The Summer Sale Is Now Live! We're having a huge sale and you'll find up to 50% off most of our games! This is a great opportunity to try our wide selection of games, so don't miss this chance! The full list of our games that are on sale can be viewed on our Steam Publisher page here.

Add to wishlist!

Unusual Visual Novels: Summer!

This Week in Destiny, we have more details to share from The Edge of Fate. We are getting closer and closer to July 15, so today we are talking about the incoming weapons tuning as well as some economy changes. And let's not forget about the developer stream from Tuesday, the gear tiering Dev Insight article from yesterday, and the other topics you can see below.

• We had a livestream on Tuesday!

• A new Rite of the Nine challenge

• Announcing our World First Race hosts

• GCX, here we go

• Kepler Restricted Brief

• Weapons, Power and Economy Updates

• Destiny 2 Open Access

• Bungie Day is almost here

You can read the rest of the TWID here.

The update that changes EVERYTHING is here!

Now you can race your friends live, spectate runs, chat mid-game, and much more.

We put a lot of love into making this update. Drop a like and share this with your friends! 🤩

• Invite friends or join mid-race

• Party leaderboard

• In-game chat

• Spectator mode (TAB)

• Custom Cups

• Sign up for the Beta through our official Discord

• Beta Runners can invite others into Multiplayer (even Demo users!)

• Casual-friendly way to keep 7.5m/s speed

• Shift / Right Trigger as default key binds

• Watch ghost runs straight from leaderboards

• Save and replay the most epic runs

• Still in 'experimental' phase

• Load custom playlists

• Seamless track transitions

• New Soundtrack by SKAYDEN

• If you want your music to be in RBM, contact us on official Discord

• HUD Lab: Customize your in-game UI

• New onboarding experience

• Clean new menu UI

• Portal linking

• Object count display

• Cloud map deletion

• Rotation fixes

• Mirroring improvements

• New input glyphs

• Vastly improved Controller experience

• Rebind support for 'Throw'

• Categories

• Note: More changes coming soon!

• Transparency and size settings

• Distance-based name tags

• World / Nation / Party filters

• 🏃 and 👁️ buttons now work as they should

• New: Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Switzerland

• Flag opacity fixes

• Let us know if your flag is missing on official Discord

• Crash prevention

• Input conflict resolution

• Consider this as a preview that gives you quick overview of our plans

• You can actively participate and steer the direction of development

• Follow this link to learn more: RBM Issue Tracker

Due to amount of changes, it's highly advised to 'Restore Defaults' under Settings > Input.

• Date: 7 July - 14 July

• Duration: 1 Week

• Format: Top 64 Runners advance to next round

• Map: 'Spiral Out' by Lint

• Date: 19 July (Saturday)

• Duration: ~20 min

• Format: Top 10 advance to next round

• Maps: Random 30 campaign maps

• Date: 26 July (Saturday)

• Duration: ~40 min

• Maps: All campaign maps (aka Full Multiplayer Speedrun)

📝 Note: Demo users are welcome to participate in the tournament - tell your friends!

Tell us what's most exciting. Is it not on this list? Let us know in the comments or on our official Discord.

• Custom Map Multiplayer Races

• “Cinemo” Cinematic Replay Mode

• Hard Mode Achievement

• Cremo 2.0 (Controller support)

• Steam Deck Support

• Seasonal Events

• Camera & Assist Tools

Shoutout to the current WR holder Senievol who's the first ever to go under 40min!

We’re tracking three priority issues and need your help to squash them:

Occasional 180° spins. Possibly tied to FPS spikes or Jukebox.

Input freeze in Fullscreen at 500+ FPS.

Sensitivity drop + FPS loss when returning from tabbing out.

If you're experiencing these, please report them on Discord. Your input is vital!

Thanks for helping us make the game better! 💛

• 💬 Join our Discord – We’d love your feedback!

• 📺 Join Livestreams on YouTube - Come hang out for live races, 3 times a week!

• 📚 Check out our Guides & Overview – We’ve hidden some surprises. 😉

Welcome to the sixth Steadfast Steward’s experimental build! In order to test out these changes, head over to our public beta branches on Steam, Epic or GOG. 

For full details on what to expect from our Steadfast Steward’s Update and how to participate, please check out our Participation Details blog post, or see our intro post in the #general_info channel on our official Discord.

