The official Rust update history, pulled straight from Facepunch's Steam announcements — 31 updates including 18 monthly forced wipes, from 2025-01-23 to 2026-08-06. Every entry links to the full devblog.
Synced live from the official Rust Steam announcements · last refreshed Aug 11, 2026 · RSS
This month we're releasing a set of features we call Player Maintained Monuments - tying together our existing monuments in new and interesting ways while pushing players to interact with each other in the process.
Using new Heavy Fuses, the power plant can be fired back up to unlock several new gameplay features for everyone around the island.
Heavy Fuses can be found as loot and must be inserted into the new special fuse boxes located at the power plant. Not everything will be unlocked all at once - some things connected to the power plant require more fuses than others to become functional.
Once the power plant has started providing power, the powerline poles with transformers (the white cylinder-looking things) which appear alongside roads can now provide power for electrical circuits. These powerlines can also now be climbed - no need for a ladder, just approach the powerline and jump.
Green recyclers (the ones outside of safezones) have received a 10% nerf to their baseline efficiency of 50%, being restored to 60% with sufficient power from the power plant and additionally receiving a duration buff from 5s to 4.5s once the power plant is at maximum power. Yellow recyclers (inside safezones) remain unchanged from their previous behaviour. We have also added a single special new red recycler with 75% efficiency to the power plant, only usable at maximum power.
A new in-game event!
Power up the new Satellite Control Computer at the Launch Site with tech trash and an aiming module and then take control of a satellite of your choosing.
Use the thruster buttons to target the crash location before locking it in. It doesn't come with a manual though, so you'll have to figure out which thruster button does what, first!
Once locked in, the satellite will start its descent, visible to all players on the server. After a short while it will impact and spill its new satellite loot crates.
Once they've cooled down, they're ready to loot - but the whole server knows about them too!
Once the Power Plant is running, a new switch on the Large Oil Rig will become usable. This controls the flow of crude oil to Dome. Once activated, this will pump Crude for 20 minutes.
However, you can't retrieve it by yourself - you'll need to use the Tanker vehicle module to drain the oil and then transport it to a car lift to extract it.
There is also a switch on Small Oil Rig that pumps at half the rate. You can enable both switches at once to get 1.5x the Crude.
There is a new freezer located inside the Supermarket that provides a steady stream of chilled food so long as it is receiving power from the power plant.
Every so often, it will provide a larger food cache than usual. Happy shopping!
Water pipes will now spawn around the roadsides of the map. To start, the pipes will be empty and won't produce any water. To get them to start pumping, the Water Treatment Plant will have to be maintained.
Two gearboxes have been added inside the monument, and turning them pressurises the new intact water tank at its centre. To get a gearbox moving, the powerplant's grid needs to be live, then you'll need to place a gear into the gearbox and interact with it to start the valve wheel spinning. Gears are consumed as the wheel turns and can't be pulled back out once inserted.
When the tank reaches full pressure, the blades will start spinning and clearing up the blockages, restoring water flow across the map. After that, coming back every once in a while to keep the pressure up and the blockages clear will be much easier than a cold start.
In Oxum's, the car garage has received a tune-up. When the power grid is active, or when the backup generator around the side is turned on, the garage will power up with some new features.
The garage door can be opened or closed with a switch on the outer wall, so long as that switch has power.
Inside the garage, the car lift will be operable and ready for business. Lower it down using the controls and drive a car on to start using it just like any other car lift. When you're done, raise the lift back up and head down into the cave for a chance at higher quality car part spawns!
A newly refreshed control tower has hit the airfield. On the second floor, you'll find two new terminals that charge up from fuse boxes connected to the power grid.
The smaller terminal will increase the rate at which air drops fall across the map when charged.
When the larger terminal is charged, a Chinook resupply crate can be called in to drop a crate near the airfield tarmac.
The terminals will slowly lose charge after they are activated. Once they've drained the residual charge completely, they will be available for use again.
