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

July 2022 was the settling-in patch after the Combat Update. Facepunch had spent a month watching how the new gunplay actually played out and came back with a round of tuning, plus a meaningful loading optimisation, Steam-backed chat filtering, and a proper moderation panel for player-created content.

Combat balance

Facepunch said they were broadly happy with where Rust's gunplay had landed after the Combat Update, and the changes here were targeted rather than sweeping.

• F1 grenade - fuse time cut by 0.5 seconds, down to 2.5s. Grenades had been too easy to simply walk away from. Cooking grenades was raised as a possible future option but rejected for now as too cheap a tactic.
• M39 - repositioned to feel like a straightforwardly superior SAR, with an increased fire rate and modified recoil.
• Shotgun slugs - reduced damage falloff, so slugs become a viable choice at mid range instead of being almost entirely ignored.

The most-felt fix was a long-standing viewmodel bug: the first shot shortly after aiming down sights would play the non-ADS animation, throwing the viewmodel across your screen at the worst possible moment. With that gone, weapons feel considerably snappier.

The devblog also recapped balance changes shipped earlier in the month: an improved hide blood option and a new hurt flash disable option, a slightly more aggressive M249, more aggressive HMLMG recoil paired with lower durability and a higher crafting cost, scopes now increasing weapon recoil, reduced blur and blood effects, and the accuracy bonus removed from the silencer.

Loading optimisation

Loading into servers got noticeably quicker. Asset loading is now queued so files keep streaming off disk while the main thread spawns world prefabs, which puts more of your hardware to work at once. The same change applies to the dedicated server, so operators should see faster boot times too.

The slow "Asset Warmup" phase now starts in the background as soon as you reach the main menu, and connecting to a server no longer waits for it to finish - it just keeps running.

There's also a memory-based improvement: on machines with 24GB of RAM or more, monument assets are no longer unloaded, which makes switching between servers much faster since they're already in memory. Setting global.forceUnloadBundles to true overrides that and always unloads them.

Gunshot sounds

The remaining new gunshot sounds were finished this month, including new silenced shots for every gun. Another tuning pass was expected within a month or so to address feedback, but deliberately delayed to let people's ears adjust first.

Elsewhere in audio, interaction sounds were added for small loot containers - food, medical, tech, ammunition and so on - and generic loot crates were updated to use existing interaction sounds. Missing sounds for smoke grenades, supply signals and the combat knife deploy were fixed.

UGC admin panel and content reporting

Server admins got a new section in the Server Admin tab listing all User Generated Content on the server - painted signs, cassette audio, carvable pumpkins, neon signs and pattern boomers. Admins can view or listen to the content, see who created it, and delete it directly from the UI without travelling to the entity. A search field lets you pull up everything a specific player has made.

Reporting was improved alongside it with a dedicated Offensive Content report type that attaches a screenshot so admins have something to act on. Two convars support this: reportsServerEndpoint sends player reports from your server to an HTTP address as JSON, and printReportsToConsole logs reports to the server log.

Chat filtering

Rust now uses Steam's chat filtering to obscure strong language and slurs in chat and other player-shared text. Filtering is applied client-side and is customised through Steam account preferences rather than in Rust itself - if you'd never touched those settings, filtering was already on for you.

Quality of life

• Spray Can crosshair - a crosshair appears when free spraying, and the default number of sprays per player went from 25 to 40
• Contacts screen - you can now mute, unmute and report players directly from it
• Placement rotation - the Mailbox, BBQ, Medium Battery and Windmill now face toward the player by default, while the kayak faces away
• Return to sender - photos can be inserted into mailboxes
• Jackhammer - now hits the hotspot every time without needing tap firing
• Updated player inventory idle animation
• Torches despawn after 30 seconds, and dropped backpacks despawn after 30 seconds for rocks and torches
• Streamer mode hides the map name in the server browser, and servers running a custom map now only show "Custom Map" rather than its name
• You can connect to domain.com without a port on the end

Hapis Island

Petur added three new monuments to Hapis - two in the desert and one in the northern arctic - along with a batch of fixes. Mountain goat ore nodes were mostly repaired, berry bushes that weren't spawning now do, roadside spawns are no longer overly sparse, and several existing monuments were updated to match where they currently stand on the procedural map.

Tools for creators and modders

Debug camera additions brought physical camera properties, letting content creators pick from common camera sensor types and set a focal length in real-world terms. The commands are client.camphysical to toggle it, client.camphysicalsensortypes to list sensor types with their ID numbers, client.camphysicalsensor to select one, and client.camphysicalfocallength to set focal length in mm. A camera info overlay toggled with client.showcaminfo shows FOV, depth of field aperture and blur values, camera lock status, and sensor type and focal length when in physical mode. Camera zoom moved off the hardcoded Z/C/Y keys onto debugcamera_zoomin and debugcamera_zoomout binds, with debugcamera_raise and debugcamera_lower replacing hardcoded Q/E.

Map maker prefabs added over 60 tiled cube prefabs for the community, with materials including brick, wood, metal, concrete, plaster and cloth. Each cube can be scaled, rotated and positioned in a custom map scene while keeping its texture tiling local to the prefab.

Harmony QOL gave server owners harmony.load <name> and harmony.unload <name> to load, reload and unload Harmony mods at runtime, so fixes can go out without a server restart.

Fixes

The changelist covers a long run of exploit closures and repairs: stealing attachments out of shop fronts, keeping a shopfront standing by breaking its wall frame, keeping your last item in softcore, shooting through the armoured window collider, and an exploit around changing water quality. On the more ordinary side, horses now move properly with elevators, research tables no longer get stuck researching, flashlights and lasers stay on between equips, nodes and animals no longer take extra hits, and animal headshots play a hitmarker again.

Facepunch also acknowledged in the blog that they were investigating widespread performance issues affecting many users - problems also hitting third-party apps like Discord - which they believed had possibly been fixed that same day by an EAC update, with other performance areas still under active investigation.

On the cosmetic side, that month's Workshop skins included the Military Python, Pixel AR, Blacksmith's Hatchet and Aftermath Garage Door. Prices for all of them are tracked in our skin tracker.