What's New in Rust's "Companion App Update" Update

The Companion App Update shipped in June 2020, and it was the patch that let Rust follow you out of the game. The headline was Rust+, Facepunch's official companion app, backed up in-game by a new family of pairable smart devices. Builders got plenty to chew on too, with spiral staircases and a full set of triangle building blocks, while horses received a nerf to their, er, output.

Rust+: The Official Companion App

Rust+ launched with this patch, letting you stay connected to the game so you never miss an important moment. The pitch: coordinate with your team, receive alerts when you're being raided, remotely set off traps, and more.

• Server pairing — pair with your favourite servers for real-time player counts, current game time, and which teammates are online, plus optional push notifications when a teammate joins.
• Map view — browse the full server map to find points of interest, see where your teammates are, check on vending machines, and track ongoing events like the attack helicopter and cargo ship.
• Team chat — messages sync between the app and the in-game team chat, so you can seamlessly switch between the two and plan your next raid from anywhere.
• Device control — connect Smart Switches and Smart Alarms to your electrical contraptions and control them remotely at any time.

Beyond Smart Alarm alerts, Rust+ also notifies you when a teammate joins the game, when you get killed while offline, and for Rust news. Every notification type can be disabled separately in the app's settings — though Facepunch warned against disabling notifications entirely, since pairing servers and devices relies on them. Importantly, servers can only send you notifications if you opt in from the Rust+ menu in-game, and you can switch any server off afterwards from the hub. Facepunch also set up a dedicated feedback form for app bugs, and put up a wiki page for server owners — servers need app.port open and unfirewalled for pairing to work.

Smart Switch, Smart Alarm, and a Humble Button

Three new deployables arrived alongside the app:

• The Smart Switch is an improved electrical switch that can be flipped on or off from Rust+ or manually. You pair it by holding the Use key (E) and selecting the pair option, and it requires building privilege to operate by hand — a secure, convenient addition to any wired base.
• The Smart Alarm sends a push notification to everyone who has paired with it (and still has building privilege) whenever it receives an electrical signal, with a fully customizable message for any use case.
• The Button is, in Facepunch's own words, just a button — nothing smart about it. Press it and electricity flows through it for five seconds.

New Building Blocks

A generous set of new building pieces opened up fresh base designs:

• Spiral Stairs and Triangle Spiral Stairs — half-height blocks that attach to foundations or floors and stack to traverse multiple floors, often nicer to navigate than the old U and L stairs (which remained in the game). The triangle version stacks within a two-triangle footprint.
• Ramp — a quarter-height sloped block that vehicles can easily drive up.
• Steps — half-height blocks replacing the old Foundation Steps; note they're no longer treated as foundations, so they need a foundation or floor to attach to or they'll collapse.
• Triangle Floor Frame — like the square version, but taking triangle floor inserts.
• Triangle Ladder Hatch — the square ladder hatch's little sibling, with a much smaller footprint.
• Triangle Floor Grill — exactly what it sounds like.

On top of the new blocks, walls gained conditional wall corners — corner pieces that appear automatically wherever they make sense visually, giving bases much less of a "player built" look.

Weapon Fixes: Attachments and FOV

Third-person weapon attachments had accumulated plenty of bugs — scopes clipping ironsights, attachments floating offset from the gun — so this month every weapon and the nine attachments each supports got a cleanup pass.

Weapon view models also became FOV-aware: the gun and arms at the bottom of your screen now scale with your field-of-view setting, fixing a bunch of clipping issues at high FOV and letting the team be confident that new viewmodel animations display as intended. Prefer the old behaviour? Set graphics.vm_fov_scale to off in the console. Ultra-widescreen players got relief too, with several weapons shifted forward when aiming down sights to reduce camera clipping — a couple of cases remained, but far less noticeable.

Modular Cars Beta and the Great Dung Nerf

The new modular cars were nearing completion and opened up for public testing on a separate branch of Rust Staging — a taste of the vehicle overhaul to come.

Meanwhile, horses had been producing way too much dung, leading players to hoard every horse on a server for dung farms — a cool idea, but rough on everyone else looking for a ride. Horses now produce far less dung, far less frequently, and they convert calories into it, meaning they need feeding over time before delivering the goods.

uMod Fundraiser Garage Door

Since January 2014, developers like Wulf and Calytic have poured time into Oxide and its modernized successor uMod — the modding frameworks behind thousands of servers' kits, gamemodes, events, custom skinning, and Discord integrations. This update added the uMod Fundraiser Garage Door skin, with proceeds going directly to the projects' development team.

Smaller Changes Worth Knowing

The changelist rounds things out with workshop editor upgrades (new detail layer parameters that allow removing "micronormals", plus a fuzz mask parameter), reduced memory allocations when updating your inventory and pressing buttons, improved server performance for fluid IO entities, better hair material shades, updated Hapis Island vending machines, and a long tail of fixes — building and anti-hack exploits, a CH47 event bug that dropped hackable crates at the same monument, instant-death zones in caves and Savas, and the SPAS-12's shell floating into shot during reloads. If you're curious how this era's workshop skins have fared on the market since, our skin tracker keeps tabs on them.