The current progression meta has grown stale, moving too fast and becoming too easy over the years, with scrap inflation and scrap being everywhere. We don't believe this has been overwhelmingly negative, but it has detracted from world PvP, especially in and around monuments, and we want to experiment more with progression. This is experimental step 1:

We’re introducing a new layer of progression to the Workbench system. The aim is simple: get players back out of their bases, contesting monuments, slow down progression and clashing over territory.

Workbench level 1 remains unchanged, but Level 2 and Level 3 now require blueprint fragments to craft. These fragments are found at key monuments, creating a soft progression gate that pushes players into early fights and slows down clan snowballing.

• Workbench Level 2 now requires 5 Basic Blueprint Fragments

• Workbench Level 3 now requires 5 Advanced Blueprint Fragments

Blueprint fragments are tied directly to puzzles and high-end loot, encouraging players to push deeper into monuments and hackable events.

• Always spawn in green puzzle rooms (x1)

• Always found in blue-card puzzles next to the red keycard (x2)

• Found in airdrops

If you chain both green and blue, you've already had 3 Fragments in a run.

• Guaranteed inside hackable crates

• 1 in 10 chance to appear in elite crates

• Always spawn in pairs

The main areas where these can be found are:

• Launch Site

• Military Tunnels

• Nuclear Missile Silo

• Underwater Labs

• Small and Large Oilrigs

• Events: Cargoship and Ch47 crate drop

You can also convert 10 Basic Fragments into 1 Advanced Fragment, giving a fallback path.
Scrap crafting costs for workbench levels 2 and 3 are now greatly reduced, allowing players to have extra scrap to unlock items from the techtree.

Larger groups will naturally eventually accumulate more fragments than they need, creating an economy where fragments and workbenches are traded. Smaller groups and solos will be forced to scrap harder for their progression, making monuments hotly contested again.

We'll be watching and reading all feedback, and we'll adjust and balance as needed over the coming days and weeks. As mentioned at the beginning, this is just part 1, part 2 will be released in the December update. 

By design, not all monuments are equal, some have trade-offs, while others feel bad for groups but ideal for solos or small groups. With blueprint fragments, we want to ensure all mid to large-sized monuments are relevant, so with that said, the following monuments have basic green keycard puzzles added:

• Dome

• Ferry Terminal

• Radtown

In addition, you'll now be able to find a recycler at the Dome, puzzle room. 

The meta of running the same paths in monuments has gone stale, we've not changes some monuments in over 5 years. Do you know where every monument loot crate is? Many of you will.

Today, almost every monument has had the majority of its loot moved to new locations. Areas that previously had little to no loot have been refreshed, making these areas relevant again. Dead spots are gone, and new loot run paths have opened up.

Our goal here is to break old habits and get players rediscovering movements, hopefully making loot runs feel fresh, least for a bit. 

Every day, we see posts on Reddit, X, Discord, Facebook, of someone sharing a screenshot of awful loot roll they just got. Granted, sometimes it is terrible, but Hackable crates should always feel rewarding. 

We've reworked Hackable and Elite crate loot rolls, removing some of the junk. You should now always get something of use, hopefully multiple items. 

Drones now have a single storage slot, able to hold a single stack of any item. While piloting the drone, you will be able to drop the contents by left clicking.

Throwable explosives dropped from the drone are active and will explode with their usual behaviour, keep your eyes and ears open. 

SAMs and Auto Turrets will now treat player drones as hostile and target them, marketplace drones are safe.

The Nuclear Missile Silo monument, first introduced in May 2023 as a blue-card monument. The silo has always been a high risk vs reward location, with forced corridors and plenty of scientists to battle through, and then hopefully not door camped when leaving.

From today, the monument is now a red keycard monument. This change aligns it with other high-tier areas, advanced Blueprint Fragments can now be found here.

3 additional elite crates have been added throughout the silo.

This change should make the silo a more valuable, highly contested destination for groups chasing top-end loot and progression.

