What's New in Rust's "Crafting Update" Update

The Crafting Update landed in March 2025 and was one of the densest patches Rust had seen in a while — a genuine feast, in every sense. Cooking got its own workbench and a pile of new recipes, farming expanded into chickens and bees, armor gained a socket system, and behind the scenes Facepunch shipped a mountain of anticheat and server-performance work, plus the controversial debut of Premium Servers.

Cooking: Workbench, Pies, Bread and Spoilage

The new Cooking Workbench is a deployable for cooking up new food recipes — mixing table recipes can be crafted there too. Many of the items it unlocks carry stat and modifier bonuses, and cooking food now shows a visual model on all cooking deployables and cooks in real time.

The stars of the menu are the pies — eight new cookable varieties per the changelist, each with a unique stat or modifier bonus. (As Facepunch put it: hopefully Shadowfrax is finally satisfied.) Alongside them came Bread, baked from the new Wheat crop that players can collect in the wild and grow themselves.

Balancing out the bounty: food spoiling. Meat-based items now spoil over time — raw meat after 6 hours, cooked meat after 24. Cooking resets the timer, and a powered Fridge pauses it entirely (yes, the fridge now requires power). Anything spoilable shows a countdown on its item panel, plus an icon when it's safely refrigerated. Rounding out the consumables, new cooling and warming teas offer protection against Rust's harsher environmental conditions, and a new Harvesting Tea joined the roster.

Chickens, Bees and Flowers

The Chicken Coop lets you hatch and raise your own flock. Wild chickens have a chance to drop an egg every minute while a player is nearby; insert one into your coop, hit "Hatch", and you're a poultry farmer. Each chicken tracks four stats — Hunger, Thirst, Love and Sunlight. Food and water come from the coop's item slots, Love means the occasional pat on the head, and Sunlight requires the coop to actually see the sun. Meet those needs and chickens gain health and periodically lay eggs; neglect them and they slowly decline and die.

Bees arrived as both an industry and a weapon:

• Natural beehives can spawn on Oak Trees. Break one and the bees come for you — counter them with a Hazmat Suit, by dousing yourself in water, or with a Flamethrower, Torch or other fire source. The Honeycomb you collect yields Honey, useful in cooking recipes, edible on its own, and sellable at Bandit Camp for scrap.
• The player-placed Beehive produces Honeycomb from a Beehive Nucleus (which has a chance to spawn when creating honey). Each Nucleus levels up from Grade 3 to Grade 1 — Grade 1 nets the most Honeycomb over time. Hives care about being outside, humidity, and temperature: give them open-air walls, shelter them from rain (or keep a fire nearby), and build in temperate areas or use heaters. And wear your hazmat when harvesting.
• The Bee Grenade creates swarms on demand — a thrown swarm slowly spawns up to 3 smaller swarms that attack players in the radius, behaving just like natural hive swarms.

For the gentler gardener, roses, orchids and sunflowers now grow in the wild and can be picked and replanted at home — purely cosmetic, not used in crafting — alongside a new Plant Pot. Farms also got the Triangle Planter, fitting triangle foundations and floors with 4 seed slots and the same 3000 max soil saturation as the small planter. A matching Railroad version unlocks for Frontier DLC owners, and both Railroad planters became proper skins — Spray Can compatible and out of the standalone crafting list. Frontier pack owners also automatically received a new Frontier Triangle Planter skin to match the November 2023 decor pack.

Engineering Workbench and the Hopper

The new Engineering Workbench is a dedicated tech tree for water, electricity and industrial systems, unlocking at Workbench Level 1 with basic circuits, water management and industrial setups, then scaling up to advanced components for automated factories, efficient grids and complex plumbing.

The Hopper is a new powered attachment for the Large Wood Box or Storage Barrels that sucks up dropped items in a small radius and deposits them in the box — and it doubles as a storage adaptor, so industrial pipes connect directly without an extra part. It gets better: kill a player or animal in range and the corpse is sucked up and harvested, with the meat, bones and animal fat deposited automatically; dropped backpacks get unpacked too. All of it requires line of sight — building blocks in the way will stop it.

Item Ownership and Armor Inserts

Hover over an item and you'll now see who crafted it and how it was made — enough to piece together the story of where each gun came from, or to brag that you stole someone's entire armory. Unlike the original XP-era version, this one is deliberately simple: only unstackable items carry ownership, there's a single owner per item, and ownership persists no matter how many hands it passes through.

