Friends With Benefits

RUST 2025: MID-YEAR RECAP & SNEAK PEEK

PARTY SYSTEM

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)

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• Right click on a friend

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• Click "Invite To Party"

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• Wait for them to accept the invite

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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.

OUTPOST SPAWNING

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.

TEAM INVITE CHANGES

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.

NOTABLE CHANGES

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

DEPLOYABLE SNAPPING

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.

ABYSS PACK - NEW STORAGE TANKS

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. 

PATROL HELICOPTER CHANGES

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.

Background

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.

New Mechanics

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.

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• Flees will be capped to 1 grid maximum.

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• Flee location is now shown on the map.

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

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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.

IMPROVED EROSION

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.

LEGACY VIEWMODEL CAMERA ANIMATION UPDATES

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.

ROOF STABILITY FIX

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.

2025 RECAP & LOOKING FORWARDS

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.

Looking ahead:

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.

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