What's New in Rust's "Spring Clean" Update

Rust's April 2026 update, Spring Clean, shipped on April 2nd and does exactly what the name suggests - it tidies up a long list of small annoyances (spam-placed watchtowers, junkpiles spawning on your sleeping bag, plants going stale after half a day) while quietly overhauling some of the game's oldest, ugliest performance bottlenecks under the hood. There's no headline weapon or new monument this time around. Instead you get two new building pieces, a genuinely useful tech tree rework, a fishing economy fix nobody asked for but everybody needed, and a terrain renderer rewrite that's been years in the making. Here's everything that changed.

Armoured Ladder Hatch and the Water Wheel

The two new items this month are both base-building pieces rather than anything combat-related. The Armoured Ladder Hatch is a direct top-tier upgrade to the existing Metal Ladder Hatch - same footprint, same Tier 3 unlock, but built for players who want their vertical access points to survive a raid rather than being the weak point in the wall. It comes in both square and triangle variants and slots straight into existing frames, so retrofitting an old base doesn't mean redesigning anything.

The Water Wheel is the more interesting addition: a passive power generator you place directly in a river, where it spins with the current and feeds your base's electrical grid with zero fuel or sun exposure required. Ocean placement works too, though output is less consistent as the tide changes and the flow direction shifts. It's also, deliberately, a giant hamster wheel - you can climb in and pedal it yourself, and yes, you can shove a handcuffed prisoner in there and make them generate your power for you.

Tech Tree Multi-Unlocking

This is the quality-of-life change that's going to save the most collective time across the playerbase. Previously, working your way down a tech tree branch meant clicking and unlocking every single node in sequence, one at a time. Now you can select any node further down the tree and the game will highlight the full path leading to it - hit unlock once, and every prerequisite along that path unlocks together in one animated sequence. The tree also now centers itself properly when you zoom in and out, which sounds minor until you remember how often the old version left you scrolling to find where you were.

Overfishing and Deep Sea Loot Changes

Fishing gets a real economy pass this month. If a spot gets fished too hard in too short a window, it becomes "overfished" - casting there will only pull up junk until the area has time to recover. This specifically targets AFK fishing bots and in-base fishing exploits; it has no effect on fish traps, since those were never the problem Facepunch was trying to solve. Server owners get ConVars to tune or fully disable the mechanic if their community doesn't want it.

As a counterweight, Deep Sea fishing got more rewarding: Herring and Anchovy - the two lowest-value catches - no longer show up in deep sea loot tables at all, concentrating what you pull up out there toward the better rewards.

Combat and Balance Adjustments

Shields quietly became the meta over the last month or so, and Facepunch's fix is a hitbox change rather than a damage nerf: an idle shield (not actively raised) now uses a smaller square hitbox, while an actively-raised shield keeps the larger one it's always had. The tradeoff between "defensive tool" and "reduced offensive capability" only applies while you're actually using it defensively now. A related bug that added extra recoil when shooting at a shield - meant to apply only to melee hits - was fixed at the same time.

Away from combat, plant ripeness windows were extended from 14 hours to 24, specifically to be less punishing for players who can't log in every single day to harvest. Growable flowers were already at 28 hours and are unaffected. Watchtowers can no longer be spam-placed next to each other, and the Chainsaw now reliably hits the X when farming trees instead of occasionally whiffing.

Interface and Accessibility

The F1 admin/console menu got a genuine top-to-bottom redesign this update - a full command list screen, server convar autocomplete for admins, Ctrl+Scrollwheel text and item resizing, a favourites tab and a recents tab for items and vehicles, player positions and team IDs on the server tab, and new Copy Pastes and Loadouts management tabs. AI-generated descriptions were also added for every console command that was previously missing one (clearly labeled "(Generated)" so nobody mistakes them for official documentation). The legacy F1 menu is still reachable via client.legacyconsoletoggle for now, but it's being phased out over the coming months.

Smaller but genuinely useful additions: coloured buttons (matching the existing coloured-wire convention, and the first UI element to support nested radial menus), a new Light Toggle Radial menu that lets you individually toggle multiple equipped light sources by holding the bind instead of flipping them all at once, an altimeter on the Hot Air Balloon positioned next to the windsock, and custom colour pickers for chat channel tags (Discord DMs, team chat, cards chat) in the accessibility settings.

