Hardcore mode is making a comeback this month, bringing with it some community requested changes and a few new tweaks we've been planning for a while.

Our goal with game modes, such as Primitive and Hardcore, is to offer a fresh way to experience Rust, see how players respond, and try out different ideas. We don’t expect them to stay popular for long, usually just a couple of months. They’re not a major development focus or time sink, as most of the team is working on bigger features behind the scenes.

We look forward to seeing your feedback. These game modes help guide our decision-making for the core Rust experience, so your input really does matter.

If Hardcore’s not your thing, don’t worry, there are plenty of other changes to check out in the blog below.

The fog of war system is back for the Hardcore game mode, exclusively, obscuring the map when you first spawn and slowly revealing itself as you move around the world. This is now integrated with the normal map system rather than a held item like it's original version.

Our goal with this mode is to heighten the inherent risk and reward gameplay in Rust, hopefully leading players to consider their next moves carefully as the consequences for dying can be significant.

As part of an effort to make navigation more interesting in Hardcore we have added the compass as a new handheld tool item.

In Hardcore mode your location on the map is now no longer displayed at all unless you have compass equipped in your belt. Once you have a compass in the belt, the player location is displayed without the direction indicator. The compass UI at the top of the screen is also completely removed, as it was in the previous Hardcore mode.

On hardcore, Sleeping bag respawn cooldowns have been increased to 15 minutes, while beds will now be 10 minutes. Along with the weapon crafting changes this hopefully leads to a more complex thought process when deciding whether to attack other players.

We've doubled the upkeep cost in Hardcore mode. The goal here is to encourage tighter, more efficient base designs and reduce the number of massive, sprawling compounds that tend to dominate the map over time. With higher upkeep, players will need to think more strategically about how they build and maintain their bases, prioritising what's essential and trimming the excess.

This month, we've introduced a long overdue refresh for our menu. After several years of our existing menu being built upon we've decided to create a new experience built from the ground up. Allowing us to add new features in, better UX and a more modern appearance. 

On load to Rust post-patch you'll notice our shiny new interface. Across the top we have the new navigation menu with all of the usual links just in a horizontal format. And along the bottom we have the social bar, the place you go to access your friends list, party system and send our message.

Sandwiched between those two is where we'll hold all of the pages, content, media and everything else.

Our new homepage design. Primarily more of the same from the last UI but an improved focus on the most recent patch. In the top left of the interface we now have a new call to action, the Twitch Drops tile. It'll be activated when we've published a new event either coming soon or currently in progress. Bottom left we have a curated list of heroes - whether that be weekly skins, featured DLCs or even a bit of information we want to share.

A refreshed look at the Play tab. We've introduced a horizontal tab menu for the server types, from Official all the way across to what your friends are playing. Down the left side of the UI we've got a filter menu, we've spent a bit of time tidying this area up so its a lot less overwhelming and gives you a quick glance at what filters and options you have toggled to tailor your server results. 

We've added a few new features: like sorting via  server modes, as well as the ability to see queue sizes before you join.

You can now preview a server map before you join. This lets you plan where you're going to put your base, make sure its got whatever biome you love and make plans before committing to a queue. This works for any servers with Rust+ support.

Featured, Limited and General stores all got a major overhaul. We fully rewrote the entire store system to improve the experience of viewing skins and packs. Within the Featured tab we'll have a curated list of items for sale as well as a block for the weekly skins.

On a few pages you'll notice we've added a new skin viewer. A new overlay where you can view skins from all angles. Rotate, pan and zoom to inspect skins to your hearts content. We've also put the same viewer into the Inventory page so you can see existing skins in all their glory.

The inventory has been tidied up, a new organised structure. Pressing on an item within your inventory will now open a new modal which will give you information about it, a 3D model viewer if available, market rates and even if you can break it down or not.

Likewise the crafting of items has also received the same modals to make everything consistent, cleaner and more usable.

Settings also received a full overhaul. Options have been re-organized into categories and a search bar will let you filter all of the controls, highlighting the pages in which items match your query.

The gesture menu got a full overhaul from the existing experience. You can now drag and drop items from the gesture bar on the right to the slots you want them to sit in. Whether you replace existing items, or into empty sockets you should be able to freely move items around quicker than ever before. 

We've also introduced other gesture packs into the menu, allowing you to see what you own and what you don't own with the ability to quickly navigate to the pack on the store to learn more about it.

You should now expect up to 65% quicker loading from desktop to loading into a server due to a big refactor of how we load assets. This optimization also enabled us to reduce our memory usage by 10-20%. Results will vary but everyone should see a boost!

The experimental option "Optimized Loading" has also been removed. This new optimization completely replaces that and cannot be toggled.

These optimizations also apply to the Rust server.

