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This month we bring you an update of fixes and improvements! Long distance gun sounds, team bag labels, player processing optimizations, Exhibit DLC Item Pack, & more!

04 September 2025
DEVBLOG
This month’s update is a little lighter than recent, focused on tackling a number of long-standing bugs and improvements. We’ve been working through community feedback to smooth out some of the more persistent issues and make everyday gameplay feel that bit better. Normally, if bugs persist for several years, there’s usually a good reason for that, whether it’s being difficult to reproduce or requiring a lot of work to resolve.

Looking ahead to October, we’re lining up some strong meta and balance changes. If you’ve got suggestions, don’t hesitate to share them with us across our socials, including Discord, we’re always keeping an eye out and reading through what you send.

November will bring the much-anticipated Naval update. This will introduce modular boats with cannons, of course, and much more. You’ll be able to customise your vessel, set sail across the high seas, explore new ocean-based monuments, and even discover smaller outlying islands beyond the horizon.

In December, we'll be celebrating 12 years of Rust, what the heck. 12! 

Additionally, we'll soon be announcing the Warhammer X Rust crossover DLC.

Networking range in Rust is made up of grids. Players view the world a few grids at a time - you're unable to see outside of that.

As a result you've only been able to hear things like gunshots in grids you're registered to, this makes the world feel incredibly small and closed off. Some servers increase or decrease the grid size to lower network overhead. This unfortunately takes those gunshots with it, making the situation even worse.

We can now run gunshots at different distances to the network range: helping make Rust feel more alive and shaking up the meta by giving advantages/disadvantages to certain weapons.

The old default maximum a sound could travel was around 350 meters. (the size of a default network grid) this was the same for all weapons, as explained above.

The new values are as follows:
  • Pistols / SAR / SKS / SMGs / Shotguns - 400 meters
  • AK / LR - 500 meters
  • LMGs / Minigun / Long Distance Rifles (Bolt Action Rifle / L9) - 600 meters
It might only seem like 50 extra meters on the low end, but those 50 meters will be seeping into your neighboring grids (unlike before). Letting you hear more of the world around you.

These values also mean that players will now be able to hear you from much further away if you're choosing to use stronger weapons such as the AK or a Bolt Action Rifle. 
It was hard to see what bags belonged to which team members, even if they named them correctly it could be a pain to figure out.
Provided you now have Building Privilege and a Hammer out, you will now be able to see which bags are owned by which team members when looking at them.
Visual and audio damage indicator effects have been added to the minicopter to provide clearer feedback on it's health status. As the minicopter takes damage there will be progressing effects, just like the other helicopters, with thresholds at 45% and 20% health remaining. Now if you see a mini leaving a raid trailing smoke and you can't hit the driver, you'll know to aim for the chassis!

Foliage displacement has been improved to allow for smooth transitions. This includes when objects are removed and also makes displacement from moving sources like players look more realistic and natural.
With the last patch, we introduced new volumetric clouds as an alternative to the 2D clouds.  However, we put them under experimental settings and kept them disabled by default.
With this patch, the volumetric clouds are now enabled by default, with the long-term goal being to completely replace the 2D clouds.  The setting for them has been moved under the normal graphics settings tab, and the quality levels are tied to graphics presets.  Additionally, the graphics.vclouds convar has been replaced by graphics.volumetric_clouds.
Automated Workshop Screenshots
Workshop submissions using the in-client skin creator tool now automatically take screenshots that are included in the upload.
Players Eyes
For several years, a bug has caused players eyes to sometimes appear closed, this is now fixed!
Invisible Respawn
Fixed players being invisible when respawning, whilst asleep
RF C4
Fixed C4 not being stackable after enabling RF
Tugboat Rug
Fixed rugs deleting deployables when picked up, if on a tugboat
Barricade placement
Fixed barricade deployment being blocked on sand dunes around giant excavator
Taking the stage this month is the Exhibit Decor Pack, an illuminating collection of deployable items to glow up your base. 

