DevblogUpdated weekly
What Facepunch is building
Facepunch works in public. Every change to Rust lands as a commit anyone can read, but the messages are written for other developers. This is the same week in plain English, grouped by what it touches.
Blockers get balanced, events stop losing their loot on restart
2026-W35 · 24 Aug to 30 AugA merge-heavy week: ninety-two branches went into main, which is what the last week before a staging wipe usually looks like. The two changes players will feel are monument blockers settling on one C4, and events finally keeping their crates through a server restart.
- Commits
- 655
- Developers
- 37
- Branches
- 112
- Merged to main
- 92
Monument blocker balance
August shipped blockers on monument loot routes without much idea of what they should cost. This week settled it: one C4 or five satchels, a health bar so you can see progress, and decay so an opened route closes again.
- Hitting a monument blocker now shows a health bar.#616341
- Blocker protection and health adjusted, then lowered again to one C4 or five satchels.#617645
- Blockers at Launch Site, Military Tunnels and Missile Silo tuned individually.#617543
- Small Oil Rig got its own blocker.#617649
- Blockers now decay, with the decay grade period set to 24 hours across all of them.#617828
- Fixed explosive ammo doing no damage to blockers at all.#618252
Events keep their loot through a restart
Restarting a server used to wipe every crate off the oil rigs, the cargo ship and any active event site. That is a real cost on a wipe day when a restart lands mid-fight, and it is now fixed for all of them.
- Both oil rigs keep their crates through a server restart.#616302
- Cargo ship keeps its crates and runs more loot cycles, with random gaps between them.#617438
- Patrol helicopter, Bradley and satellite crash sites save correctly instead of losing every crate.#617509
- Oil rig radiation still restarts after a server restart even if the force reset fails.#617562
- Fixed non-puzzle crate and barrel spawns on both rigs being set to never respawn.#618273
- Hackable crate flag and visual fixes.#617396
High quality metal ore
HQM becomes something you mine off a node rather than only smelt. The work this week was mostly about making it rare enough not to break progression.
- HQM ore texture and collectible art added, with prefabs.#617430
- HQM spawns split into their own population so they can be made much rarer.#617557
- HQM node spawn rate cut by 66%.#617629
- Collectable yield lowered from 8 to 5.#617750
- Added to the general random ore spawner at weight 5, plus a dedicated spawner with doubled respawn delays.#617769
Composter rework
The composter was running on its own code path and had drifted. Merging it into the normal cooking code gave it a progress bar and automatic starting, and shook out a pile of bugs on the way.
- Composter code merged into the normal cooking code, so it shows decomposition time like a furnace.#617799
- It now starts automatically when you put something in, using the apartment stove's code.#617803
- Smelt speed increased so it behaves the same as before without splitting stacks.#617809
- Fixed items that are both cookable and compostable, such as meat, using the wrong time.#617813
- Fixed a four year old bug that let you move items into a furnace output by splitting them.#617814
- The loot panel says Composter instead of Furnace.#617812
Vehicle armour breaks into panels
Attack helicopter and hot air balloon armour now comes off in pieces. Shooting a panel off exposes what is behind it rather than chipping at one shared health pool.
- Attack helicopter left, front and right panels toggle their colliders and visuals when removed.#617463
- Main cabin collider shrunk so shots pass through the gaps that opens.#617470
- Armour falloff adjusted.#617665
- Balloon armour split into chunks that break off individually.#616245
- Balloon armour now reports the parent balloon's health.#617946
Marketplace needs the grid
The Bandit Camp market terminal is being wired into August's power grid, so drone deliveries stop being an always-on service.
Character creator
Work continued on the main menu character creator. Most of this week was making the preview render live so the face tab updates when you change race or skin colour.
Frogs, rabbits and squirrels
Small ambient animals being prototyped next to the livestock work. Worth watching mainly because it shows how much of a branch gets cut before it ships.
Deployable optimisation pass
A batch of mesh and texture optimisations gathered from several small branches. Nothing visible on its own, but these are the objects that fill a base, so the saving multiplies.
Render pipeline and DLSS
The new render pipeline gained DLSS support and had a set of visual bugs cleaned up before merging. This is groundwork rather than something to look for in game.
Also this week
- Swamp trees now give 1000 wood instead of 300. #616179
- A tool cupboard can change its upkeep rate based on how many players are authorised on it. #616164
- Wearables can muffle game audio, which is being used to make heavy helmets deafen you. #616154
- A deepsea.terrain_everywhere convar enables deep sea terrain and ocean colour across the whole map. #616141
- Jukeboxes snap when deployed. #618619
- Admins get on-screen status indicators, starting with infinite ammo. #618627
- Rugs no longer block installing a workbench upgrade. #617625
- The boat building station can be deployed on servers with a non-default ocean level. #617918
- Wooden armour parts and the crystal AR were added to the skin viewer. #617991
- A texture pass found the radiation dart shipping at 4K on every platform. #616234
- Modular car steering retuned, with no struggle multiplier while the handbrake is on. #616107
- SAM sites are being buffed against drones, with a configurable detonate distance. #616185
- Staging wiped on 27 August for save 288. #617700
Read from Facepunch’s public commit log, 655 commits between 24 Aug 2026 and 31 Aug 2026. Branch work is not a promise: some of it ships in the next update, some of it never ships.