You may notice that these patch notes are more detailed than usual. We have included a number of ‘Developer Notes’ beside many of the entries here, to better express the intent behind the changes. By outlining our goals we hope that this will help measure if our intent is matching our implementation.

This update features work on the Runaway’s Orphan path.

Wanderer

• Backdraft and Backdraft+ now ignore Block if the Runaway has Stealth

• Firestarter+ buff increased from 2 Burn to 3

• Ransack and Ransack+ no longer grant Stealth if the Runaway already has Stealth

• Ransack and Ransack+ no longer consume Combo if the Runaway already has Stealth

• Ransack+ DMG reduced from 4-8 to 4-7

  • Dev Note: Ransack is a utility-laden skill, so it's raw DMG is being proportionately reduced.

Arsonist

• Dragonfly+ Burn reduced from 4 to 3

• Firestarter and Firestarter+ now target a single enemy

• Firestarter and Firestarter+ now copy all Burn from the target

• Firestarter and Firestarter+ now transfer all Burn from the target's team to the Runaway

• Firestarter+ no longer grants a Speed token

• Hearthlight and Hearthlight+ now correctly consume Arsonist Buffs when used

Orphan

• This Path no longer has reduced HP

• This Path no longer buffs or debuffs Burn dealt based on rank

• This Path no longer buffs or debuffs DMG dealt based on rank

• After not moving for a round, the Orphan gains +1 Burn dealt

• After not moving for 2 rounds, the Orphan gains +1 Burn duration

• The Orphan loses these buffs when moving

• When moving, the Orphan gains +1 DMG stacking up to 2 times

• The Orphan loses this buff if she hasn't moved (or been moved by external sources) by the end of a round

  • Dev Note: The original intent of the Orphan Path was to facilitate movement and positioning choices but many people opted to play it with a park 'n spark approach instead, sitting her in the back and spamming Firefly. The Orphan's kit and buffs have been retooled to support choosing mobility or stability as needed so that both the original intent and the emergent playstyle are preserved while mitigating some of the old Path's issues with rank bonuses clashing with the needs of skills (e.g. Dragonfly having penalized Burn in rank 2). While some of the other Paths specialize in spreading Burn around, the Orphan is more capable of stacking it on single targets.

• Dragonfly is now a Path skill

• Dragonfly and Dragonfly+ do not have a chance to apply Combo

• Dragonfly and Dragonfly+ do not have Burn RES Piercing when Stealthed

• Dragonfly and Dragonfly+ add an additional, separate Burn 1 effect when used while Stealthed. This Burn is also affected by DOT modifiers such as Orphan Path buffs or trinkets.

• Dragonfly+ Burn reduced from 4 to 3

• Firefly is now a Path skill

• Firefly and Firefly+ do not interact with Combo

• Firefly and Firefly+ do not gain Burn RES Piercing when the Orphan has Stealth

• Firefly and Firefly+ add an additional, separate Burn 1 effect when used while Stealthed. This Burn is also affected by DOT modifiers such as Orphan Path buffs or trinkets.

• Firefly+ Burn reduced from 5 to 4

  • Dev Note: We wanted key Burn skills on this Path to have a unique Stealth buff that not only synergized with the Path buffs but other sources of DOT modification such as trinkets, Firestarter, or Physician's Cause of Death. Even a very small fire can quickly grow out of control under the right conditions. Having lost their Stealth Burn RES Piercing, we also opted to have Orphan inherit the Wanderer version of Hearthlight.

• Firestarter is no longer a Path skill

  • Dev Note: The current Wanderer version of the skill already synergizes well with other Path effects.

• Ransack is now a Path skill

• Ransack and Ransack+ do not consume Combo to grant Stealth

• Ransack and Ransack+ apply Combo

  • Dev Note: As great as Ransack is for generating Stealth, having both Stealth generators for this Path require movement would make it very difficult for the Runaway to benefit from both her Stealth Burn effects and the Burn buffs for having not moved at the same time. Consequently, Ransack has become a Combo generator instead of consumer and the secondary source of Stealth has been moved elsewhere on this Path. Between this and adjustments made to Searing Strike / Firefly, Orphan overall is generally less Combo-hungry and slightly more capable of providing it instead.