The pack can be purchased in-game or from the Rust Steam item store

Bulb String Lights
Get that warm and fuzzy feeling with these decorative bulb string lights. Hosting a garden party or wiping a raiding party - it’ll look fabulous.
Clothing Mannequin
Goes by “Manny”. Dress him up in your favourite attire and pose him for style. He’ll even swap clothes with you if you want a quick wardrobe change. 
Wall Cabinet 
Place on the wall and store your smaller items inside or on the shelf below. Has 18 slots.
Moveable Spotlights
Light-up the action with these moveable spotlights. Target them with the hammer and they’ll orient towards you! Comes both in wall and floor mountable varieties. 
Fairy Lights
Smaller and more twinkly than the Bulb String Lights, these Fairy Lights bring a touch of magic to the wasteland.
Fluorescent Strip Lights
Giving off a strong UV light, these strip lights will be a great addition to any grow-op. Comes both in wall and ceiling mountable varieties. 
Chandelier
Give a touch of elegance to your base with this adjustable Chandelier light. Raise and lower it to the perfect height. Time to fit a grand staircase in your 2x1. 
Electric Table Lamp
Settle down for the long dark night with this cozy Electric Table Lamp. Maybe get a buddy to read you a story.
Beanbag Chairs
Sit back and relax in these Beanbag Chairs. Comes in two varieties. 
Wallpapers
Interior design to the max with these unique and sparkly wallpapers. Included are a dark shaggy carpet, hexagonal wall tiles and painted gold stars ceiling decoration! 

All images are clickable

Threading Player Updates

Back in Jungle Update blog, I wrote about experimenting with batched processing of players on our servers. To summarize, I talked about how we needed to restructure code and start doing more operations in batches instead of on individual basis, and I showcased how it allowed us to leverage Burst and parallel job execution to speed up NoClip checks on the server.

This update I'm taking it a step further - I've converted more parts of our player update code to batch/pipeline form, which allowed to clearly see dependencies between processing stages. This, in turn, confirmed which parts we can try to process in parallel on worker threads. As a result, we can now offload a bunch of player-related logic over to worker threads, speeding up the main thread:
Right now it's gated behind UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 server variable, as an experimental mode. We've been running this on our EU Staging Server for a couple weeks to confirm that things are stable - and so far it's holding, but I don't have clear guarantees on how it will scale on high-population servers. In theory, thanks to these points:
  • Faster server occlusion (more on that below)
  • Avoiding redundant calculations of player state by using frame caches
  • Use of managed threads for work offloading (sending entity snapshots and destroy messages have been converted)
I'm hoping that it'll allow the server to scale better with a higher player count and make player processing less of a bottleneck.

The plan is to roll it out gradually to release servers, while confirming server stability & performance - so far it's been developed in a lightly stress tested EU Staging, so I'm missing real world data. After roll-out is successful, I'll be able to identify further bottlenecks and work on expanding parallel processing.

Server Occlusion Optimizations

As part of the above rewrite I took a look at server occlusion, as I noticed that it has been running too many checks per frame. In addition to other problems, this caused server occlusion to eat up to 8ms in some cases, like bellow:
Having to process 10k occlusion queries for 350 players seems to be excessive, even if it eventually boils down to only 500 paths to check.

I've reworked the relevant code to benefit from the following improvements when UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 is enabled:
  • We now deduplicate occlusion queries - if player A and player B want to check for visibility of each other, it's enough to just check A->B
  • We run occlusion queries in parallel
  • We cache results of occlusion queries for the duration of a frame, allowing us to skip them throughout the rest of the frame

I'm hoping that the gains will scale with the player count and become substantial once we're testing with 350+ players.

Going Forward

The rewrite of player update allows us to see more clearly how the execution and data flow, but it's lacking further optimizations(aware of 1 bottleneck) and tuning (controlling worker batch sizes). My plan is to use the new telemetry to guide where to focus efforts as I continue to expand UsePlayerUpdateJobs further. I currently don't see a specific end in sight, as the more is converted, the more opportunities to capitalize on data/execution patterns we get.

If things go well for UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 during this patch, it's likely the mode will be promoted to level 1, and a new experimental stage will begin.
As mentioned in last patches devblog, we are going ahead with requiring a minimum encryption level of 2 on servers that wish to be considered 'secure' and appear on the Rust Client server browser.

As a reminder, encryption level 2 is the default configuration for Rust Dedicated Servers and as a result the vast majority of server owners do not need to take action. For those that do, you will need to update your server.encryption convar to 2 and restart your server.

Additionally, we are going ahead with the removal of the server.secure convar. As previously mentioned, any insecure servers will now need to pass the '-insecure' parameter on server startup instead.

September 20th-30th 

Rust Kingdoms 3 returns bigger and better! Watch for socials to see the lineup and what drops you can collect!