This month we’re serving up the Bar Games Pack.
Get your buddies together and come on down to the Bar Games Pack. Featuring the unique and complex mini-games Pool and Darts, and a range of bar game-themed items to turn any base into the hottest joint in town.
Both the Pool Table and the Dart board are self-contained mini-games for both solo and multiplayer fun. Deploy them in your base, interact and play them in real-time, setting your score for others to beat.
The Pool Table allows one/two players to have a classic game of pool! It can be placed down as a normal deployable. Players will then walk around the table, jump on to get ready to hit the cue ball and pick their desired power amount before flicking their mouse up to shoot. Standard pool rules apply!
Other items include an interactive Juke Box deployable, skins for the Mini Fridge and Shotgun Trap, unique bar stools seating, and themed wallpapers and sprays.
The Bar Games Pack can be purchased in-game or from the Rust Steam item store.
On the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Oxidemandias, king of grubs:
Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!”
Leave a lasting legacy with the Stone Sculpture. This interactive deployable lets you carve away at stone until you create the shape of your heart’s desire. Or just sculpt your favourite appendage. Either is a surefire way to stand proud.
The Stone Sculpture can be purchased in-game or from the Rust Steam item store.
You can now toggle a respawn option (bag/bed/etc) to display on the compass. Only one can be marked at once, and you need to interact with the bag directly to enable it. The thinking is that this will free up the standard "home" map marker.
You can also now Favourite bags on the death screen, these bags will appear first in the respawn list.
The Recycle Bin workbench upgrade got an upgrade of its own!
It now has its own inventory, which can be accessed by interacting with the bin itself.
All bonus items returned by the Recycle Bin upgrade now go directly into this new inventory, ready for you to collect at your convenience!
It's take-only though, so you can't fill it with loot yourself.
Ore nodes and woodpiles can no longer spawn in safe zones.
As they could only be harvested using a rock, they tended to pile up and eventually drained the global spawn population, preventing new nodes from appearing elsewhere on the map.
The Wolf Headdress has always been a strong option early and mid wipe, providing good head protection and the ability to be combined with a bandana. To give other helmets a chance as a viable alternative in early bow fights, we have decided to lock its crafting behind needing a Tier 1 workbench.
Also, a quality of life improvement is coming to the lunar new year animal masks. These have always had the same stats as the Wolf Headdress, and have now been set up as skins, allowing you to freely re-skin between all of the variants, and avoiding clutter in the crafting menu.
You can now swap between having the shield on your back and aiming down sights vs. having it to the side and blocking with it.
To do so, go to your settings panel and set up the bind. Once you have it set, you can switch between the two stances every couple of seconds.
We added a cooldown to the stance switching to prevent players from spamming it - it'd lead to more randomness in gun fights rather than players strategically sticking to one stance.
Players have found ways to claim large areas of the map by spamming deployables as long as the game has been alive, whether it's been pillars, TCs or high walls. Changes in the past have helped address this, such as upkeep and adding a sheet metal crafting cost to high stone walls. This is another step forward to reducing the effectiveness of blocking access to large areas of the map.
High walls now have a static upkeep cost of 20%. This brings them in the middle of building blocks (10% -> 33%) to keep them the intended way to make compounds while discouraging spamming them.
This makes it more expensive and a hassle to come up with enough upkeep for external TCs if you don't want to keep refilling them. It should also help clear up old compounds after a base is raided.
Water wells are a great stepping stone into the world of farming by allowing you to get a taste of tea buffs and high level tools. However, over time (and especially with the extra influx of scrap from the blueprint update), more and more players started using it as an alternative to farming. In the most extreme example, you could buy 10x jackhammers and 10x advanced teas a few hours into wipe, leading to much faster progression than intended.
To return to its intended function, we kept the prices the same but reduced the stock that each water well vendor has.
