What’s in store for 2025? Consistency! Continued guaranteed monthly updates on the first Thursday of every month, alongside regular fixes, quality-of-life enhancements, improvements, and exciting holiday events.
Next Month
On February 6th, we'll release the Primitive update. The update will be one of the most impactful updates to date in changing the dynamics of early-game raiding and combat by introducing siege vehicles, primitive weapons, shields, and a dedicated game mode.
The Primitive update represents a time in Rust where the already scarce technology and the usual homemade armaments and ammunition have been depleted from Rust's current setting, forcing survivors to fashion crude weapons with less sophisticated methods of attack and defence.
The Siege Tower can be used to climb over exterior walls while players remain in cover. And it can be pushed or horse-drawn and has several floors, with extendable drawbridges that double up as shutters.
The Catapult will be a projectile launcher for longer distances that can utilise multiple projectiles such as boulders, radioactive barrels, and propane tank IEDs. While it does have wheels, its size makes it something that a vehicle or horse will have to help you move it towards your next target.
The Ballista is a combination of a catapult and a large crossbow which was highly accurate given the heft of its projectiles. And in Rust, those features remain with the Ballista also having multiple ammo types, being able to do heavy damage to people, doors, and vehicles.
Finally, the Battering Ram will be another addition that is driveable like a traditional vehicle, with a triggerable ram that damages building blocks in a radius.
As well as these new weapons and vehicles, we have been working on a variety of shields, a 4 shot mini-crossbow, and updates to melee damages and ranges.
With this comes some improvements to horses, including their ability to tow the new siege weapons, and new skins to customise your primitive approach to gameplay and expression.
Can't wait till February? Rust Staging Aux2 branch is publicly playable, allowing everyone to test and give feedback.
Forwards
Alongside
next month's Primitive update, we have a ton of content currently in
development, and if you're keeping an eye on our commits page, you'll
already know some of what's on the way. This year, you can expect to see
Cooking 2.0 bringing many changes to food management and unique buffs
to foods, a Jungle biome featuring dangerous animals such as crocodiles
and tigers, and changes to softcore and hardcore game modes.
Outlined above is skimming the surface of only a few key features. We have a lot more planned.
But what about?
Performance?
Performance
is always an ongoing process. We're constantly adding and improving new
features monthly, often hidden in changelogs. There is no magic button
to increase performance. Instead, it is a slow process of small gains.
We
hired several people over the past couple of months whose sole job is
focused on performance-related tasks, these are positions which never
existed before, we never had staff dedicated to performance full-time,
they're getting to grips with the Rust project and are already hard at
work identifying and fixing issues. A recent example is Daniel's
server profiler.
We'll continue to share news on performance in our monthly development blogs.
Old Content?
As like with prior years we've set aside multiple months in our
internal roadmap of light or no content. These gaps are deliberate to
allow us to be versatile and adaptive to community feedback, have time to
focus and address old content and improve recent content. We have a lot
we can keep building upon, not all content we add to Rust is supposed
to become meta, but rather adding yet another way of achieving a goal.
Cheating?
Repeating the words of last year's blog: Anticheat is a hugely complex topic. We work closely with Epic Games' Easy
Anti-cheat, to aid in detecting and banning cheaters in Rust. We don't
disclose what we do and don't do when it comes to anti-cheat for good
reason. The more information we disclose publicly, the more it can
assist cheaters and cheat developers to circumvent measures, it's a huge
cat-and-mouse game.
One of the best
anti-cheat measures is obscurity. The fewer people know what EAC and we
are doing, the better. This comes with the drawback of not communicating
enough, on the outside, it appears we're doing nothing. Almost every
month, we're shipping improvements or fixing/restricting cheat features.
We've fixed several high-priority exploits upon discovery or disclosure
within hours through hotfixes we don't note publicly. EAC sometimes
pushes several improvements weekly, which are applied when you start the
game.
We continue to promise to you is we're actively monitoring and
combating cheaters daily. Our internal systems keep improving, as do
EAC.
In past blogs I talked about server-side player culling, if a player is behind a hill and you can't see them, don't network the player to disrupt ESP cheat features. We're slowly iterating this and have tested it on live servers, we're working on getting this to the most performant state possible to work on mid-high population servers.
Another feature we're exploring and want your feedback on it, is a form of premium servers. The overwhelming number of cheaters banned have Rust Steam inventory valued at below $20. A large number of long-term regular players have Rust Steam inventories of over $20. If we used this as a gate to entry for some servers, it would mean these servers would see considerably fewer cheat-related players, is this something you want? Would you play on these servers? We're still collecting data to determine the exact barrier to entry. The reason for looking at Rust's Steam Inventory price, in short, is because it's a metric that can't be spoofed and gamed easily, unlike game data. The big negative here is servers rely on a steady flow of players, new and old; this gate could have a net negative impact on the server's population and, thus, the overall gameplay experience - we'd love to hear your thoughts.
This year:
- We've taken down over 1300 cheats-related media on social platforms.
- 290,000+ bans applied
57,000+ Temporary
233,000+ Permanent
The majority of cheaters have been removed from the game in less than 12 hours of playtime
This has lowered this to 10 hours of playtime in the last 3-months
- 12,617,47 Cheat reports received
- 1,200,000~ cheating reports received on Facepunch servers