• Searing Strike is now a Path skill

• Searing Strike and Searing Strike+ launch ranks are 2 3

• Searing Strike and Searing Strike+ do not consume Combo

• Searing Strike and Searing Strike+ do not gain increased Burn when the Orphan has Stealth

• Searing Strike and Searing Strike+ add an additional, separate Burn 1 effect when used while Stealthed. This Burn is also affected by DOT modifiers such as Orphan Path buffs or trinkets.

  • Dev Note: Searing Strike's launch ranks have been adjusted to support both pairing with other skills that don't require movement to benefit from the Burn buffs or following up on movement to benefit from the DMG buffs. Like Dragonfly and Firefly, it has potential to stack added Burn on a single target from Stealth but it also has the best DMG range to benefit from +DMG, at the risk of losing the buff since this skill doesn't move you. If you can get somebody else to displace the Orphan afterwards, though, the buff can be retained.

• Smokescreen is now a Path skill

• Smokescreen and Smokescreen+ do not apply Combo

• Smokescreen and Smokescreen+ now consume Combo to grant the Runaway Stealth if she does not already have any

• Smokescreen applies 1 Weak

• Smokescreen+ applies 1 Weak instead of 1 Vulnerable

• Smokescreen grants 1 Stealth vs. Combo if the Orphan does not already have Stealth

• Smokescreen+ grants 2 Stealth vs. Combo if the Orphan does not already have Stealth

  • Dev Note: Smokescreen has been reworked for the Orphan to provide a way for her to gain Stealth without sacrificing the Burn buffs like Run and Hide would. In addition, the skill swaps the Vulnerable for Weak in order to double down on hampering the target's next attack; even if Blind fails the 50/50 roll, the Weak token will still cut the damage in half.

• Spiked Barricade and Weapon Rack Debuff RES reduced from immune to 100%. Dev Note: This is primarily to fix blocking positive tokens. The effect that prevents these enemies from gaining positive tokens is a debuff which couldn't be applied if they are immune.

💾 Shards, Secrets... and Something Else.
What was once buried… now glows. Whispers echo through the mines. Not all who craft, return the same.

   🔷 Strange Shards: They hum. They shine. They shouldn’t exist.
  Yet here they are – shimmering upgrade components waiting to be crafted.
  But… no known recipe has been confirmed. Not officially. Not safely.

   🧠 Theories emerge daily. Some claim the shards hold memory. Others say they evolve.
  All we know is: they weren’t in the last update.

   🧪 New Setting: Enable "Unlock Recipes by Discovery" in new games.
  Your knowledge begins empty – just like your courage.

   🔍 How it works:
  – Ingredients only appear if you've held them.
  – Results remain hidden… until it’s too late.
  – Once discovered, you never forget. Unless you should.

   🌀 Performance Improvements:
  - Code rewritten in sleepless frenzy.
  - GPU usage down. CPU usage whispering.
  - It runs smoother, but something stirs deeper now.

   📂 New Feature: The active worker list (on the left) is now collapsible.
  And it’s collapsed by default.
  Click to reveal your loyal workforce – or leave them in the shadows.
  They won’t mind. Probably.

   🎮 Want early access to forbidden builds, test Beta Branches, or whisper your shard theories?
  Join our official Discord server… if you dare.

👉 Click here before it disappears...

Greetings, Captains! 🖖

Today we have a special dilithium sale on the webshop! 💎

Get over 22k dilithium for only $25! 💰

Act fast, because this limited-time offer will only last until Monday 7/7!

As part of one of our long term goals of reducing friction for new players, we bring the party system to make it easier to connect to a server as your friends!

To invite friends to a party:

• Open the friends menu (bottom right of the main menu)

• Right click on a friend

• Click "Invite To Party"

• Wait for them to accept the invite

Once all your friends have joined your party the party leader can connect to a server. This will cause all party members to connect to the same server.

There is also an in-game advantage to joining a server as a party. When you first spawn on the server your party members will spawn nearby each other and automatically be put on the same team. Future respawns will remain random scattered on the beach.

After several years of waving a radiation detector around, we’ve finally given CZ-721 in the Outpost something to do. He now offer players a mission to travel to a Fishing Village and back to unlock a new, permanent spawn point in Outpost. This new spawn point has a 30 minute cooldown and won’t count towards your bag limit. This mission is available in both Vanilla and Primitive modes, but is disabled in Softcore (as there is already a permanently available spawn point in that mode).

