Facepunch studios programmer Garry Newman has posted a yearly review that contains a bit of interesting fact: Survival game Rust has now made more money than his eponymous Garry’s Mod, or Gmod. With Rust having grossed $142 million at 9 million copies sold, it has surpassed GMod at a humble $108 million. GMod has still outsold rust in terms of copies, however, with 16 million total sales. This might come as a surprise to some, because GMod is 15 years old this year, while Rust released in 2013. Doing the math, that means both games have sold over a million copies for each year of release, while Rust has sold 1.5 million for each year. 

The post also contains details on Facepunch’s release from earlier this year, Chippy—that sold about 10 thousand copies. Compared to other games from Facepunch that’s not great, but it’s pretty good for the post-indie apocalypse Steam environment. Anyways, here’s the big Rust thing from this year: Horses. Who doesn’t love a horse. Nobody, that’s who.

You can read Facepunch’s entire yearly review over on their website. Warning: Contains sales figures, console game announcements, other business stuff. 

The headline says it all: Rust, the game about waking up naked and alone on a strange island, mere hours away from death due to exposure and starvation, now has tubas. And not just tubas! The game's first paid DLC, announced last month, also includes a piano, a drum kit, guitars, a trumpet, a pan flute, and other cobbled-together instruments—all of them fully playable—of the sort you'd expect to find on a Gilligan's Island with guns. I'm sure no one will annoy anyone with these.

The Rust Instrument Pack goes for $10/£7/€8 on Steam (although it's 10 percent off until December 12), and in a nice touch you don't need to own the DLC in order to enjoy the tunes. You'll have to purchase the pack to be able to craft the instruments, but once made they can be shared between all players or taken off of corpses as regular inventory items. Static instruments are also available on a new music stage in the Compound so everyone can give them a try.

Unlike the squeezebox and fiddle in Sea of Thieves, for instance, which play preset tunes on a button press, these instruments in Rust can be manipulated more finely: "They all use a completely overhauled music system that allows you to play specific notes (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) across multiple octaves," developer Facepunch explained. And if you happen to have a MIDI-compatible device lying around you can plug it into your PC and use it to interact with the instruments in a more musical manner. The acoustic guitar already in the game has also been converted to work with the new system.

Here's what you can craft, and what it costs to do so:

• Wheelbarrow Piano (200 Wood, 100 Metal Frags)
• Junkyard Drum Kit (200 Wood, 100 Metal Frags)
• Shovel Bass (50 Wood, 75 Metal Frags)
• Sousaphone (100 Metal Frags)
• Jerry Can Guitar (25 Wood, 50 Metal Frags)
• Xylobones (50 Bone Fragments)
• Plumber's Trumpet (75 Metal Frags)
• Cowbell (35 Metal Frags)
• Canbourine (25 Metal Frags)
• Pan Flute (20 Metal Frags, 5 Cloth)

The update also enables legs, which Rust developer Garry Newman gave us an unexpectedly horrific behind-the-scenes look at last month. "Legs" sounds simple enough, but like most things involved with game programming there's a lot more going on than meets the eye. 

As usual, there are a number of other fixes, changes, and additions in this update. Loading times have also been improved (although Newman noted, accurately, that if you really want to speed things up, buy an SSD), and horses are now better able to navigate rocks and radtowns—although they might sometimes do weird things like, say, teleport onto signs (this is being worked on). And for owners of Garry's Mod, there's a new GMod Tool Gun, a hammer replacement to celebrate that game's 15th anniversary. Full details are up at facepunch.com.

It's fun to get a look at how the sausage is made in games, and Rust developer Garry Newman opened the doors to his butcher shop in a blog post today. The post reveals that Newman has wanted for years to let players look down in first-person and see their own legs while playing Rust, rather than traveling through the world as a disembodied camera in the same manner as most first-person games.

"We have a skeleton with the player model on it (which is what casts the localplayer shadow)," the post reads. "We want to show it, but we also want to manipulate the bones in a way that they don't conflict with the player's view. But if we do that the shadow would be all fucked."

The solution Newman finally came up with? Rendering a different model. "So what we do is basically copy the third person model (which creates the shadows) and manipulate the bones. The manipulation isn't anything complicated, it's just a case of tucking shit behind the camera," Newman writes.

Above: Gif made from video at Garry.tv

"There's a couple of extra things we have to do. When you're crouched and look down, we pull the viewmodel back so it doesn't clip through your knees."

