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

Rust's March 2026 update, Shipshape, is exactly what its changelist title - "Naval Cleanup" - promises: a focused pass on fixing the rough edges left over from the naval update, rather than a big new feature drop. Boat building gets a long list of fixes, electricity and wallpaper finally work on boats, the Deep Sea gets rebalanced based on player feedback, and cannon combat gets a real reason to exist beyond just being loud. There's also a smaller but universally welcome change: 20 more minutes of daylight, every single day.

Extended daytime

Daytime is now around 20 minutes longer, with night left unchanged at roughly 10 minutes. It's a small number on paper, but it adds up over a full wipe cycle - more time to build, farm, and raid in daylight without touching how viable night tactics still are.

Boat building - the fixes list everyone wanted

This is the meat of the update. Boat building blocks can now be rotated and demolished at any time while in edit mode - the old 5-minute placement timer no longer applies to them. The tiny dive site buoys that used to bring a full-size boat to a dead stop have been fixed, so you can sail through them freely. The genuinely annoying bug where sails would randomly get destroyed - caused by rotating a sail after placement, which could nudge it off the edge of the boat and trip a groundwatch check the next time you picked something up nearby - is also fixed.

The Deploy & Edit steering wheel option now always shows up, even when your current location doesn't support it. Previously it would just disappear with no explanation; now you'll see an error toast telling you exactly why you can't use it there.

Beyond the fix list, boats can now carry electricity, industrial, and water IO items almost across the board. A handful are blocked outright for balance or performance reasons: Auto Turret, SAM Site, Windmill, CCTV Cameras, Seismic Sensor, Hanging Lights, and the Door Controller/Hopper combo - all subject to change later. Wallpaper now works on boats the same way it does in a normal base, and deployable snapping is supported too - hold a deployable and left-shift on a player boat, same as on land.

Sunken player-built boats are now destructible block by block, turning wrecks into something you can actually explore and loot instead of a dead end. Decay timing has also shifted based on feedback: the decay delay is doubled from 12 to 24 hours, but once decay starts, it now finishes twice as fast (12 hours instead of 18). Net effect: your boat survives longer while you're offline, but an actually-abandoned one clears out quicker. As a reminder, a boat only counts as "used" when it's received real steering wheel input.

Out at the Deep Sea specifically, every island now has a static Boat Building Station for repairs and modifications without sailing home, and it has a slight magnetic pull that helps dock your ship when it's powered down nearby.

Naval combat and the AI that guards it

Cannons now come with a real tactical cost for the boat on the receiving end: repeated hits apply a movement penalty, slowing a ship down to as little as 30% of its top speed. To balance that out, players mounted on cannons now have better protection while using them, since they're a much more exposed target than before. Aiming while a boat is moving also isn't free anymore - there's a moderate amount of ADS aim sway on player boats, scaled to the boat's speed, nudging fights toward cannons over someone trying to land AK shots from a bouncing deck.

Naval scientists got a proper AI pass. They can no longer see through smoke grenade cover - if it works out, the same occlusion tech is planned for bushes too. Buried in this change is a much older fix: hazmat has always given far less protection against scientists and turrets than it should have (5% instead of the intended 30%; fullmetal was 25% instead of 50%). That's now corrected for naval scientists specifically, since fixing turret damage across the board is a much bigger job for another time. Their combat feel changes too - lower miss chance but reduced per-hit damage, so a fight against them reads as a steady health drain instead of sudden chunks disappearing. They've also been given flashlights and lasersights (previously missing entirely), and they'll now reposition in response to gunfire from any direction, not just after being hit or spotting a flanker - sniping them from a distance is a lot less of a free lunch than it used to be.

Deep Sea rebalancing

Straight off the back of player feedback since the Deep Sea's release, several changes land this month: loot now respawns gradually over time instead of all at once, the initial fill on opening is cut to about 70% of its old amount, and which side of the map it opens on is now randomized each time. It no longer opens immediately after a server wipe, and RHIBs can no longer get you there - a proper boat is required. A notification sound now plays when it opens, and every one of these behaviors is configurable via new convars for server owners who want a different balance. Once you're out there, network range has also been increased from 300 to 640 metres, so ships are visible from much further away - something the Deep Sea's lower entity density can afford that the mainland can't.

New in the item store

This month's paid content is the Storage Box Pack, 16 uniquely labelled skins for the Large Wood Box covering Ammo, Armor, Charcoal, Clothing, Components, Explosives, Food, Guns, Meds, Metal, Ore, Scrap, Stone, Sulfur, Tools, and Wood - a genuinely useful set if you sort storage by category.

There's also a new tool for anyone who paints: the Painting Line Tool. Hold shift and drag while painting to draw a straight line, the modern equivalent of the old line tool, aimed at players doing detailed mural work rather than quick freehand sprays.