Did you know? Rust = Repopulation Unit Survival Test

Ever since its introduction, Rust's built in crosshair has left a lot to be desired. There was only one setting - on or off. If you didn't like the default look or behaviour, you were out of luck. This lead to many players opting for third party apps instead.

This month we are adding crosshair customization, which gives you control over settings like Style, Colour, Dot size, Spacing, Line length & width, Outline and Outline colour.

It also lets you choose whether to hide the crosshair when aiming or keep it visible.

Lastly, there's a built in crosshair sharing feature, where you can import & export crosshairs via a code.

The spike trap is a new default primitive trap which slows and hurts players when stepped on. 

Crafting cost: 80 Wood.

The UI popups for Oil Rig resets, Cargo Ship inbound, and Excavator activated have been replaced with global environmental sounds. We hope that this proves to be a more immersive and less clunky way of notifying players to these monument events.

For players that miss the message popups, this can be reeenabled with the console command 'ui.monumentnotificationtoasts'

One of the many data points we collect is how often players are doing certain activities and missions sit towards the bottom of that list. The most common reasons we hear why you don't like missions are: that missions don't suit Rust, you don't want to do missions, and missions are not worth the time for the reward. 

Fair, we don't want to force anyone to do missions if you don't want to, they're supposed to be an add-on to the activities you're already doing. 
We can certainly try to address some of the complaints, so today we've significantly increased mission rewards by offering a higher quantity of loot and additional mission rewards. 

Do give them a try and let us know if they now feel worth the effort to reward.

A new type of crate can now be found washed up along the spawn beach shore, offering a small boost to help you get started.

They’re not common, so you won’t be able to rely on them for a steady supply, but you may be lucky enough to stumble across one

We have been working on some upgrades to the workshop skin creation scene, and would like to present you with a first pass. With this update comes a host of UI improvements, a few new features, and behind the scenes there's some updates to the interface components that are going to make them easier to work with going forward.
Overall the flow of making skins should be smoother now, with less buggy menus and more clarity of all the different tools available. Notably some new features are: toggles for the player model and depth of field effect, custom workshop icon support, and a new colour picker. If you're interested in skinning but haven't bit the bullet yet, now is the time to check it out!

The medieval arsenal has had some love this month, with sweeping balance changes across the board. Our goal is to make these weapons and make them feel more viable.

The way shields work has had an overhaul. Your stamina allowing you to hold shields at the ready has been nearly doubled, but when you block damage with the shield, this stamina is reduced. The amount of stamina reduction is dependent on shield type, In addition, shields block a higher percentage of damage than before and also have a slightly larger hitbox. This should make them a more viable defense mechanism than their first iteration.

Catapult Ammo Range

All Catapult ammo fires 30% further

Catapult Reload

Catapult Now Reloads 3 Seconds Faster (50% faster)

Catapult Crafting

Catapult crafting reduced by 1 gear and 1 rope

Battering Ram

Battering Ram sheet metal cost reduced by 2

Propane Explosive

Propane Explosive bomb deployed and thrown, damage increased

Ballista Craft

Ballista craft reduced by 1 gear

Bee bomb

Bee bomb crafting cost reduced by 1 bee grenade

Ballista Incendiary

Ballista Incendiary low-grade fuel reduced by 10

Barricade placement

Fixed ice lakes and train tracks blocking barricade placement when close to monuments

Turret Interference Fix

Fixed turrets powered inside a base being turned off by turrets outside the base

APC Invisible Fire

Fixed Invisible fire around APC debris

Held Item Redeploy

Fixed held items rarely redeploying when moving quickly through the world

Chainsaw Startup

Removed the fail start-up chance from chainsaw, starts first time, every time

Cargoship Pathing

Smoothed ship path shown on the map & no longer sails around Oilrigs

There has been a long term bug in Rust with the Chinook's Crate drop logic. It would often frequently select the same location all wipe. This has now be changed to be a true random, as it should've been.

We've made some optimisations surrounding the new main menu this month.

• Reduced VRAM usage by compressing and atlassing the UI assets in a better way

• Lowered CPU overhead when the menu is not visible

• Addressed freezes and stalls when landing in the main menu after the splash screen

More improvements that didn't make it in this patch are coming next month. We're exploring different ways to load and unload the menu content dynamically, reducing the VRAM pressure.