Everyone who has played Rust before now would know that Asset Warmup takes so long. Even on a top end PC it can take at least a minute or two to complete on its own. This loading step is where we load all of our prefabs from disk and preprocess them to automatically fill in bits of information and remove unnecessary pieces for the client (or server). Loading the prefabs takes up most of the time here. If you had the experimental Optimized Loading option enabled it made them load quicker by having Unity load the prefabs asynchronously (and starts as soon as the menu is visible).

Our new method of loading prefabs is to stick all of them into a couple scenes and then load the scenes. Apparently Unity is way faster at loading scenes than prefabs (who knew?). We can also load those scenes asynchronously - they're loading as soon as you're booted to the menu. Once they're loaded we hook them into our ResourceRef system (basically addressables but predates addressables) and then they can be used as normal prefabs everywhere.

The memory usage reductions come from not needing two copies of every prefab (the prefab asset + preprocessed copy) and doing a chunk of the preprocessing at build time. Both weren't possible before this optimization because modifying prefab assets during builds is unreliable and modifying prefab assets at runtime is unusually slow. Using scenes lets us stop using prefab assets as soon as they get instantiated into one of these scenes.

Metal detectors can now detect weapons dropped by other players. Whenever a player's backpack or dropped weapon despawns, it will now be buried for a day, allowing other players to find it using a metal detector.

This month, we’re landing a new Hazmat pack based around an elite fighter pilot. 

Touchdown in the turbulent world of Rust in this fighter pilot’s G-Suit. Whether sustaining high speed turns or dealing with rads, this suit has you covered.

Only high-ranking personnel get to handle the M15. Put it to good use.

High-tech and guaranteed to keep the hostiles out.

There’s no chance of rescue, so salvage what you can and store it here.

Pulled from the wreckage and repurposed as the coolest place to hang out after a hard day’s raiding. No longer ejects. 

With this patch, Rust's atmospherics have received a facelift, including:

Available under the Experimental options tab as a replacement for the 2D clouds, the volumetric clouds are fully 3D, move across the sky, morph into different shapes with weather, and interact naturally with lighting from the sky at all times of day.

They can also be enabled through the console using graphics.vclouds 1 through 4, with 4 being the highest quality but most taxing on your GPU.

This new fogging technique allows us to have different fog setups localized to each biome that remain spatially consistent.

Previously, we would adjust fog globally depending on which biome you were standing in, which was unnatural and provided an advantage to players standing outside of the biome.  Now, for example, you'll be able to see the haziness of the arctic biome as an outsider looking in.

Along with this, the volumetric nature of the fog presents cool visual improvements.  For example, it receives light from the sun and shadows from the surrounding environment, creating natural god rays and pretty sunsets.  The fog in each biome of also colored slightly differently to better match the environment.

For those marathon painters creating the next masterpiece of Rust's art history, we want to make sure you don't lose it all if you happen to starve to death before the final brush stroke. With this toggleable option checked your paintings will automatically sync with the server every 30 seconds, saving you from a complete restart.

Foliage (trees, bushes) outside of shadow range will apply directional self-shadowing. This should improve visuals of distant foliage and reduce trees looking like they are glowing (especially at sunrise/set).

Each time a bullet or thrown weapon moves around, the client would perform some physics raycasts to see what it had hit and process the results (damage, blood, sound, etc.), then the next projectile would do the same, then the next one, etc. This is pretty standard and works fine when you have a small number of projectiles, but can be a bit slow when you have a large number of projectiles in a densely packed area.

The projectiles have been rewritten to update as a single batched set, where the information on the physics queries they need to perform is gathered first and ran across all available job threads in parallel. Updating projectiles as a set like this also opened up a few new optimisation paths that we're now making use of. 

From our benchmarks we've seen that batched projectiles are generally at least twice as fast to compute as the old serial projectiles. You're not going to see your framerate double but things should be a little smoother when fights get intense.

Quite a small change, but we've modified the syringe self injection animation to now apply the heal just as the syringe leaves the arm rather than slightly after. The animation was reworked so that the duration is no different to before, this is purely a visual change.

This should hopefully result in less accidentally cancelled heals.

Starting this patch, we've made some minor changes to how servers mark themselves as insecure as well as introduced an additional requirement a secure server needs to meet in order to appear on the Rust Client server browser.

If you wish to run an insecure server you will now pass the '-insecure' parameter on startup rather than setting the server.secure convar to false. The convar still exists and server owners will see warnings on server startup if they are still using it, we are aiming to remove the convar entirely on the 4th September 2025.

For existing secure servers, you now need to ensure your secure.encryption value is at least 1 to appear on the server browser in the Rust Client. We have plans to further increase this requirement to 2 on the 4th September 2025. This is, and has been, the default configuration for Rust Dedicated Servers and as a result these changes only impact a minority of servers and most will not need to take any action.

Unless you're a skins artist you probably won't have noticed, but we identified a bug in the client that caused normal maps to be updated in an incorrect configuration under certain circumstances when submitted via the Workshop. 

The Workshop submission was fixed in a previous update but now the historically affected skins have also been fixed and should appear exactly how the creator intended!