New skins released alongside Shipshape

This month's Workshop Skinnable is the Barbeque - the first skin slot for the BBQ deployable. A themed batch of new skins launched alongside the update, several leaning straight into the naval theme:

• Naval Camo Helmet
• Naval Camo Kilt
• Naval Camo Vest
• Sea Survival Bag
• Nuke Vibe BBQ
• HellCore Thompson
• Imprisoned Demon AR
• No Mercy SKS
• Hazma Sheet Metal Door
• Nuke Room Double Armored Door
• Sinotype Farm Garage Door
• Little Wheel Spinner

You can track live prices and price history for all of these - and see how they compare against the wider market - on the wiki's Market Index and Compare Skins tools.

Anticheat: TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot enforcement

Server owners can now opt in to requiring TPM and Secure Boot for players connecting to their server, which lets EAC work more effectively. Right now over 80% of players already have compatible TPM hardware, but just under 60% have Secure Boot actually enabled. A server enforcing both for everyone gets a Secure tag in the server browser, toggled via the server.useServerWideRequiredSystemConfig convar; a handful of official Facepunch servers are testing it for now. There's also a lighter per-player opt-in (server.usePerPlayerRequiredSystemConfig) that enforces the requirement without adding the server-wide tag. Facepunch's stated goal is to make this a global requirement eventually - if you're unsure whether your PC qualifies, it's worth checking sooner rather than later.

Performance and tech

A behind-the-scenes fix worth calling out: Rust's physics library previously capped out at roughly 64,000 colliders per broadphase cell (the map is split into a 16x16 grid of them), a limit that got a lot easier to hit once the world grew for the naval update. Running a custom version of PhysX removes that ceiling almost entirely - the new theoretical limit is around 4 billion colliders per cell, well past anything actual performance would allow anyway. On top of that, several of the most collider-heavy props on the map got trimmed directly: vine swinging trees use 6-9 fewer colliders each, and collectable plants (hemp, wheat, pumpkins, berries, and anything growing in a planter) no longer carry a server-side collider at all, since only the client needs it for interaction.

Mission server performance also got a detailed rework. The old system had the client guessing which missions were available and the server only checking validity when you actually tried to accept one, which could desync and boot you out of an NPC conversation with no explanation. That validation work is now fully server-side, running through a shared "work queue" so every player pulls from the same calculated state instead of each triggering their own. The most expensive part of that queue turned out to be generating valid random positions for missions - profiling on Facepunch's own EU staging server found it eating up to 6% of total frametime, with single position lookups taking 5-6ms because the search iterated over thousands of map areas every time. Precomputing those areas once at server startup, then pulling randomly from that cached set, dropped the cost of a single lookup to roughly 0.15-0.275ms and the queue's total frametime share to under 0.15% - also fixing the lag spikes players felt when talking to mission NPCs.

Elsewhere, the Graphics menu's Shadow Settings have been folded into the main Shadow Quality preset (Max Shadow Lights moved to the Rendering section instead, with its minimum raised to 1 to stop light-leaking), and video playback in the settings menu is measurably lighter on performance.

A heads-up for Windows players

A new Windows MIDI interface rolling out this month doesn't play well with Rust's own MIDI implementation, and can cause a steadily growing number of virtual MIDI devices that degrade client performance over time. If you've used MIDI instruments or a Stream Deck with Rust before and you're on a recent Windows update, Facepunch is recommending you disable midiconvar.enabled and global.processmidiinput for now while a proper fix is worked on.

Looking ahead

Facepunch also published a snapshot of the 2026 roadmap, kept updated at rust.facepunch.com/roadmap as the year's patches land. And for anyone who loves the game's art direction as much as its gameplay, The Art of Rust - a hardback art book covering 12 years of concept art, environment design, and visual development - shipped this month too.

Full patch notes

Features

• Increased day time
• Electricity, industrial and water IO items deployable on boats
• Wallpaper on player boats
• Added boat building stations to Deep Sea Islands
• Added some aim sway when aiming weapons on moving boats
• Painting Line Tool