• Stock lowered from 10 -> 2
• Restock time increased from 2m -> 10m
This should allow you to use it as a quick boost without it becoming an alternative to the intended farming progression of setting up farms and cloning plants.
This is a "relatively minor bug" but it needed a dedicated section in the blog to explain it properly.
In Rust's inventory system, when holding ALT, it will try to move the item "onto your player".
Examples:
• move into backpack before main inventory
• wear clothing instead of dumping in chest
• move from backpack to main inventory instead of dumping in chest
• equip clothing instead of putting into main inventory
The bug was "hover looting a body bag corpse would do nothing if it needed to swap clothing". When nothing happened, you would try to hover loot again... and it still wouldn't work. Next, you would panic and try to manually swap the items.. which still wouldn't work. So finally, in the middle of the fight you would start unequipping your current armour just to be able to equip the armour off the body bag.
This is fixed so it works intuitively. It will now allow you to swap clothing despite the inventory being locked and put the clothing you are taking off into your main inventory. There is also special handling so if your inventory is completely full, it will move the clothing you are taking off into the body bag you are looting.
This should reduce frustration when looting clothing from corpses in big fights and raids.
Last month, the Master Key used in the Apartment Complex shipped without a model. Of course, none of you noticed because nobody would ever break into their poor neighbour's apartment for scraps, right?
It now has a fully functional view model and animations, so the experience of cracking open your neighbour's apartment can feel even better.
Arrows have had a facelift. Wooden arrows have now been updated to have more visual interest (complete with new fletching) and to feel more "RUST".
Under the hood, it's been a fiddly one, as each existing weapon contained the arrow mesh directly, so updated rigs and prefabs were required.
The apartment complex is a new monument that allows players getting started with a wipe to find a place to call home. Simply talk to the receptionist in the lobby to get started and rent a room.
There are options for every budget, from the basement to the penthouse. Different room types come with different perks, like more storage, furnaces and more.
Once you've rented a room you'll need to insert scrap into the slot next to your door, otherwise you'll be evicted and all of your possessions will be seized.
There is a master key available somewhere on the island - find it and you can unlock access to any occupied room in the apartments for 5 minutes.
Need a hint as to what room to burgle? There might be a guard in the basement who has more information.
The new apartment complex monument features a small marketplace of shops. Each shop can be purchased and run by players, allowing you to sell your wares to the residents of the apartment building.
To get started, simply approach the shop and interact with the contract hanging out front, and you'll get a breakdown of how much it costs. This includes a non-refundable upfront scrap fee as well as a per-hour (real-time) scrap cost. You will need at least 12 hours of rent available to open the store.
Once open, you can modify the sale listings and adjust stock levels like any other Vending Machine. These shops cannot be accessed by drone, but you can modify the sign above the shop to add some personal flair.
All of the shops already taken? After a shop has been open for 6 hours, you may take it over, but you will pay x2 on both the upfront scrap cost and per-hour rent. This will continue to escalate (3x, 4x, etc) if someone else takes over the shop after 6 hours until eventually someone runs out of rent and the shop (and cost multiplier) resets.
If a shop is taken over or closes and it has your belongings in its inventory, you may return to the shop to retrieve them. Just interact with the shop to pick up your items. These items will only last 24 hours though, so be quick!
Be warned, the master key can also be used on these stores so your items could be stolen if you try and store valuable goods.
We've made some new changes to the Softcore game mode.
There's now a 2x multiplier on resource gather amounts. This works pretty much as you'd be used to on modded servers, giving you extra ore, wood, food and animal loot.
It's hard to handle raids for more casual players. To combat this, we've created pre-defined time windows where you are allowed to raid each other. By default, raids can only happen between the hours of 6 PM - 9 PM. This is set via your server's local time, so it's the same time zone for everyone. E.g. 6 PM local time no matter where you are. During a Raid Window, everything is fair game, it's regular rust.
