You can expect to see new monuments, including apartment complex. We’re also working on new player models and animations, which will improve both how characters look and move. The player update will unblock one of the biggest hurdles to player customisation. 

We’re expanding the ecosystem with new animals, cows and sheep, for example, alongside a proper animal breeding system. This opens up some interesting gameplay opportunities and adds more depth to the world beyond simple hunting. Bigger and better dung farms? 

As always, plans will evolve, priorities will shift, and we’ll keep talking openly as things take shape. But there’s a lot to look forward to.

In March, we released Premium Servers. To access these servers, your Rust Steam inventory must be valued at $15 or more. This includes items from the Permanent Store, such as building skins, décor packs, and hazmat skins, as well as any other tradable Rust items with an attached value.

Since launch, there have been several attempts by bad actors to game the system in various ways. So far, we’ve successfully countered those attempts.

We’ve also seen strong and healthy retention across Premium Servers. They’re doing an excellent job of gatekeeping cheaters out, and I'm very happy with how this is working. At present, the $15 price point is doing its job well, and see no need to raise the barrier to entry. If you want the best cheat-free experience, premium servers are it. 

In May, we enabled server-side player culling by default across all servers. As a reminder, this is technology that stops networking players who are fully obscured by terrain and rocks, preventing or significantly limiting several high-impact cheat features such as ESP and aimbot.

In April, we opened our HackerOne program to the public. This allows players and researchers to report security vulnerabilities and exploits in exchange for a bug bounty. We also launched a dedicated security page on our website to make submitting reports easy, secure, and straightforward. To date, we’ve paid out over $300,000 through this program.

More recently, our anticheat partner, Easy Anti-Cheat, has begun additional efforts specifically targeting recoil cheats, often referred to as scripting. We continue to work very closely with the Epic Games EAC team, and there’s a lot of ongoing collaboration behind the scenes. We’ve got some big plans together for 2026.

Looking ahead to 2026, we’re continuing to hire additional support staff and developers dedicated to anticheat. We’ll also be introducing a new third-party anticheat layer that we’ll be working closely with. More details on that once we’re ready to talk about it publicly, but it'll be soon.

Performance is always an ongoing process. We’re constantly adding and improving features every single month, many of which never make the headlines and sit quietly in changelogs. There’s no magic button we can press to suddenly make Rust run faster. Instead, it’s a slow grind of small gains that add up over time.

Over the past few years, we’ve hired several people whose sole focus is performance. A lot of this work is experimental and, frankly, tedious. Things that should/could work in theory often don’t in the real world, and it can take days to weeks just to prove something isn’t viable. Sometimes you spend a long time getting to a result that simply says “nope”.

And, like every year, we do mess up performance from time to time. When that happens, we review what went wrong and keep adjusting our internal processes to get better at catching issues earlier. 

That said, we did ship some genuinely great improvements in 2025, the BIG ones:

As we continue to add more content and systems, performance can take a hit. We’re constantly fighting that trade-off. It’s a balance between pushing Rust forward and making sure it still runs well across a huge range of machines.

Most players seem to understand the reality of this. Rust is a sandbox game. You can go to the largest, worst-performing monument in the game, drop a massive base next to it, have a dozen smaller teams build nearby, then throw 40 players into the area, raid while 500 players are connected to the server. Honestly, it’s a miracle Rust works as well as it does sometimes. These are exactly the kinds of situations we have to design and optimise for.

Looking ahead, we’ve got a lot of performance work underway. Much of it is deep, underlying changes to things like render pipelines, navmesh. We’re also regularly checking in with the Rust Mobile team to see what they’ve solved there, and whether any of those solutions realistically make sense to bring back to PC.

Performance is never “done”, but we’re committed to keeping Rust playable as it continues to grow. If we hit all performance roadmap taskings in 2026 and it works out as we hope, 2026 will be a good year. 

This team does not take resources away from regular Rust development. DLC work is (95%)  separate from our core monthly update pipeline. It’s an add-on, not a replacement, and if anything, having a focused DLC team has at times helped us push more free content into the game by taking pressure off other teams.

If you look back at 2025, you’ll probably notice a pattern. Nearly every month we shipped a new in-house DLC item, pack or skinnable. That wasn’t accidental, and it’s a pace we’re comfortable maintaining. You can expect this to continue into 2026.

Compared to most games, I genuinely believe we offer good value for money. That’s something we don’t want to lose as Rust continues to grow.

One of the things we’re actively exploring is what a battlepass-style system could look like in Rust. This doesn’t mean we’re copying another game, and it doesn’t mean anything is locked in yet. If we do this, it has to feel very “Rust”, fair, respectful and good value. If you're a frequent user who purchasing DLC, this system should feel rewarding.