Along with this new mission we’re also shipping a bunch of under the hood improvements to the mission system. This has been a longer term project over the last few months as we all want to make more missions and flesh this system out but the process to create new missions internally is quite cumbersome and error prone. Prior to these upgrades, creating a new mission involved a long process of manually setting up conversation nodes, filling in translation fields and lots of manual data entry. We’ve automated as much of this as possible, allowing us to iterate and create more missions faster. We’re not quite there yet but we’ve got more missions planned this year that will allow us to push these tools further. 

In terms of player facing upgrades, we’ve improved the conversation screen so that it doesn’t bounce around as the text is animating in, added a Mission Complete panel to communicate when a player has finished a mission and applied a lot of performance improvements as the conversation screen was quite heavy.

We’ve made several improvements to the invite process this month in order to make it easier to find and play with your friends. You’ll find a new Invite button in the bottom left Team UI that allows you to add friends to your team even if they aren’t on the current server or online. 

You can also now send team invites via the chat panel by right clicking a players name in the chat.

Peacekeeper Mode

Now display a holster warning to offending players (like the old safe zones)

Headshot Sounds

Added dedicated UI sounds slider (affects headshot sounds)

Surrendering Holstered

Weapons are now holstered when surrendering, no longer hidden

Optimized Turrets

Optimized Turrets aiming calculations on the server for better performance

Placing Deployables has always been a bit of a chore in Rust, especially if you want it to be properly in a corner or against a wall. We've finally implemented a solution to this, one that will hopefully be unintrusive, easy to use and help open up the building system by allowing quick and accurate placement of deployables for all.

Plenty of Deployables can now be snapped. This snapping is enabled by pressing Left Shift whilst ready to place an object. It comes in two flavours: Simple and Advanced (default). These modes can be changed in the settings menu.

Simple:

Simple mode will try to snap the object to a wall whenever possible. It will not force any other changes, and can be used to use the wall as a simple slider, allowing custom placement wherever you would like, but with the walls help.

Advanced:

Advanced will do everything simple does and more. Deployables will snap into corners, and will try to  snap onto similar Deployables nearby. For example a box will snap to a box, or a shelf will snap to a shelf.

August 2023's Abyss Pack has been updated to now include another new free item!

The Vertical and Horizontal Storage Tanks have been bought up from the depths. Holding as much as a Large Wood Box, they're great places to store your salvaged loot.

If you already own the Abyss Pack, the new Storage Tanks will automatically be added as an option in the crafting menu.

You can get the pack on the Steam Item Store. 

I know the most recent set of Patrol Helicopter changes weren't the best in some respects, so we want to try and improve them. It may be best to discuss some of the reasoning behind the previous changes as well as the reasoning to these new changes before getting into it.

Our main drive with the Patrol Helicopter changes is to encourage PVP across the map, whilst simultaneously stopping the same clans from getting Patrol Helicopter every time it comes out. Our previous set of changes included two main parts:

Tug of War

Before the last set of changes, the Patrol Helicopter would simply aggro on the player that shot at it, providing it wasn't mid missile attack and enough time had passed since its previous aggro. This meant that 'the last player that damaged it' could tag the Patrol Helicopter predictably and easily. 

Therefore a system known as 'tug of war'/danger zones was developed. When a player attacks the Patrol Helicopter an invisible bubble is generated, players attacking the helicopter from within this this bubble increase the bubbles score according to a specific set of factors (damage dealt etc). This allows multiple groups or individuals to fight for aggro of the Patrol Helicopter in a more serverwide style.

Multi-Stage Fights (Fleeing Mechanics)
When these 'bubbles'/danger zones ranked up too much score too fast, then the Patrol Helicopter will flee. With the idea being that the flee would happen 2/3 times and players would be required to chase down the Patrol Helicopter: fighting it across the map to encourage PVP serverwide. 

In my opinion: most of the issues with the above changes lie with Multi Stage Fights, with the main one being that players end up feeling frustrated or unrewarded for taking the helicopter.

The Tug of War system has been left virtually unchanged, with most of the following changes have been made to try and improve the Multi Stage Fight/Fleeing behaviour.

Patrol Helicopter has been changed to work the following ways:

• Will always flee towards a monument.

• Flees will be capped to 1 grid maximum.

• Flee location is now shown on the map.

