What's New in Rust's "17th Feb Update" Update
February 2014's second Legacy patch introduced whitelist servers tied to Steam Groups - the ancestor of today's community server gating - alongside tooltip cleanups, fixed explosives, and another go at the bug where harvesting resources killed you.
The 17th Feb Update shipped in mid-February 2014, during Rust's Legacy days of rapid-fire mini-patches. It was a short one, but it introduced something genuinely new for the era: whitelist servers, giving communities their first official way to gate who could join.
Whitelist Servers
The whitelist system was kept as simple as possible: a server assigns itself to a Steam Group, and you need to be in that group to join it. Whitelist servers you're eligible for appear in a dedicated whitelist tab on the server browser - and servers you can't join are never shown at all, in either the normal or whitelist tabs. Server owners enabled it with a setting in their config file, and servers needed a restart before players could join, so if your favourite server vanished from the list briefly, that was why.
Fixes
The rest of the patch was cleanup:
- Fixed unicode not working in name tooltips, and stopped people using colours in them
- Removed the "hatchet to gather" tooltips
- Fixed broken explosives
- Fixed being killed by harvesting resources - a bug that had been "maybe hopefully" fixed the week before, now dealt with properly
Nothing earth-shattering beyond the whitelist feature, but that one addition laid early groundwork for the private community servers that would become a huge part of how Rust is played.