Livestock is the big one: sheep and cattle you lead, name, feed and breed, with fences to keep them in. Underneath it, a rebuilt underground train network, a character creator, and monument blockers that finally have sane health.
This is written from work in progress. Anything still on a feature branch can slip to a later month or be dropped entirely, and the status on each story says which is which.
FarmingIn progress
Sheep and cattle you can lead, name and breed
The largest single piece of work since the August wipe. Livestock animals have needs, a breeding system gated on keeping them met, and lineage that persists across a wipe day.
BoarChicken
Each animal carries stats shown in a widget, and every stat has to be above half before it will breed. One of them is social: an animal is happier with about five others nearby and unhappier with fewer or more, which turns a herd size into an actual decision rather than a number you maximise.
Pregnancy is visible in the world, not just in the UI, because pregnant animals sit down. Parentage is saved, and infants stay close to their mother rather than wandering off into a wolf.
You lead animals rather than herd them, and an animal being led can be renamed from a dialog. Sheep are furthest along, with skinning, lean and react animations and a sleep state, and a bull prefab and a second species have been set up behind them.
All animals were set to female at one point during development; that is fixed.
Timers moved onto a new PersistentTimer class, which is what lets growth and pregnancy survive a restart.
Admin commands exist to select and direct a given animal, which server owners will want.
A month of level design on the underground network: a large crashed station, randomised rooms with their own puzzles and doors, and vendor rooms down in the tunnels.
Train Yard
The stations are being split into rooms that shuffle between spawns, so the same station is not the same route twice. Small stations get a set of randomised rooms, medium and large stations get doors and puzzles placed through them.
Three large randomised rooms are in: a control room, a boiler room and an abandoned waiting room. Vendor rooms with an NPC have been set up as a trial, which would give the tunnels a reason to exist beyond a shortcut and a place to get run over.
August shipped blockers on monument loot routes. Three weeks of balance passes since have settled on 1 C4 or 5 satchels, a visible health bar, and decay so an opened route does not stay open all wipe.
Timed Explosive ChargeSatchel ChargeLaunch Site
Health and protection were adjusted several times before landing. Hitting a blocker now shows a health bar, which was the missing piece: without it there was no way to tell whether you were making progress or wasting explosives.
Blockers decay, with the decay grade period set to 24 hours across all of them, so a route someone opened this morning is shut again tomorrow. Launch Site, Military Tunnels, Missile Silo and both oil rigs were tuned individually.
Explosive ammo did no damage to blockers at all; that is fixed.
Blockers have been added to the red keycard doors in underwater labs.
HQM ore nodes with their own art, split into a separate spawn population so they can be made genuinely rare. The spawn rate has already been cut by two thirds.
High Quality Metal OreHigh Quality Metal
Splitting HQM off the shared ore population is the important part: it means the node can be rare without competing for slots with sulfur and metal. The collectable yield was cut from 8 to 5 during tuning.
There are two ways it spawns, a dedicated spawner with doubled respawn delays and a weighted entry in the general random ore spawner, which suggests it will show up occasionally anywhere rather than only in fixed spots.
A character creator is being built into the main menu
Rust has always assigned your appearance from your Steam ID. A full customiser is in development, with race selection, per-feature tabs and live preview rendering.
It started as a convar system for swapping between existing player model features and has grown a proper main menu page: a tile grid of options, a set of blockout animations, and race selection.
The preview renders live, so changing race or skin colour updates the face tab immediately rather than showing a stale icon. There is a dust effect behind it and a live background, which is a lot of polish for something that could still be cut.
A new medical item that heals instantly and strips radiation. It is loot and vendor stock rather than a craft, which puts it in the same slot as the normal bandage early wipe.
BandageJar of Honey
Instant health went up to 10 during development and was pulled back to 8, so it is a small heal rather than a syringe replacement. It also removes 5 radiation, which is the part that makes it interesting on a monument run.
It has been added to medical crates and to the water well vendor, and now has its own icon, material and world model.
The composter finally shows you how long it has left
The composter has been rebuilt on top of the normal cooking code, which gives it a progress bar, automatic starting, and a pile of bug fixes it had been carrying for years.
ComposterFertilizer
It shows decomposition time the way a furnace shows smelt progress, and starts automatically when you put something in, using the same code as the apartment stove. The smelt speed was raised so it behaves the same as before now that stacks are not split.