Head to https://twitch.facepunch.com/connect to sync your Twitch and Steam accounts.
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Features

  • Exhibit Decor DLC Pack
  • Long Distance Gunshots
  • Team Bag Labels
  • Minicopter Damage Indicators
  • Volumetric Clouds Enabled by Default
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Improvements

  • Improved new 'disconnect' box to support longer disconnect messages
  • Improved how advanced christmas lights are deployed, they're now similar to the wire tool
  • Improved ceiling light deploy guide
  • Improved ceiling light physics, should swing more realistically
  • Improved foliage displacement animation, and displacement now fades away when objects are removed
  • Improved mixing table overflow drop locations
  • Added error toast messages with failure reason when you are unable to pickup deployed items
  • Added error toast message if trying to reskin an item whilst a player is sitting on the item
  • Improved drop position of overflow items for the mixing table
  • Improved crafting menu search to work for dlc skins
  • Shrunk the building blocked volume around the attack helicopter
  • Improved storage monitor positions on barrels
  • Improved sound timing of the animation when helping a wounded player with a med syringe
  • Enabled volumetric clouds by default
  • Improved XL picture frame deployment
  • Replaced some static black barrels on the oil rigs to prevent confusing them for diesel collectables
  • Added convar for setting the code of any cctv camera with “global.setcctvcameracode”
  • Added convar for adding a cctv code to any computer station with “global.addcctvcode”
  • Added convar for removing a cctv code from any computer station with “global.removecctvcode”
  • Added convar for clearing all cctv codes from any computer station with “global.clearcctvcodes”
  • UsePlayerUpdateJobs gained a new mode, 2, which knows how to offload work to threads
  • For Modders - TextTable must now be explicitly pooled
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Fixed

  • Fixed user interface assets looking blurry when changing the texture quality option
  • Fixed horses ragdolling on planters and dead trees
  • Fixed social menu settings button not working
  • Fixed boots being in the wrong order in the skin viewer
  • Fixed double barrel sight UV issue in the skin viewer
  • Fixed wooden double door material in the skin viewer
  • Fixed skin viewer quality changing based on the texture quality setting
  • Fixed TMP_Text.FillCharacterVertexBuffers IndexOutOfRangeException error
  • Fixed cinematic gestures not showing in the gesture menu when using ShowAdminCinematicGesturesInBindings
  • Fixed some localization inconsistencies
  • Restored voice volume option slider range to 0-5
  • Fixed DDraw rendering over the main menu
  • Fixed some items showing as marketable locked when they shouldn't
  • Fixed typos in tutorial and server browser
  • Fixed issue where character eyes could remain closed
  • Fixed issue introduced in hardcore update which would cause tech trees to display incorrectly in some gamemodes
  • Fixed convar server.uselegacyworkbenchinteraction
  • Fixed frontier hatchet beads jittering and moving oddly
  • Fixed terrain clipping issues around military tunnel entrance
  • Fixed nametags not showing through glass
  • Fixed base health being wrong after a server restart if any max health modifiers are active
  • Fixed night vision goggles glowing at night even if they're disabled
  • Fixed tree marker colour's not being applied when set in the accessibility options
  • Fixed being able to swing a torch underwater to prevent it from extinguishing.
  • Fixed being unable to place things on tugboat shelves
  • Fixed Chickencoop receiving light whilst indoors
  • Improved minute formatting in server restart toasts
  • Fixed reconnect button not working if the server you are reconnecting to is currently down
  • Fix 'Crafting Update' Loading Screen frequently appearing
  • Fixed explosion screen effect persisting when you respawn
  • Fixed Tugboat and Transport Heli lights disappearing
  • Fixed not being able to place barricades on sand dunes at giant excavator
  • Fixed despawn times of some DLC items being shorter than their regular counterpart
  • Fixed contact menu screenshots being too dark
  • Fixed being able to get overstacked items when gutting fish with harvesting tea
  • Reworded TC tool storage tooltip
  • Fixed tree marker color setting not applying when changed
  • Fixed being able to have a lit torch underwater by continuosly swinging
  • Fixed nametags not showing near terrain holes in monuments
  • Fixed the AK not having an empty mag sound
  • Fixed blackjack machine screen being blank
  • Fixed canyons being full of fog
  • Fixed other players being able to hear fall damage sound of an invis admin
  • Fixed item ownership getting applied when an invis admin opens a loot container
  • Fixed jackhammer sound persisting when the player disconnects
  • Removed miscellaneous leftover debug console logs
  • Fixed players sometimes being in the swimming animation on excavator
  • Fixed small oil refinery having duplicated gibs
  • Fixed C4 with different frequencies not being stackable after disabling RF
  • Fixed some commands that could reveal the map in hardcore
  • Fixed attack heli flares not working correctly
  • Fixed laser light end point always being red regardless of the beam color
  • Fixed some issues with favoriting servers in the browser
  • Fixed not being able to remove locks from doors while they are open
  • Fixed sleeping players being invisible when respawning
  • Fixed visual artifact in sky when volumetric clouds were never enabled and sky rotation was applied

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