Where the facts come from
Two sources, both published by Facepunch and both linked from every post. The Rust commit feed is the live record of every change the developers make, roughly two thousand entries a month. The official news blog is the monthly update post that lands on force-wipe Thursday.
Nothing else is read. No other Rust site is scraped, quoted or summarised, and no numbers are invented to fill a gap. Where a commit message is ambiguous, the write-up says so rather than guessing at what it means.
What the model does
A Claude model reads the raw material and writes the post to a fixed structure: a headline, a category, an importance rating and a status for each story, then the smaller changes grouped by what they touch. The brief tells it to lead with what changes for a player, to use the game’s own vocabulary, and to avoid hype. The structure is enforced by a schema, so a post that does not fit the shape is rejected rather than published.
Artwork is not generated. Each story can point at items, containers, NPCs and monuments that already exist in RustFront’s database, and any reference that does not resolve to a real entry is dropped before the post is written to disk. That is why the pictures on an update page always link to a page with the numbers on it.
What it does not do
- It never decides what is true. Every story carries the commit ids or the blog section behind it.
- It never predicts. A story on the upcoming page is marked by where the work actually lives: merged to the release branch, still on a feature branch, or an experiment.
- It never edits the game data. Item stats, loot chances and raid costs come from the Rust server files, on their own schedule.
Why the upcoming post can be wrong
Work in progress is not a roadmap. Facepunch abandons branches, delays features by a month, and occasionally ships something that was never visible in the commit log at all. A story marked “in progress” or “experimental” is exactly that, and the post says so. Once the update ships, the upcoming post is replaced by coverage written from the official blog, which is the authoritative account.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, it is worth telling us, because the same mistake will otherwise repeat next month in the brief. Use the support form or email support@rustfront.com.
2 update posts and 3 weekly digests published so far. RustFront is an independent community project and is not affiliated with Facepunch Studios.