Easter Store Items and Seasonal Content

Spring Clean landed right alongside the 2026 Easter Egg Hunt, running through April 16th - the usual progression of painted eggs upgrading to bronze, then silver, then gold, with an Easter Basket for instant egg pickup and Bunny Ears/Onesie granting "Egg Vision" to spot them faster. Seasonal store items this year include the Egg Hat, Bunny Hat, Egg Costume, Chicken Costume, and Horse Costume, alongside a new three-variant Bunny Costume and an Excavator-themed Rustigué Egg with its own mini scene and music track. Individual Easter-themed wallpapers for walls and floors are also available on the store for a limited time.

New Skins This Update

A fresh batch of Easter-themed skins landed alongside the update, all tied to the seasonal event and priced on the Steam Community Market like any other skin. Every one of these is tracked on the wiki with live pricing:

• Easter Wreath Wrap
• Egg Hunter Poncho
• Easter Bloom Helmet
• Easter Bloom Vest
• Easter Bloom Kilt
• Easter Chicks Box
• Royal Egg Furnace
• Trojan Egg Basket Grill
• Easter Bunny Sheet Metal Door
• Easter Madness Garage Door
• Hot Cross Buns Rock
• Egg Destroyer Jackhammer
• Carrot Chopper Salvaged Axe
• Carrot SKS
• Eggy AR

The Carrot Chopper Salvaged Axe is worth a specific mention: it's one of the first community skins available for the Salvaged Axe since that weapon received its full model, texture, and animation remake this same update - the tool had gone unchanged for 12 years before this refresh.

Under the Hood: Performance and Server Tech

This is the deepest performance-focused patch notes section Facepunch has published in a while, and most of it is invisible to players in the best possible way - servers just run better. The headline change is a new GPU-driven terrain renderer replacing Unity's built-in one, cutting drawcalls by roughly 1,000 and shadowcasters by around 550 in Facepunch's own test scene, for a measured ~0.65ms median CPU gain with GPU performance holding steady. Server dedicated builds also now strip most meshes that exist purely for client-side rendering, saving around 600MB of runtime memory and 2.7GB of disk space per server.

On the networking side, area-of-interest management moved from a square region around each player to a more efficient circular one, and different entity types (decor and dropped items vs. vehicles) now use different network ranges tuned to how far away they actually need to be visible. UsePlayerUpdateJobs is now defaulted to level 2 for every server following a smooth rollout since March's Shipshape update, and an experimental level 3 is available for server owners willing to test it - built on Facepunch's own fork of UniTask to cut down on C# async allocation overhead in antihack and network streaming code.

Two smaller but notable additions for the wider server ecosystem: a demo shot dubbing tool that lets cinematic editors layer camera position, FOV, and depth-of-field changes onto an already-recorded shot instead of nailing everything in one take, and RustRelay - a new opt-in system that forwards a server's outbound network packets to a websocket endpoint of the owner's choice, the first building block toward real-time and historical 3D server visualization tools outside the game client itself.

Facepunch also shared an update on last month's TPM 2.0 / Secure Boot server requirement: their 6-server secure pool is now seeing roughly 1-in-63 players flagged as cheaters, versus 1-in-42 on a regular server - a real but smaller improvement than premium servers saw at launch, which the team attributes to the smaller test pool and the fact only around 60% of players currently have both hardware features enabled.

Full Changelist

Features

• Armored Ladder Hatches
• New Water Wheel deployable
• Tech tree multi-unlocking
• Overfishing mechanic
• Demo shot dubbing system
• New F1 menu
• Coloured buttons
• Light toggle radial menu
• Hot air balloon altimeter