Outside of those times, Tool Cupboards 'project' the raid blocking system, so you need to be inside a TC radius to be protected outside of the window. During this time, building blocks and doors cannot be raided: walls, floors, roofs, doors, ladder hatches, etc. Deployables can still be attacked, as can a Tool Cupboard (if it's lying unprotected).
A Tool Cupboard must be at least 1 hour old to be able to block raids. This means a young TC can be raided regardless of whether the raid window is on or not. Helping prevent misuse of the system.
Server Owners have been given a bunch of ConVars to tweak this.
Clans are a more advanced version of teams where you can have more members with different roles/permissions. There is a separate clan chat channel and announcement/MoTD text for communicating with clan members.
Clans can be created and managed at Clan Tables.
You can now see clan names on player nameplates. You'll also see your clan members' locations on the map if they're nearby.
The clan system is disabled in hardcore mode.
PLAYER ANIMATION - SPRINTING WITH RIFLES
As mentioned last month, we're starting to use a new set of animation tools to improve the player animator. This month we're rolling out new sprinting animations while holding most two handed projectile weapons/rifles.
The player now pops their right arm up and lets the sprinting animation take over the rest of the body, looking much more responsive and less robotic.
We've extended last month's Torch animation system to support one handed melee weapons. We're just testing this out on the vanilla Hatchet for now, but once we're happy with the results we'll roll this out to other melee weapons. This allows for nicer movement while holding a weapon while still allowing two handed animations like throwing to play as expected.
This month, we’re introducing the Glowing Wallpaper Pack.
Brighten up your base with this collection of 27 wall, floor, and ceiling wallpapers. Featuring luminous neon, glowing graffiti, foxfire fungi, and more. Whether you’re building the coziest crib or an industrial powerhouse, this pack has something for everyone.
These wallpapers look great in the day, but are even more special when the lights go out.
Included in the Glowing Wallpaper Pack:
Walls
• Stars And Planets
• Mushrooms
• Firearms
• Explosions
• Graffiti Murals (3 variants)
• Neon Shapes (3 variants)
• Foxfire Fungi
This month we've added a couple more changes/improvements to Jobs 3 code and we've had the it active on our servers for half of the month and things looked stable. We've also done a bit of a rewrite how we pass around server player state, which will force server mods to update their code as well. This makes it the perfect time for us to promote it to default, as it would enable us to clean up a bit more code and simplify things.
This means Jobs 2 mode will become deprecated and will be removed in August - one will still be able to set it to 2, but it will run mode 3 underneath.
As Jobs 3 has been modified over multiple months, here's the full list of improvements that comes with it:
• Use of UniTask library to avoid allocations from multithreading code
• Speeds up per frame player snapshot sending by using new fuzzy pool and removing buffer preallocation
• Runs portions of player network subscription updates in parallel
• Schedules EAC and Analytics tasks earlier to avoid main thread waiting on them
• Parallelized remaining server Anti Hack logic
We've also started to explore Jobs 4 optimizations - our first contribution to it is parallelization of server occlusion pair gathering. We're also going to be looking what kind of more risky or breaking changes to make, so it'll likely be a couple months before Jobs 4 will have enough substance to ship it.
Picked Skin Grey Out
Picked Skin is now Greyed Out
Auto Sorted
Vending machines and fridges now support storage adaptor auto-sorting
Inventory Player Model
Player model quality now changes within the inventory to yield better performance
Footstep Frequency
Adjusted the footstep frequency to be closer to the old player rig
Get ready to cuddle up with a bear that’s not only adorable but also changing lives!
Starting July 2nd, Rust will host a massive charity drive to raise money for two incredible causes: Cancer Research UK and Ronald McDonald House UK.
Rust is also partnering with some of the biggest names in the Rust community! Throughout the drive, partnered creators will be hosting their own fundraising streams, with free Twitch Drops to also help raise awareness of the charities and allow players to show even more support.
We even have a Charity Auction! Want a signed Displate poster? Or to design your own Rust Skin? Go check it out!