Considering my humble beginnings as a community modder before Facepunch, it seems fitting to be the one giving back to the modding community who works tirelessly to extend the game past the vision we originally had for Rust.

This month I integrated a previous Hackweek where I allowed the following features to be modified on the client.

• drone station tax currency item & amount

• ddraw works without client admin

• dropped item custom names

• entity scale

• item icons

• maximum health

• melee weapons throwable

• send user language when connecting to server

• vitals

I also took a look at our Community UI modding framework and merged the following features into the base game.

• 9-slice sprite support

• activeSelf exposed

• button hover colors

• draggable CUI components

• input field multi-line

• input field placeholder

• layout groups

• pivot

• rotation

You can make Pull Requests for new CUI features at this github repo[github.com].

This month, we investigated the performance of Rust and found that the VRAM usage was significantly higher than intended. This was due to various factors, but the main issue stemmed from how we handled texture streaming. By default, texture streaming was set to use all available VRAM for textures. 

This was problematic as it left no space for meshes and render targets, meaning RAM would be paged to cover the excess memory required for rendering.

To solve this issue, we started looking into a better way to calculate the memory budget for texture streaming by taking the available VRAM and subtracting an estimate of the excess memory we required, but this would have caused issues for devices with a lower amount of VRAM.

To ensure that textures are always loaded at the correct mipmap level, and the minimum amount of VRAM is used for texture memory, we've set the memory budget very high, but enabled discarding. This means that we only ever have the textures that are needed immediately in VRAM, which should improve memory performance for all devices.

We also identified an issue with texture streaming and our batching system, where the required mipmap level wasn't being calculated correctly. This has now been corrected to allow for more efficient use of texture memory.

Another significant change we made to improve the texture streaming system was to enable mimap streaming on all skins to reduce their memory overhead.

This month we're introducing a new workshop skinnable: the bed. 
The bed is always high up on the request list for adding new skins in the community, so we're really happy to kick this process in to action starting this month. We've already enabled the bed deployable to be available to skin creators and the first few skins are starting to come in which is very exciting to see.
 

We'll be rolling out other in-demand items over the calendar, so keep an eye out to get the freshest skins.

To make your own bed skin, head over to the in-game workshop and locate the Bed deployable. From there you can download the model file and add your own materials.

We can't wait to see what incredible and inventive skins people come up with! 

Paintings, signs, and photo frames can now be rotated before deployment!

To help with this in the painting menu we have added some hot-keyed controls to help you quickly rotate your artwork, or reset the rotation/pan back to center.

Bicycles and Tricycles have received some additional love this month with a new feature - bunnyhopping!

Pressing Right-mouse-button whilst riding will activate a small jump to help you navigate obstacles in the world. The bikes are now more thrilling to ride and are even better than before in getting you to your destination - logs, rocks, walls and grubs won't stand a chance!

Some key points:

• Faster bikes provide higher bunnyhops

• You can only activate 1 bunnyhop every 3 seconds

• Jumping will require and consume 10% of the bike's stamina bar

• Jumping is scaled with the bike's health and stamina bar (keep those tyres inflated, chain oiled up and don't wear yourself out too fast if you want a big hop!)

Send me your best skatepark clips!

Every Rust player has been pained by a projectile invalid appearing in their combatlog. These checks exist for good reason to ensure projectiles behave as expected within legal values between clients and the server, preventing manipulation by bad actors. For the most part, these checks work correctly and do their job, contributing to a safe and consistent experience, but we are aware that there are cases in which they go wrong, invalidating a projectile that should have been accepted by the server.

I'm working to investigate and resolve these false positives.

This month, I have been working with the server projectile's code to investigate and reproduce reported issues. This involves pages of code reading, note taking, drawing projectile trajectories in editor, making diagrams and firing thousands of bullets, amongst a whole lot more.

