What's New in Rust's "Armed and Animated" Update

The Armed and Animated update arrived in November 2024 wearing its contents in its name: two new weapons on one side, a gesture pack and smarter animation-driven AI on the other. It also quietly kicked off one of the more ambitious long-term projects in Rust's history - a ground-up AI overhaul, starting with the humble wolf.

Two New Weapons

The Handmade SMG filled a long-standing gap near the end of the T1 tech tree. It lacks accuracy and raw damage but compensates with sheer volume of fire - a hail-of-bullets weapon that lets skilled early-game players stay competitive through timing, positioning and surprise bursts against better-equipped opponents.

At the other end of the progression, the SKS unlocks at the start of the T3 tech tree and bridges the gap between the SAR and the M39. It's a mid-tier powerhouse pairing punchy damage with accuracy - a no-nonsense rifle with solid range, stopping power, and a kick that seasoned survivors will appreciate.

Improved Wolf AI

New AI programmer Maverick's first project reshaped the wolf, and the reasoning was refreshingly honest. The old wolf was basically a landmine: miss its footsteps - especially at night - and you died, because wolves outrun players and charge in a straight line. If you saw it first, though, it was trivial: unload a nailgun and collect the loot, or watch it flee absurdly far when shot from distance. Frustrating or trivial, no in-between.

The new wolf is deliberately undocumented. Rather than publishing an exhaustive behaviour list, Maverick invited players to forget everything they know about old wolves and experiment - with hidden behaviours left for the community to discover. Long-term, the plan is to extend this overhaul to scientists and all other animals, so November's wolves were just the opening move.

Gesture Pack and Wheel Customisation

Rust's first Gesture Pack hit the permanent item store with 8 new gestures: Rock Paper Scissors, Loser/L Hand, Knuckle Crack, No-No/Wagging Finger, Cut Throat, Shush, Watching You, and Finger Gun. The star is Rock Paper Scissors, Rust's first gesture minigame: select it from the wheel, wait for an opponent to interact, then both players pick rock, paper or scissors with the number keys. You get 10 seconds to choose - wander off or time out and the game ends - then both players "shoot" simultaneously on the count of three. Perfect for settling who does the farming run or who gets the L96.

Supporting this, a new gesture wheel customisation menu appeared under Options > Gestures. Click a slot to assign a gesture, RMB to clear it, and switch between two full wheels in-game with E/Q - with the system built to add more wheels as future gesture packs land. Note that new gestures must be manually assigned to a wheel slot before they appear.

Balance and QOL

Radioactive Water, which debuted the previous month to a shrug, got the buff it needed: radiation from sprinklers up 70% and from splashes up 40%, positioning it as a proper counter against full-kit raiders. The mixing table also got lovely QOL - click a recipe to auto-fill the required ingredients into the correct slots, repeat-click to stack for another batch, shift-click to load the maximum you can afford, and unaffordable recipes now grey out.

Other notable QOL from the patch:

• IO arrows - inputs and outputs are now shown with arrows when looking at IO deployables
• Corpses, Boogie Boards and boats now properly float down rivers with the current
• Player voices (and music) can now be heard over CCTV feeds - eavesdrop on the group taking Oil Rig
• Monument CCTV cameras can be damaged to disable them for 5 minutes
• Player SteamIDs can be copied from the F7 report menu
• Every Water Well variant now has a killable vendor NPC

The full changelist runs deep on fixes too - the Travelling Vendor's spawn location is no longer guessable, planters finally receive rain water between 8pm and 10am, and the patrol helicopter no longer crashes at bunker entrances.

Servers, Anticheat and Admin Tools

Many official Facepunch servers - especially Eastern and Western Europe and Eastern US - were upgraded to higher-performance hardware, with some max player capacity increases and all blueprints transferred. (If your favourite server vanished from your list, search for it and enable "show empty servers".) Upgrades for other regions were promised in the following weeks.

The anticheat report brought hard numbers: 91,676 bans since July (19,398 temporary, the rest permanent), broken down per patch - including 22,473 permanent bans during October's World Update 2.0 alone - against 5.3 million total reports across all servers since July. Two bigger moves were announced: server-side player culling (don't network players you can't see, starving ESP cheats) began rolling out slowly across official servers this month after extensive internal testing, and a third-party takedown partnership - manual review only, no automation - had already removed over 1,200 pieces of cheat-related media from social platforms.

Admins also got Copy Paste, a new tool for copying, pasting and saving entire bases - handy for staging tests and for attaching real base copies to bug reports.

Events and Sales

Rust Kingdoms returned to Twitch that Friday, hosted by Rustoria, with big creators battling for the throne until Sunday the 17th and plenty of Twitch Drops along the way. And for anyone who missed the World Update 2.0 sale, Rust went 40% off again for 48 hours - standalone DLC included - just in time for wipe. With the wolf overhaul framed as step one of a much larger AI project, this patch was as much a promise about Rust's future as a delivery for its present.