The fixes are the good bit: compostable items that produced nothing were still accepted, meat that was both cookable and compostable used the wrong time, and the panel said Furnace instead of Composter. A four year old bug that let you move items into a furnace output by splitting them was fixed on the way past.
Hot air balloon and attack helicopter armour breaks off in pieces
Armour on both vehicles is being split into chunks that can be shot off individually, exposing the frame underneath instead of behaving as one health pool.
Attack Helicopter
Attack helicopter front, left and right panels toggle their colliders and visuals off when removed. The main cabin collider was shrunk so shots go through the gaps that opens rather than hitting an invisible box.
Balloon armour splits the same way and reports the parent balloon's health, so the armour is cover rather than a separate thing to grind down. Armour falloff was adjusted alongside it.
August's power grid extends to Bandit Camp: the market terminal now needs charge from the Power Plant, with a power icon and some UI explaining why it is dead.
Vending MachinePower Plant
This turns drone deliveries from an always-available service into something the server has to keep the grid running for, which is consistent with how the rest of the August features work.
Scientists get their pathfinding fixed, including cover they never used
A long list of AI navigation fixes. The notable one: the function that finds the closest navmesh edge never worked, so scientists have never actually favoured cover near walls.
ScientistHeavy Scientist
Scientists were not spawning at all in underwater labs and on cargo ships, and cargo scientists that did spawn were not moving. Old scientists tried to steer rather than turn instantly, and oil rig scientists crouch-walked upstairs at an angle.
NPCs also got stuck when a navmesh tile rebuilt underneath them or while they were crossing it. Wolf, crocodile and tiger jump behaviour onto foundations now has automated tests behind it, which is new for Rust AI.
Steam Input is now the only gamepad path, with configuration exposed as menu options rather than convars, and a gamepad cursor for inventory management by default.
Moving to Steam Input means controller bindings come from Steam's own config system, so remapping works the way it does in other games and community layouts become possible. Analogue steering and control sets are being built on the same branch.
Bases are being taught to hide rooms you cannot see
A renderer change that stops drawing rooms inside a base while you are not in them. Large bases are one of the worst frame rate cases in the game.
Building blocks have been reserialised to define their faces and edges, which is what lets the game work out that a room is sealed. Interior walls were being incorrectly hidden at first and now have tests pinning the fix.
Rooms are not hidden until they have been out of sight for five seconds, which avoids a room vanishing as a door swings closed in front of you.
Small ambient animals with their own behaviour states, built alongside the livestock work. Some of it has already been cut.
Frogs look for shallow water and start croaking. Rabbits and squirrels got an interest mechanic, and then had it removed again, which is a good reminder of how much of a branch never reaches a wipe.
What survives is basic setup for all three and separate sleep cycles per critter, plus reduced network range so a map full of them does not cost bandwidth.
A transparent AK with colour variants, and a magazine that visibly empties as you fire, which is a first for a Rust skin.
Ice Assault Rifle
The ammo script hides bullets based on the current count, so the magazine is a live readout. Most of the branch is the shader work needed to stop a transparent gun sorting incorrectly against itself and against other glass in the world.
The electricity system is being rewritten for performance
A hackweek rewrite of the IO system that only rebuilds circuits marked dirty instead of checking every circuit every tick. Most electrical entities have been converted.
Auto TurretSAM Site
The old evaluation pass pooled collections every tick and looped all circuits to check a flag. The rewrite uses buffers and a dirty set, and merges the battery drain and charge passes into one loop.
Auto turrets, SAM sites, igniters, tesla coils, lights, fridges, car lifts, door controllers, seismic sensors and fuse boxes are converted, with an automated test fixture behind them. This is the sort of change that either lands invisibly or breaks every base on the server, so expect it to sit on staging for a while.
The other half of livestock: a fence and gate you place on level ground to actually keep animals somewhere.
High External Wooden Gate
A second implementation replaced the first, and hold-to-place was removed in favour of normal placement. Both the fence and the gate use a level-placement socket modifier, so they will not follow terrain the way a wall does.
Something called the High Stakes pack is in development
Eleven changes so far, every one of them titled russian roulette. That is the entire public record.
Following the Bar Games Pack, a second gambling-themed pack looks likely. Facepunch’s own notes give away nothing beyond the mechanic name, so treat everything else as guesswork.
