What's New in Rust's "10 Years Of Rust" Update

December 2023 was a big one: the 10 Years Of Rust update marked a full decade since Rust first appeared as a browser-playable Unity experiment back in 2013. Facepunch celebrated with an in-game birthday event running from December 7th to the 16th, a wave of Rust Legacy throwbacks, and - because it wouldn't be Rust without them - some genuinely meaty engineering changes underneath the party hats. By this point the game had sold over 16 million copies (not counting console) and shipped monthly updates for ten years straight, with no plans to stop.

Birthday Festivities

The anniversary event brought in-game birthday cake, hats (randomised between 8 colours) and two new party deployables. The Pinata could be crafted for 500 wood, and smashing it dropped a random selection of goodies to share with your team. The Confetti Cannon was simpler: light the fuse, sit back, and let the confetti rain down.

Legacy Throwbacks

The real theme of the month was nostalgia. The Legacy Wooden Shelter - the humble starter home from 2013 Rust - returned as a placeable deployable, complete with an included door, key lock and even a small radius of building privilege. Shelters decayed naturally unless the door was interacted with at least once a day by someone with a key or ownership, and inside a tool cupboard radius they used TC upkeep like anything else. They could also be repaired with a hammer. It was also the debut of new gameplay programmer Ian Henderson, who brought Vincent's shelter model to life.

The M4 Shotgun, first seen in Rust Legacy in 2013, was revived as an uncraftable military-grade shotgun with notably stronger range than other shotguns, dropping rarely from high-end loot crates. The Legacy Furnace - based on the original furnace model, which was famously just starter rocks copy-pasted into a furnace shape - was a free skin awarded automatically for playing 3+ hours during December. On the store side, the limited-time Legacy Bow skin paid homage to the first-ever bow model and was only purchasable during December, while the Legacy Wood building skin became the first wood-tier building skin, applied via the hammer's building-skins wheel.

Rounding out the throwbacks, Hapis Island came back (again) as a community-made recreation of the 2018 version, hosted on two official servers - US at 54.39.130.95:28015 and EU at 51.210.222.218:28015 - planned to run until at least March 2024.

Paint UI Overhaul

The sign-painting UI got a long-overdue rework. New tools included an eraser for all sign types, a colour picker, two air brush types, a more natural-looking paint brush, and sliders for brush size, opacity and a new spacing option. You could now chat while painting, reset the camera to face the object straight on, toggle preview lighting to kill glare, save with Ctrl+S, and even download the image you were editing to your desktop. For the bind-happy, new convars like paint.selectedtool, paint.selectedbrush, paint.brushsize, paint.brushspacing and paint.brushopacity made the tools scriptable. Under the hood, 2D painting was optimised so long, quick strokes no longer killed framerate, and clicks on the UI could no longer accidentally paint the sign.

Server-Side Ragdolls

Player corpse ragdolls were rebuilt from the ground up. Previously the server simulated only a pelvis-sized "corpse" collider while each client ran its own full ragdoll attached by a spring - a setup that caused mismatched loot interactions, corpses stretching out unnaturally, and ragdolls that fell straight through vehicles. The new system simulates the full ragdoll on the server, syncing limb positions efficiently packed into a couple of 32-bit integers. The result: corpses now collide with all vehicles in the game (trains, cars, boats, helicopters), the stretching issues were eliminated, and loot interactions line up with what you see. Ragdolls stop simulating once they settle to keep server cost low, and a serversideragdolls convar (true by default) lets server owners revert to the old system if anything goes wrong.

Oil Rig Radiation

A year after the Oil Rig respawn delay went from 30 minutes to 1 hour, Facepunch noticed the monument was sometimes taking literal hours to refresh - players were camping it, farming resources or sitting AFK in vents to grief the respawn. Now, radiation kicks in 30 minutes after the hacked crate unlocks, applying low but consistent damage regardless of armor and forcing players out once the event is over. The trick of leaving a single item in the hacked crate to keep its map marker alive was also fixed, and the rig's alarm sound changed meaning: it now signals "radiation starting" rather than "heavy scientists incoming".

Quality of Life and Fixes

This patch shipped an unusually generous batch of QOL improvements:

• Bandage revives - you can now revive downed players with a bandage, restoring a small amount of health
• Ore harvesting - node hotspots can be hit from further away, so no more climbing onto the node and crouching
• Industrial pipe colors - teal, orange, pink and purple added
• Sprinkler fix - sprinklers were wasting up to 40% of their water on certain planter counts
• Tugboat FPS - fixed a rare large FPS drop when tugboats came into range
• Car lift pickup - car lifts can now be picked up when not in use
• Hot air balloon - players no longer fall out of it
• Heli crate remodel - the patrol heli crate switched from the military to the elite crate model
• Keybind search - a search box was added to the binds section of the options menu
• Drone ID - drones now show their ID in your inventory
• Fixed explosive ammo not applying splash damage in some situations, and yes - the occasionally square sun was fixed too

Graphics got some love as well: contact shadows now respect foliage shadow intensity so grass no longer looks overly dark with the effect on, and terrain texture compression saved around 80MB of VRAM. The full changelist runs to several thousand characters of smaller fixes - despawn timers were raised on items like diesel and the Spas-12 (5 to 60 minutes), the HBHF sensor stack size went from 1 to 5, and exploits like connecting two TCs with a wall were closed.

End-of-Year Retirements

Two experiments were retired from official servers. Hardcore, released in August 2022 as a veteran-focused mode with safe zones, team systems and maps disabled, saw a declining player base - Facepunch admitted they "missed the mark on its implementation" and collected feedback for a possible 2024 revamp. It remains available for community servers. Barren, the low-end-system map from before custom maps existed, was also retired - in Facepunch's own words, it "looks ugly and not a good representation of Rust".

Twitch Events and What's Next

December was stacked with community events. The first-ever Support a Streamer campaign ran December 7th-31st: buy 2 subscriptions from any participating Rust streamer and earn an exclusive Creator Computer Station to use in game. Twitch Rivals kicked off December 11th, with 150 well-known creators - hJune, Welyn, Willjum, Buddha, DisguisedToast and more - competing over 5 days for a $100k prize pool, with Twitch drops enabled throughout. And on December 16th at 19:00 GMT, an optional update flipped on the Xmas event and festive features.

The anniversary also fuelled a wave of legacy-themed cosmetics on the workshop and item store around this period - pieces like the Legacy Kevlar Facemask and Legacy Kevlar Vest capture the same 2013 nostalgia, and you can track their prices on our skin tracker. Beyond that, Facepunch pointed ahead to the January end-of-year blog covering what 2023 delivered and the plans for 2024 - ten years in, the monthly update train showed no sign of slowing down.