Improvements

• Improved deep sea spawning performance
• Improved water junkpile spawning performance
• Increased network range in the deep sea (300m to 640m)
• Deep sea is now closed when the server just wiped
• Improved wanted posters performance
• Improved toast messages performance
• Improved wallpaper performance
• Improved player boat drag-by-angle calculations
• Improved visuals when shooting cannons
• Cannons now provide some protection to the player
• If a player cannot spawn on the default spawn beach they will now spawn at a Fishing Village or Harbor
• Planter interact options are now always visible but disabled
• Improved sail placement guide - now goes yellow if the sail being placed will block another
• Improved performance of UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 by fixing duplication of entity snapshots
• Improved performance of GamePhysics.TraceSpheres/TraceSpheresUnordered/VerifySpheres (scales better than serial counterparts around 32 queries)
• Sunken player boats are now destructible
• Cannon hits will now slow down boats
• Player boat decay delay increased; decay duration decreased
• Player boat blocks can be rotated or demolished at any time in edit mode - the timer has been removed
• Unified health display for player boats so behaviour is consistent across all parts
• More feedback for "Deploy & Edit" option when unavailable due to location
• Improved clarity for AND/OR/XOR IO switch icons
• Added particle and animator controls to skin workshop (currently BBQ only)
• Added painting menu rotation visualizer tool, with a toggle to disable it
• Reworked the painting reset-rotation button into a "flatten" button that preserves roll and panning
• Saving signs with "Hide Signs" enabled now shows a confirmation warning
• Added convar for painting autosave interval (client.autosavepaintinginterval)
• Added convar for brush sizes above 100 (paint.maxbrushsize)
• Optimised mission WorldPositionGenerator, improving UpdateMissionValidStateWorkQueue and NPC dialogue performance
• UpdateMissionValidStateWorkQueue now tracks last validation time per mission to avoid redundant revalidation
• Exposed missionValidStateWorkQueueCooldown and missionPerValidStateCooldown server vars
• Added resetmissions / resetmissions_all server commands
• Updated deploy animations for building planner and wallpaper tool
• Paintball overalls icon now reflects the currently applied colour
• Server runtime_profiling now gathers more stats from job queues

Fixed

• Fixed UIDeepSeaPortalMarker NRE
• Fixed demo.browser command not working since the new main menu
• Fixed Swedish language not selectable in the options menu
• Restored the warning popup when logging off in a safe zone
• Fixed being able to deploy signs on doors placed on boats
• Fixed demo recorder menu missing text
• Fixed rugs and bear rugs placeable on cargo and harbour bridge
• Fixed game tip never showing
• Fixed bulb string light rotation issue on ceilings and floors
• Fixed missing deploy interaction on string lights
• Fixed auto turrets not targeting players close to doors
• Fixed performance issues playing video in the settings menu
• Fixed gibs missing textures on some skinned deployables
• Fixed boats becoming bricked when sleeping in storm conditions
• Fixed player clipping issues with water junkpiles
• Fixed aim jitter reloading/firing cannons at high ping
• Improved memory usage of tropical and tutorial islands (130MB saved on client and server)
• Fixed sleeping players surviving safe zones after a server restart
• Fixed UI spacing issue snapshotting containers with fewer than 5 items
• Skinned entities now despawn on the same timer as their base item when dropped
• Fixed not being able to mount new AI on Oil Rigs to Trophies
• Fixed entity leak saving server state (persistent items no longer saved inside transient containers)
• Fixed ~40 cases of server pool leaks
• Fixed bot IDs being incorrectly reused when loading a save
• Fixed TriggerParent volumes sometimes sleeping incorrectly
• Fixed a thread race condition in GamePhysics.SortDeferred
• Fixed perfsnapshot/_stream crashing when run again mid-export
• Worked around perfsnapshot/_stream failures from corrupted memory stats
• Fixed C4 issues with Boat Building Stations
• Fixed getting stuck in the Boat Building Station umbrella
• Fixed player boats getting stuck on dive site buoys
• Fixed boat stairs having incorrect protection properties
• Fixed deployables on upside-down boats
• Fixed Boat Building Stations occasionally locking in cooldown mode during a save
• Fixed Boat Building Station and player boat ownerid not being set correctly
• Fixed sails rotated after placement sometimes being destroyed
• Fixed incorrect icon on the sail "Rotate" option
• Fixed being able to briefly edit a sinking boat
• Fixed immortal entities showing health information
• Fixed Large Oil Rig vent openings causing projectile invalids
• Fixed Large Oil Rig black barrel props rendering as yellow/red
• Fixed mannequins showing the wrong paintball overalls colour
• Fixed a null reference swapping quickly between paintball guns
• Paintball guns in turrets now deal extra damage to players wearing paintball overalls, and retain their last colour
• Paintball impact effects now ignore max spawn distance when instigated by the local player
• Server memory optimisations relating to projectiles
• UpdateMissionValidStateWorkQueue no longer validates tutorial missions
• Fixed mission map markers not showing when first opening the map
• Fixed wolves not counting toward the Wildlife Cull mission
• Gone Killing mission now fails if the deep sea closes
• Fixed Beep in the Deep mission getting stuck if a player disconnects after finding but not opening the chest
• Fixed Storage Monitor and Hopper draw distances being too far
• Fixed several items partially deployable inside walls
• Fixed missing currency symbols in the store
• Fixed owned items still showing at the top of the limited/featured store
• Fixed limited store countdown showing an incorrect refresh time
• Fixed a false "placing through walls" error on valid door placements
• Fixed BBQ and garage door gibs not being skinned
• Fixed performance issues with settings menu video tooltips

Removed

• Removed obsolete Facepunch.Pool APIs (GetList, FreeList, FreeListAndItems, ClearList, FreeMemoryStream)

Known Issues

• MIDI support appears to be broken on Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2

Want to see how the market's reacting to Shipshape's new skins in real time? Check the wiki's full skins browser, or track your own collection's value on My Inventory.