Improvements have been made this month to edge-case false positives affecting the following areas:

• Firing projectiles when inside vents (like the ones found on the oilrigs) and other tight spaces

• Firing projectiles at long distances

• Firing projectiles at fast-moving players

• Firing slower-moving projectiles (arrows, shotgun bullets...)

• Additional preventions put in place relating to incorrect projectile movement

I've also got further plans on how to better debug projectiles in-editor to find these edge case false positives that negatively affect gameplay.

How you can help:

If you experience projectile invalids in your F1 combatlog during gameplay then please try and record a video clip showing the entire interaction (GeForce overlay is great for this) and then upload a bug report in-game using F7, stating the full server name and any other important information. You can also reach out to me on https://discord.gg/rust

Additionally, any information you have regarding possible projectile exploits or cheats is always appreciated. Reminder that we have a bug-bounty 💰 program available at our Hackerone security page[facepunch.com]

in June, in the nerfed, buffed, balanced? update, we reduced the stack size of the wooden barricade from 10 to 5. Today, we're doubling down and reducing the stack size to 3.

This should continue to help curb the Insta-maze spam in close quarters without gutting their utility entirely. You'll now have to use them more strategically. 

In addition, the barricade health has been reduced by 20%

We have been working on some upgrades to the workshop skin creation scene, and would like to present you with a first pass. With this update comes a host of UI improvements, a few new features, and behind the scenes there's some updates to the interface components that are going to make them easier to work with going forward.

Overall the flow of making skins should be smoother now, with less buggy menus and more clarity of all the different tools available. Notably some new features are: toggles for the player model and depth of field effect, custom workshop icon support, and a new colour picker. If you're interested in skinning but haven't bit the bullet yet, now is the time to check it out!

On October 23rd at 18:00BST / 13:00 EST, we'll release a mandatory server and client update to enable some new spooky features!

This year, we'll be introducing some spooky-themed wallpapers! 

Server owners, please remember this date.

Rust is partnering with both Ronald McDonald House Charities UK and Cancer Research UK to combine the cosyness of your base, with real-world impact!
100% of sale proceeds after Steam fees and tax from the sale of these charity bears will be donated, helping Ronald McDonald House Charities UK provide free ‘home away from home’ accommodation and support to families with children in hospital, while also supporting Cancer Research UK's critical work in funding cancer research and saving lives!

These limited-time items will run through to 30th October.

Ronald McDonald House Charities UK is an independent charity, operating 14 Houses around the UK. The Houses provides free ‘home away from home’ accommodation and support for families with a sick child in hospital.

The charity ensures families can stay together, and close to their children during critical times, easing the financial and emotional support for those in need.

https://rmhc.org.uk/

Cancer Research UK is the world’s leading cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through research, influence and information. Cancer Research UK’s pioneering work into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer has helped save millions of lives.   

Cancer Research UK has been at the heart of the progress that has already seen survival in the UK double in the last 50 years. Today, 2 in 4 people survive their cancer for at least 10 years. Cancer Research UK wants to accelerate progress and see 3 in 4 people surviving their cancer by 2034. 

Cancer Research UK supports research into the prevention and treatment of cancer through the work of over 4,000 scientists, doctors and nurses.  

Together with its partners and supporters, Cancer Research UK is working towards a world where people can live longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/

In case you missed it on Monday from Steam, Rust is now 50% OFF until Monday October 6th at 1800 BST / 1300 ET!

Why not treat that friend that's considering joining your squad? Gift it to them here. 

On the morning of Sunday the 26th of October, clocks in our native timezone (British Summer Time) will be going back one hour to GMT. European servers will also be doing this. 
BUT clocks in the US also go back on the 2nd of November, meaning we should be in sync for wipe. But better safe than sorry!

Join us for Twitch Rivals Base Invaders!

Watch & earn and exclusive Twitch Rival Backpack skin for one day only!  This drop will be tied to the Twitch Rivals channel[www.twitch.tv] and only active during the broadcast window. 

We will also have general drops across the entire Rust category[www.twitch.tv] until October 12th.

Connect your accounts to claim your drops! https://twitch.facepunch.com/