While that solution does indeed look convincing from a first-person perspective (above), it's both funny and a little alarming to see what's happening behind the scenes to achieve it:

Above: Gif made from video at Garry.tv

As you can see, the player's shadow is intact and both it and their body will look perfectly normal to them, but "tucking shit behind the camera" technically turns the player into a weird stretched taffy monster. It's reminiscent of the disturbing gymnastics required to let players peer over cover in Crysis.

You can read the full post for more behind-the-scenes magic (there's a reason the models above don't show the player's arms) at Newman's blog. And while we're on the topic of Rust, we also learned this week that it'll release its first paid DLC next month, which will contain 10 new playable musical instruments.

Rust is getting some more new stuff next month, and for the first time ever you'll have to pay something extra for it. The first premium DLC for Rust will feature playable musical instruments, 10 of them in all, including a piano, drums, sousaphone (pictured above), and yes, even a cowbell.

The premium DLC will cost $10, though Rust's devblog says it will be initially discounted. The DLC will arrive on December 5, though the instruments are available now to play with and try out for free on Rust's staging server branch.

These aren't just instruments where you hold down a key and they automatically play a song. "We've created a whole new control system to play the instruments," the devblog says.

"You can now bind the standard note range (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) to any key. From there you can bind sharp and octave modifier keys which allow you to play over 20 notes on some instruments." This new music system will be applied to Rust's existing acoustic guitar as well when the DLC arrives. You can also plug in a MIDI device and play some of the instruments in real time.  

Here's a look at some (nude) players in a jam session:

Even if you don't purchase the DLC, there are still ways to join in on the fun. If a DLC owner crafts a musical instrument for you (or if you murder someone and take theirs) and you'll be able to play it. 

And if you're worried about being hounded at all hours of the night by roving sousaphone and xylophone players, no need to worry. Facepunch's community support manager Errn tweeted that the instruments will have their own dedicated volume slider.

Here are the rest of the instruments in the DLC:

Survival sandbox Rust continues to grow and change, having added hot air balloons, electricity, and even underwear in the past 12 months. Back in June, horseback riding was added, which set the stage for this most recent and extremely important update to Rust: Horse armor.

(And no, you don't have to pay $2.50 for the horse armor. It's free.)

Horse armor will help protect your steed from incoming damage as well as providing additional protection for the rider ("This might seem like it isn't very realistic, but it doesn't matter," reads the dev blog). There are two types of horse armor, one made of wood, and the other (and far more fun) is the armor made of road signs seen above. You can also craft horseshoes, which will make your horse faster, and saddlebags, which will increase your horse's inventory size but reduce their max speed.

As is always the case with Rust updates, there's plenty more to it, including changes and improvements to the electrical system, tweaks to weapon balance, exploit fixes, and more. View all the changes here.

It's been five years since Rust arrived, treating players to dangling dongs, rampaging bears, and a ruthless multiplayer survival experience. To celebrate this anniversary, a big, world-altering update is now live. Electricity has been added to the mix of tree-chopping, rock-breaking, gun-crafting, base-building, and (recently) hot-air ballooning. Also, you can now wear underpants.

The Electric Anniversary, as it's called, is now live and contains a number of electrical components: batteries, switches, pressure pads, splitters, timers, and other various odds-and-ends that will allow players to use electricity to power lights, automation, clocks, CPUs, defenses, traps, and god knows what else. Power generation is currently (ha ha, current) supplied by solar panels and windmills. Here's a nice video from Rustafied to introduce you to the basics.

Along with the exciting new electrical components, the update adds an M39 rifle, provides an overhaul to how bows work, brings some improvements to the cargo ships, and as I said earlier, adds underwear. This last item (called a censorship option in the devlog) should be helpful for streamers who are penalized for showing bare butts, wangs, boobs, and muffs while playing the game for others.

Finally, in a post on Facepunch, Garry Newman delivered some stats about Rust's development. In five years, Rust has sold 7,457,075 copies, grossing $110,313,646, which includes bundles, DLC, and in-game sales. Its highest concurrent player count was 71,801, just this past month following the balloon update. It's also sold over 4 million skins, and the creators of those skins have earned nearly $2 million combined from those sales. That's some shockingly (electricity, get it?) good news.

Rust players really like hot air balloons, apparently: since they were added this week, along with surface-to-air missiles that can shoot them down, the player count for the survival game has inflated to an all-time high. 

Today, more than 71,000 people were playing at a time, according to Steam's official stats page, and as I write this it's Steam's fifth-highest game by concurrent player count, beaten only by Dota 2, CS:GO, PUBG and Rainbow Six Siege.