More divisive was the new armor slots system: several pieces of player-crafted armor can now roll 0-3 slots, into which you place armor inserts (three craftable types at launch) for different bonuses, mixed and matched freely. Only player-crafted armor gets slots, the count is randomised at craft time, and a new Crafting Quality Potion improves your odds of more slots.

Quality of Life

• Drones: range doubled from 300m to 600m, HP doubled from 100 to 200.
• Wooden armor is cheaper to craft, and over 40 items had their crafting times reduced.
• All meat models were replaced and many icons updated — meat's back on the menu.
• Plant genetic info can now be hidden when looking at plants.
• Neon sign power usage was halved.
• Horses got a mini-rework via the changelist: a 1-minute speed boost from apples, a 2-minute digestion (poop) boost from bread, faster turning (hold CTRL for even faster turns), and quicker acceleration to max speed while holding Shift.

Anticheat: Server Occlusion and Premium Servers

The player server occlusion system — which hides players the server knows you can't see, gutting wallhack/ESP cheats — completed its initial rollout to official servers, with the major issues found along the way resolved. Facepunch now calls it functional and stable, with upcoming improvements including rocks and cliffs in the occlusion grid bake, a faster line-visibility algorithm, and (for server owners) grid caching to a file so startup takes a fraction of a second instead of minutes. Future plans include enabling it on all servers by default, and extending culling to players within monuments and inside bases.

The bigger experiment: Premium Servers, launching Thursday, March 13th. To see and join them, your Rust Steam inventory must be worth $15 or more — counting Permanent Store items like building skins, decor packs and hazmat skins plus any tradable Rust items, but not standalone DLC like Instruments or Sunburn (for now). Facepunch originally floated a $20 threshold but settled on $15 after analysing millions of accounts, balancing accessibility against cheat deterrence. Premium servers rank higher in listings, and server owners opt in with the server.premium convar. Facepunch was frank that this won't stop every cheater — it's friction against disposable cheat accounts, explicitly labelled an experiment.

Performance: A Very Deep Engine Pass

This patch carried an unusually large amount of under-the-hood work:

• Train tunnels moved up closer to the surface, shortening elevators, staircases and rail transitions between the worlds — with underwater terrain raised where tunnels run shallow. A big world-gen change, so Facepunch asked players to report any tunnels poking through terrain with seed and position.
• Networking: an optimization reduced the data saved to ProtoBuf, significantly cutting server bandwidth and improving quality for players on weak connections.
• Build privilege checks were a hidden hotspot — entering network range of a base with 20 auto turrets triggered a separate privilege check per turret, up to 50ms of processing just to decide what to send. With minimum gaps between checks and smarter deferral (RF codes now sent when you open the UI panel rather than on network entry), one test base dropped from 50ms to several milliseconds.
• Physics: terrain-hole checks (cave entrances, tunnels) were replaced with an almost-free check in the vast majority of cases, and trigger collider changes should massively reduce physics tick impact — the latter initially disabled by default, toggleable via triggerbase.useexcludelayers.
• Server Profiler gained proper memory tracking (allocation type, size and method; per-thread graphs and allocation tracks), validated Linux support (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Debian 12 onwards, or anything with GlibC 2.14+), and survived public testing on 500+ population servers without performance degradation when idle in the background.
• That profiler work immediately paid off: a community server's "memory leak" turned out to be the message-decryption thread allocating about 10 MB/second thanks to a gotcha in Mono's ConcurrentQueue (now fixed); analytics formatting was found generating 15,605 allocations (~1 MB of garbage) on a 110-player official server and was cleaned up; and the TextTable utility was rewritten — a 200-player server.playerlistpos call that took 5ms and 2,700 allocations now handles 300 players in 0.8ms with just 18 allocations.
• Longer-term, player processing is being redesigned into ECS-style batches (compact arrays, parallel physics queries, Burst jobs) — prototype numbers already showed where the wins will come from.
• CopyPaste now stores pastes on your client instead of the server, making it far easier to move bases between servers, load them in the editor, and share among admins.

Everything Else

The graphics menu was overhauled with new preset quality levels and newly exposed options (no performance change — it just escapes Unity's built-in quality settings). The Discord integration introduced last month — view, chat, invite and add friends without alt-tabbing — kept improving, with Steam/Discord friend syncing right from the main menu. The changelist beyond that is enormous: overhauled explosions, a chicken model upgrade with new animations, persistent console command history, junkpile and vending fixes, a memory leak fix in the RCON/Rust+ websocket system, and dozens more. Fittingly for a patch this food-obsessed, the era's cosmetics leaned into the theme too — the Pie Furnace, Neon Honey Box and Frog Fridge among them — all of which you can follow on our skin tracker.