What's New in Rust's "Eye In The Sky" Update

Eye In The Sky shipped in March 2023 and it's the update that made the Computer Station genuinely worth building around. Between player-piloted drones, a camera you can actually aim, auto turrets you can take manual control of, and RF-detonated C4, the whole patch is about acting on the world from somewhere other than where your body is standing. On top of that, the Industrial system from the previous month got the round of quality-of-life work everyone was asking for.

The Drone

The Drone is a new player-controlled craftable deployable, flown from the Computer Station. It's easily damaged by impacts, so it's not a durable scouting tool, and it can be picked up and deployed just about anywhere - but it doesn't have great signal, so you need a Computer Station nearby to control it. It's unlocked from the tier 2 workbench tech tree.

RF-detonated C4

C4 can now be detonated remotely over RF. You select the item, click enable RF, and set a frequency; an RF Broadcaster or detonator on that same frequency then triggers it the moment the C4 picks up the signal.

There are two important caveats. C4 deployed outside your building privilege zone decays after 24 hours, and anyone can pick it up after a 5 second delay - so leaving charges lying around during a raid is a real risk. Used well it's either a base trap or a controlled demolition tool, and it made "bankrupt a clan" a substantially cheaper proposition.

PTZ Security Camera

The PTZ Security Camera is a new player-craftable CCTV system for real-time surveillance when paired with a Computer Station. It has pan, tilt and zoom capability and has to be placed on a ceiling. It's unlocked from the workbench level 2 tech tree. Alongside it, the power draw of all cameras dropped from 5 to 3.

Player-controlled auto turrets

Auto turrets can now be paired with a Computer Station. While the turret is switched off there's a new menu to set its ID, which you then add at the Computer Station. Once connected you take direct control - you can look around and shoot. Two limits worth knowing: the turret camera doesn't have a great view of distant objects, and a turret in peacekeeper mode can't be manually controlled.

CCTV in Rust+ (Alpha)

Viewing cameras in Rust+ had been one of the most requested features for a long time, and this update shipped a first pass at it. You can add cameras from a paired server and view them from your phone. It was explicitly released as an alpha - the team flagged it might be disabled or limited if it caused server stability problems, and server owners can control it through the camerarenderer set of convars.

The signal has a long way to travel, so image quality is low, but you should be able to make out most things in the world. All of the new controllable cameras work from Rust+ too. You need Rust+ native version 0.0.29 or later, visible in the Rust+ settings, and at the time of the devblog that version was still rolling out across the App Store and Google Play.

Industrial improvements

The Industrial Update from the previous month landed well - the devblog specifically called out bases stuffed to the brim with pipes - and this month was about smoothing the rough edges.

Filtering got the biggest rework. Filters can now require ANY, ALL, or NONE of the listed items, with Any being the default and matching the old behaviour. The number-based filters split into three fields per item:

• Maximum - unchanged; stops moving items if there's more than the given amount in the output container.
• Minimum - only moves if you have more than the supplied amount in the input container. Set minimum to 40 wood with 50 wood in the container and 10 get moved.
• Buffer - the old minimum behaviour; moves items in fixed buffer sizes. Set Buffer to 40 wood with 50 in the container and 40 get moved. Handy for feeding the Industrial Crafter.

Min, Max and Buffer are only available in "Any" and "All" modes, not "None". A new UI visualisation shows which buffer transfers are currently in progress.

On placement, the minimum distance between pipe points is dramatically smaller for neater corners, there's a new green pipe colour, and soloing a connection with RMB on a plug now keeps the highlight even when you mouse over other entities. Holding SHIFT while placing a pipe makes it collide with deployables, so you can run pipes around boxes naturally.

The Industrial Crafter now has 4 blueprint slots, so you can queue multiple items without wiring conveyors into the blueprint slots (though those connections still work). It reads left to right and crafts the first blueprint it has the ingredients for. Industrial network size and depth limits both went from 16 to 32, allowing more complex builds without inserting filler containers - and daisy-chained boxes now fill in order rather than splitting items between them, though the splitter still splits stacks.

Vending machine loot

Destroyed vending machines used to drop nothing, a rule originally meant to encourage selling high-value items and discourage raiding player shops. Over the years players found ways to use them to despawn loot and as extra base armour. From this update, a destroyed vending machine drops 50% of the loot stored inside. This was easily the update's most divisive change - the devblog reaction was close to split - and Facepunch said they'd monitor and adjust it.

Multithreaded networking

After a month of testing and fixing, all known issues with multithreaded networking had been addressed. The rollout plan was deliberately cautious: continued testing on official servers for a few days, then a server update enabling it by default everywhere, with the client following the week after. Server owners who wanted to test early could add the -networkthread startup parameter.

The rest of the changelist

The full changelist is a couple of thousand characters of smaller work, much of it Industrial polish: electric furnace and storage adaptor performance, an extra storage adaptor slot on the front of small boxes, quieter industrial sounds, the crafter pulsing red when its output is full, and conveyors turning themselves back on when power returns if they were on when it was lost. Elsewhere, ziplines are much less likely to kill you on terrain collisions and use alternate paths more often, water catchers fill correctly again when connected to a full container, and an edge case where an underground train tunnel entrance wouldn't connect to its station was fixed.

Store skins

The month's store items were an unusually varied set, including the Lunar AR, the Toxic Wolf M249, the Scimitar Sword and the memorable Twig Large Box. Current market values for all of them are in our skin tracker.