What's New in Rust's "Censorship Update" Update
A tiny but memorable December 2013 patch: Rust's naked cavemen were flooding Steam with screenshots, so Facepunch turned nudity censoring on by default, left a console toggle, and warned that uncensored Steam Hub uploads would be deleted.
The Censorship Update arrived in December 2013, just days into Rust's Steam Early Access launch, and it wasn't really a content patch at all — it was a quick bit of housekeeping. Rust's survivors spawned as naked cavemen, and players were gleefully posting the evidence all over Steam. As Facepunch put it, it was probably not totally unreasonable for Valve to ask that Rust didn't flood the rest of Steam with pictures of cavemen genitalia.
Nudity Censoring On by Default
The change itself was small: nudity censoring was switched on by default for everyone. Facepunch was upfront that this was purely to stem the huge wave of naked people being posted to Steam, not any deeper design shift — the game itself stayed exactly as rude as ever underneath.
Players who preferred the au naturel experience could still turn the censorship off via the console. The catch: any screenshots posted publicly to the Steam Hub with censoring disabled would be deleted.
What Came Next
Facepunch also flagged where this was heading: over the following days, the plan was to make screenshots posted to Steam always come out censored, regardless of whether a player had censoring on or off locally. That way the in-game toggle could stay a personal choice while Steam's storefront stayed clean. A very small patch, but a genuine piece of Rust history — one of the first times the game's infamous nudity collided with the wider Steam ecosystem.