100% of sale proceeds after Steam fees and tax from the sale of these charity bears will be donated, helping support Cancer Research UK's critical work in funding cancer research and saving lives, and also supporting Ronald McDonald House UK to provide free accommodation and support to families with children in hospital. Every purchase will make a difference.
These one-of-a-kind charity bears are available through Rust’s in-game item store, and players can choose from two cute, quirky, and (actually) glowing but true-to-Rust designs which represent your contribution to supporting families in need and funding groundbreaking cancer research. Every bear purchased is a symbol of the community coming together to create a lasting impact beyond the game.
Starting July 2nd, players can purchase these bears, but the clock is ticking as they are only available for a limited time.
Whether you’re surviving the wilds of Rust or just want to spread some good vibes in your base, these bears are a perfect way to help others while you play.
Charity Bear Plushies can be bought here!
You can donate directly to the charities through Rust's drive here.
And you can see creators and drive progress here.
Also starting July 2nd - we will have 5 drops you can earn watching any Rust stream on Twitch!
Over the course of the next few weeks you can help unlock more drops as we meet donation goal milestones!
Sync your Steam and Twitch accounts to claim your drops!
https://twitch.facepunch.com/
If you're a content creator or a community group and you want to help fundraise with us you can make your own Tiltify team here! Just select the Quick start option and publish your team page! Your teams progress will go towards the main campaign.
Every Rust update has the ability to break older demos. On our end its incredibly simple to do so, more than it should be. To this end: I've introduced a compatibility layer into the demo system. This layer will try and get old demos working on your new Rust version.
When opening an old demo you will be asked if you want to use the compatibility layer (should it be applicable). When enabled the layer will attempt to remap changed item names to what they used to be in order to get the demo to run. It's important to note that this is only likely to work provided the demo has been taken within the last few months, the older it is, the less likely it is to work.
The one catch is that this system wont work for demos taken on older Rust builds than now. Eg: this layer only works for demos taken from now onwards. Demos taken on older builds of rust don't have the information required to be able to turn on this layer
This month’s workshop skinnable is the Metal Shopfront.
Supporting customisation on both the front and back, you can finally sell your collection of severed wolf heads on brand. We’re looking forward to seeing some incredible submissions by the community.
To make your own Metal Shopfront skin, head over to the in-game workshop and locate the Metal Shopfront deployable item. From there, you can download the model file and add your own materials.
The Rust x Can Be backpack will begin shipping this month.
Every backpack purchase includes exclusive free in-game weapon charms.
Weapon Charms are fun cosmetic weapon accessories that can be attached to almost any ranged weapon. There are over 55 ranged weapons that currently support Charms with more to be added as we continue to develop Rust.
To add a charm to your ranged weapon simply open up the inventory, select the weapon and use the Change Accessory button to select from available charms. You can set the charm during the crafting phase, or when dropped into a repair bench. There is no crafting cost. You can even do this with looted ranged weapons that have charms already affixed. The selected charm is tied to the individual weapon, so if you pick up someone else's weapon with a charm attached it will still be there unless you remove or change it.
Weapon Charms are viewable both in first and third person, so other players will be able to see your selected accessory.
Check out the full collection over on the Can Be store.
We've teamed up with the talented ASH Entertainment and The Baltimore Knife & Sword Crew behind the YouTube series, Man at Arms, to bring to life one of Rust's most iconic items: the Auto Turret.
The team of expert fabricators and blacksmiths set out to recreate a 1:1 replication of the infamous base and safezone protecting Turret, with auto-tracking and a bespoke gun slot with firing mechanisms!
This custom, one-of-a-kind build was exclusively created for Facepunch.
Check out the full build over on the Man at Arms channel now.
Purchase official Rust items in the Discord Shop and earn Discord Orbs.
Orbs can be used on eligible items in the Discord Shop. Offer ends 16th July!