Looking at data from Steam Charts, you can see a definite spike around the time of the release of the latest update. You can also see that this is the first time it's pulled in more than 70,000 players at a time: its previous peak was around 68,000 in February, when it left Early Access (here's Luke's review).

I've never played Rust, but jumping in a hot air balloon with some friends to glide calmly over an enemy's base at the start of a raid sounds like fun. The SAM missiles sound like they'd be a pain, though—they just automatically fire on any balloon that comes near. Surely everyone can just stick one on their base, completely negating the balloons? I know they cost resources, but I assume anyone with a base worth robbing will be able to afford them.

Is that the case? If you've had a go with them, let me know in the comments below.

Rust, the survival game where you start by banging a rock against a tree and then progress to crafting automatic weapons, has opened up a new mode of travel that lets you take to the skies: hot air balloons. You'll find them scattered around the map, and once they're fueled you can fly wherever the wind carries you. Balloons should hold about four or five passengers, making them the ideal way to soar above the defenses of a fort you'd like to raid.

But every Sherlock has his Moriarty, and you may find your balloon shot down thanks to the inclusion of surface-to-air missiles, which also arrived in the Rust update. You can purchase a deployable SAM site from scientist outposts for 500 scrap and once stocked with ammo it'll automatically target any nearby balloons.

Note: this includes your own balloon. SAMs aren't psychic. They just love killing balloons, so they'll shoot yours down too. So remember to either unload the SAM site before you launch, or just don't fly anywhere near your own fort.

The Cargo Ship Update has brought a big, noisy boat to the shores of Rust, and it's filled with useful loot and heavily-armed scientists who'd really rather you kept your hands off of it.   

The ship, the CCSC Lazarus, will appear as a "periodic server event" that occurs every 2-to-4 in-game days. It will approach the island to a distance of about 200 meters, at which point you can ride out to it on a boat of your own and climb aboard via one of the ladders hanging down its side. At that point, you'll have to clear the defenders, hack two locked crates, and defend the ship while you're waiting for them to pop.   

One further complication: Everyone else on the server can hear the boat "from kilometers away" and see it on the map, and that could possibly open the door to opportunistic behavior on the part of unscrupulous competitors. Not that we'd expect something like that to happen in Rust, right? Best to be cautious, though—better safe than sorry. 

Oh, and there's a spot of radioactive waste on board as well. Once your radiation alarm goes off, it's time to go. 

The update also brings a new bolt-action rifle, the L96, with "extreme projectile velocity and range with very little damage drop off or bullet drop," making it particularly effective when paired with a scope. Speaking of which, there's also a new 8X rifle scope, a few different types of new gloves (including Tactical Gloves that eliminate aim sway), an additional clothing slot, and a handful of tweaks and optimizations.   

Rust's "Cargo Ship Update" is live now. Full details can be had at facepunch.com.

Rust is interesting, and also infuriating, largely because it is completely without rules. Players can work cooperatively, and they can also murder each other without penalty. Trading is a big part of surviving, and getting shot in the face while you're trying to do a deal is a big part of not surviving. What's a poor soul, dropped naked and alone into the midst of a cold, rocky wilderness, to do?

The new Compound update promises to help alleviate the stresses of such no-holds-barred business by adding a place where players can safely interact under the protective watchful eye of heavily-armed scientists. It will provide useful services and facilities including a refinery, workbenches, a recycler, a water-catcher, and vending machines that sell basic survival resources, and also a place where you can just kick back and be social if that's your thing.   

The rules are simple: No weapons, no looting, no killing, and no sleeping inside, or directly outside, the compound. Follow the rules and you can hang out to your heart's content. Break them, and the scientists (and their turrets) will kill you dead. You'll be marked as hostile for five minutes and the status will persist across death, meaning you can't rush back into the compound immediately after you die: The only option once you've been marked is to wait it out. 

Facepunch acknowledged that the compound is "probably going to be gamed pretty hard," but said that it will continue iterating on it in order to stay abreast of players trying to dick around with the system. It also pointed an amusing finger at the player base for forcing developers to take this step in the first place: "We originally intended for people to set up these kind of zones with peacekeeper turrets, but after a year and no-one bothering we took matters into our own hands." 

The update also adds a four-piece set of scuba gear to the game that facilitates underwater operations, and underwater rock formations, because what's the point of scuba diving if there's nothing down there to see? Full details on all the new content and gameplay changes including first-person clothing models, new AI for compound scientists, and updated chainsaw sounds, are up at facepunch.com.