What's New in Rust's "11 Years Strong" Update

The 11 Years Strong blog landed in early January 2025, just as servers wiped and Santa packed up after the holiday season. With the team fresh off a couple of weeks away, this one was lighter than a normal monthly patch - part 11th-anniversary celebration, part 2024 retrospective, and part roadmap for what turned out to be a very busy 2025. Even eleven years in, Rust was still growing year over year and, in Facepunch's words, bigger than ever.

2024 by the Numbers

The year's stats were genuinely impressive for an 11-year-old game: over 325 million game sessions, over 40 million hours played, and over 5.5 million unique players. The blog also recapped 2024's major updates: World Update 2.0 completely reshaped the procedural world with new points of interest; Road Renegades added bicycles and motorbikes; Bags To Riches finally delivered backpacks (plus the metal detector) - a slot that skins like the Legacy Kevlar Backpack would soon fill out; Waves Of Change overhauled the Cargo Ship and Patrol Helicopter events along with the Harbors; Lighting The Way made night navigable with a small illumination radius around the player; and Seismic Shift added an item that pings your phone when an explosion is detected. On top of that came over 300 quality-of-life changes and five new weapons: the minigun, military flame thrower, SKS, High Calibre Revolver and Handmade SMG.

The Primitive Update Preview

The headline reveal was the Primitive update, scheduled for February 6th and billed as one of the most impactful updates to date for early-game raiding and combat. The premise: technology and homemade armaments have been depleted from Rust's setting, forcing survivors into cruder methods of attack and defence. Four siege weapons led the charge:

• The Siege Tower - climb over exterior walls while staying in cover; pushable or horse-drawn, with several floors and extendable drawbridges that double as shutters
• The Catapult - a long-range launcher firing boulders, fire bombs and propane tank IEDs; it has wheels, but its size means a horse will have to help you move it
• The Ballista - part catapult, part large crossbow: highly accurate, with multiple ammo types and heavy damage against people, doors and vehicles
• The Battering Ram - driveable like a traditional vehicle, with a triggerable ram that damages building blocks

Alongside the siege gear, Facepunch teased a variety of shields, a 4-shot mini-crossbow, updates to melee damage and ranges, horse improvements (including towing the new siege weapons), a dedicated game mode, and new skins for your primitive loadout. The impatient could jump onto the publicly playable Rust Staging Aux2 branch to test it all early.

Looking Ahead to 2025

Beyond February, the roadmap promised guaranteed monthly updates on the first Thursday of every month, plus Cooking 2.0 (deeper food management and unique food buffs), a Jungle biome with dangerous animals like crocodiles and tigers, and changes to the softcore and hardcore game modes. On performance, Facepunch announced something new: dedicated full-time performance hires - positions that had never existed before - already at work identifying issues, with Daniel's server profiler as a recent example. The team also deliberately left gaps of light-or-no content in the internal roadmap to stay adaptive to feedback and revisit old content.

The Anti-Cheat Report

The blog repeated its long-standing stance that obscurity is one of the best anti-cheat measures, while sharing where things stood. Server-side player culling - not networking players you can't see, to starve ESP cheats - had been tested on live servers and was being tuned for mid-to-high population counts. More controversially, Facepunch floated premium servers: the overwhelming majority of banned cheaters have Rust Steam inventories worth under $20, so gating some servers by inventory value could dramatically cut cheating - at the risk of choking a server's flow of new players. They explicitly asked for community feedback on the idea. The year's enforcement numbers: over 1,300 pieces of cheat-related media taken down, 290,000+ bans applied (57,000+ temporary, 233,000+ permanent), around 1.2 million cheating reports on Facepunch servers alone, and the majority of cheaters removed in under 12 hours of playtime - down to 10 hours over the preceding three months.

Last Days of Rustmas

One final festive note: Christmas-themed Twitch Drops were still claimable for a few more days - watch anyone streaming Rust on Twitch by Monday January 6th to bag the seasonal rewards. If you're the type who keeps the decorations up all year, those drops - and every other Rust skin - are tracked with live prices on our skin tracker. And with siege towers on the horizon, 2025 was shaping up to be anything but a quiet year.