
Updated recipe:
- Metal Fragments 100 → 150
- Tech Trash 1 → 0

RF Broadcaster
Updated recipe:
- Metal Fragments 100 → 150
- Tech Trash 1 → 0

RF Transmitter
Updated recipe:
- HQM 5 → Metal Fragments 100
- Tech Trash 1 → 0

RF Pager
Updated recipe:
- Metal Fragments 50 → 100
- Tech Trash 1 → 0

AND, OR, XOR Switch
No longer emit light when unpowered

Industrial Conveyor
Can be placed upside down again

Industrial Light
No longer referred as Simple Light when looking at IO connection handles

Smart Switch
No longer referred as Switch when looking at IO connection handles

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.




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.

FULL BLOG POST

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
  
• Hapis Island - 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.






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!

• 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 and Code of Conduct.
  
• 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 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.



As mentioned in our start of the year blog post, 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.