Zipline & Rail Update

The first iteration of the procedural rail network is now live! Any map size 4250 or larger should have a single railway in the shape a ring going around the entire island.

This is just a tech test / proof of concept for now, so there's no official gameplay element to it yet. Please report any weird looking areas you might encounter.

In the near future, you can expect driveable above-ground trains. 

Since launching out of early access in 2018 Rust's achievements have served as a way for new players to learn the basics of the game. Unfortunately they haven't kept up with the amount of new content added to the game every month so I've made a set of 18 new achievements to earn. As usual, achievements can only be earned on official servers.

We have continued improving the lighting setup for our monuments. This month we have focused mainly on the monuments such as; Lighthouse, Fishing Villages, Stables, Excavator, Arctic Research Base and Airfield.

The degree of improvements varies depending on the monument. Some of the newer monuments like Fishing Villages, Stables and Excavator received only minor updates. This includes changes such as adding darkening volumes to interiors, adding new ambient lights and enabling interior lights during the daytime. 

Other monuments like Lighthouse and Arctic Research base received more extensive upgrades, which includes a whole lot of new lights, that will make the monuments significantly brighter during nighttime and more atmospheric during daytime. 

The monument that received the biggest upgrade this month is the Airfield. Here we have added not only new lights and darkening volumes, but also tweaked some materials and added a lot of new prop dressing to bring it to the same level of quality of our newer monuments. 

We have updated Steam Networking to the latest version, which comes with a number of important performance improvements. It's still disabled by default, but we will run some tests on various official servers to provide feedback to Valve regarding any potential issues. In the medium term, we hope to switch all servers to Steam Networking by default.

Balancing Rust can be a daunting prospect given the wide variety of playstyles and content. With that in mind, this month we're releasing our first pass of server analytics for official servers so we can start to gather some data about how you play Rust. While this will be invisible to you, we're hoping to use this data to better allocate resources to parts of the game that need work as well as identifying balance issues. 

If you're playing on an official server, thanks in advance for helping us out. We'll be sure to share any interesting stats that pop up.

On April 14th at 8:00 pm GMT a team of 80 well known Twitch creators with 40 players from North America (team Disguised Toast) will face off against a team of 40 players from Europe and Latin America (team Alexby11) in this massive global Rust competition, taking place over 48 hours with a prize pool worth $100k.

During the Twitch Rivals event, Rust Twitch drops will be enabled for 3 days from selected participating channels, well-known streamers such as hJune, xQcOW, Welyn, Silithur,  BaboAbe, sykkuno, Ray__C, LakshartNia and of course the team captains Alexby11 and Disguised Toast.

Over the course of the 48 hours, teams will build up their bases and supplies. During this time, teams can gain access to additional resources by getting kills, completing objectives, and claiming crate drops. The final hour of the competition will be an all-out battle, as both teams try to raid the opposing base. The team that collects the most dog tags will win. 

We'd like to thank Rustoria for working with us and Twitch to make this event possible. 

Learn more at twitch.facepunch.com.

On April 14th at 19:00 BST / 18:00 UTC / 14:00 EST we'll be releasing an optional update to enable this year's Easter egg hunt event, more details to follow in an upcoming blog on the 14th.