• Patrol Helicopter will no longer flee if you take it from nearby/inside a monument.

These changes are meant to preserve and improve the best parts of the previous changes (increased serverwide engagement and more PVP) whilst also trying to fix the issues players had with the multi stage fights. 

It's possible these changes wont work, but I want to try them out.

We've improved the erosion simulation that is done as part of the procedural map generation with this update. 

It will now do a better job of blending the canyons and lakes with the rest of the environment and generally make a larger impact in the generation of the world. The improved simulation adds a relatively small amount of time to the map generation, but is aggressively multi-threaded to try and mitigate this.

As of April 2024 we've been adding hand animated camera animation to our viewmodels via a new camera bone in the rig.  For older viewmodels, we've continued using the code based system implemented back in 2017. While this was functional, the camera didn't accurately track the movements on screen as well as it could.

We are now able to assign any object to be the camera for our viewmodels, so we have intended to bypass the lack of a camera bone on these legacy assets, by creating hand animated movements directly in Unity. We have now completed these animations for all our older assets (pre 2017). Admires now have camera animation as well.

I want to take a moment to explain the bigger picture of our development process after noticing a large amount of outrage following a commit regarding "roof stability being fixed".

At Facepunch one of the core objectives of our mission statement is as follows:

Valuing Player Feedback: Our community is the lifeblood of Rust. We actively seek out and incorporate player feedback, ensuring that our development process is aligned with the desires and needs of our community.

We understand and respect that some bugs are better left in the game once they turn into important gameplay mechanics. Bunkers and External TCs are well known bugs that we have intentionally left in the game until we find a suitable official game mechanic to replace them. It's not ignorance: we actively keep an eye on them and only fix the variations that we feel cross the boundary from "cool mechanic" into "game breaking". 

Roof stability bunkers and disconnect-able TCs were not considered game-breaking so what happened? Well, often these bugs end their life in the same way they were created: unintentionally. 

After the Jungle Update we noticed players started making more pyramid bases and "Jungle Temples" but there was a problem: roofs would break after server restart and/or it would be impossible to build despite it showing enough stability. The root cause of this bug as well as disconnect-able TCs was the same: the stability system was using the lowest number of links to the ground instead of the highest stability for support. To fix pyramid bases meant disconnect-able TCs would also be fixed. We weighed the options and this seemed acceptable: there are many alternative bunkers in the game & you can still break external TCs manually before replacing the main TC.

I hope this gives a bit more clarity on why we fixed roof stability and gives a better explanation of our development process than a single line commit message did.

TLDR: We didn't break all bunkers in the game nor plan to, we fixed stability calculations primarily affecting stability with roofs which caused a single type of bunker to break.

Rust is fast approaching its 12th birthday. That’s nearly 12 years of guaranteed monthly updates - over 380 content updates and 2,500+ hotfixes since launch. This year, we passed 1 million positive reviews, making Rust the 6th most reviewed game on Steam. Thank you.

In 2025 we hit a huge milestone: over 20 million copies sold on PC alone.

We also shipped some of our most ambitious updates yet:

Primitive Update – Four siege weapons, a new bow, shields, and a new game mode. We also rolled out updates to horses, ragdolls, and more.

Crafting Update – A feast of changes: new ways to cook and craft, pet chickens, bees, pies, armor inserts, optimizations, and plenty more.

Jungle Update – A whole new biome! Climbable trees and vine swinging, deadly tigers and crocodiles, new monuments, boomerangs, blowpipes, and more.

Next month brings a Hardcore mode refresh alongside some long-requested quality-of-life improvements.

Later this year, we’re setting sail with the Naval Update - introducing modular, player-built boats complete, with cannons, of course and much more. 

Also in the pipeline: AI and animal overhauls, including new animals, a Warhammer collaboration, and more we’re not quite ready to talk about yet.

The Steam Summer Sale is here!

And with just a few days left, why not pick up a copy for that potential clan partner mate you've been trying to convince to join? Get it to gift here.

I'm currently working on FSR and DLSS. As an independent developer, it's quite challenging to fully understand them, but I've still given it a try. I believe the update will be available to everyone soon.

• Tweaked the arrival distance code on the autopilot so it arrives slightly further away depending on how dangerous the target is.
  
• Fixed bug 2025, 2026, 2027 - FTL power settings while on Autopilot are too low for distant stars.