Improvements

• Removed unused mesh assets from the server build, saving memory and disk space
• Adjusted shield hitbox while idle vs. actively raised
• Improved network performance of player animation updates (bandwidth reduction)
• Mouse-over now shows names of missing car parts on empty engine UI slots
• Reduced physics overhead of player-to-AI-zone distance checks
• Salvaged Axe remake: new textures, model, and animations
• Medical syringe remake: new textures, model, and animations
• Skin viewer resolution now matches the graphics settings resolution
• Can now set the reset value of the IO counter
• Chat channel tag colours configurable in accessibility settings
• Watchtowers can no longer be spam-placed next to each other
• Added teleportboat2marker, teleportboatpos, and teleportboat2grid commands
• Chainsaw now always hits the X when farming trees
• Added convars to configure RCON / Rust+ connection limits
• Improved network groups with per-entity-type network ranges
• Entities now networked in a circle around players instead of a square
• Improved underground tunnel network culling
• Improved .map file compression
• Looting other players in safe zones now shows a popup instead of failing silently
• Added a mute button to the admin server tab
• AI-generated descriptions added for previously undocumented console commands
• Improved tech tree animations and sounds
• Console autocomplete now shows server commands for admins
• Improved dropped item clipping behaviour on boats
• Increased plant ripeness window from 14h to 24h
• Further WorldPositionGenerator optimisations, speeding up UpdateMissionValidStateWorkQueue
• Added ESPCanvas.ShowVoip convar to flag players using voice chat on the ESP canvas
• Added global.spectatebots convar to spectate bots spawned via "spawn player"
• Spectated players now show their SteamID alongside their display name in chat
• Added a UI→Misc setting for monument/world notification message and sound preferences (ui.worldnotifications)
• Added a visual indicator distinguishing deep sea vs. mainland sleeping bags on the death screen
• UsePlayerUpdateJobs now supports level 3 (UniTask + parallelized antihack/network streaming)
• Server no longer flushes the network queue per player when streaming the network grid
• InvokeHandler now preserves invoke scattering after a lag spike, maintaining load balancing
• Object Work Queues dynamically increase minimum capacity to reduce allocations
• Reduced building and shooting allocations
• Network.Group internals now lazily allocated, reducing memory use

Fixed

• Combat Knife and Sunken Combat Knife orientation on single weapon racks, and their projectile rotation axis
• Storage Box DLC Food Box missing its softcore mode corpse prefab
• Door Knocker deploy guide rotations
• Explosives attached to doors being able to travel through walls when the door opens
• Easter eggs in demos not bouncing
• Extra recoil when shooting a shield (now correctly melee-only)
• Square ladder hatches now sit flush with the floor
• Visual props disappearing on moving Train Cabooses and the Nexus ferry
• Rare error when wiping the deep sea due to Floating City planters
• Industrial Conveyors with a minimum filter still transferring items that passed other filters
• MIDI compatibility with the latest Windows update
• Possible fix for delayed voice chat during long sessions or high player counts
• Igniter working on 1 power instead of the required 2
• Wire tool invalidating a connection when clearing a wire with a pending wire (regression)
• Compression artifacts on item icons
• Battering ram being deployable onto boat building station netting
• Water junkpiles spawning too close to water monuments
• Junkpiles spawning on sleeping bags
• Clan map name tags now respect clannametagcolour
• Boat deployable sound loops not clearing properly
• Freshly wiped servers always starting in rain
• Travelling vendor server error
• Fog being too intense when viewing CCTV cameras
• Cassette error when spectating
• Shutter frames making sound when being painted
• Being unable to loot bags from destroyed containers in safe zones
• Exploit allowing players to teleport into boats
• Deep monument pits causing a black-screen effect on some maps
• Bunny ears and bunny onesie not appearing in conveyor filters
• Exploit allowing blueprint research inside the tutorial
• Shotgun traps and flame turrets working underwater on sunk boats
• Fog-of-war maps leaving small uncovered strips at map edges
• Oil rig flame smoke offset
• Only a single row of items loading in the main menu inventory until scrolling
• Rubberbanding after respawning in a camper van
• Getting kicked for RPC flooding when inspecting IO handles in certain situations
• First sleeping bag placed by a player missing its cooldown
• Pooling issue causing windows to occasionally show random textures/icons
• Being unable to purchase from boat shopkeepers on floating cities via vending-style interfaces
• Paintball turret pellets sometimes firing the wrong colour
• Deep sea players no longer notified of world events happening outside the deep sea
• Being unable to open chat while spectating in third person
• Vitals UI not updating while spectating in third person
• Spectating a disconnected player now keeps the camera at their last location
• ServerProfiler getting stuck in a loop on Linux servers (March hotfix)
• NRE in server occlusion logic when a player enters a null network group (March hotfix)
• Players not moving in demos on servers running UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2+
• Third-person camera not working correctly in demos

Removed

• Server convar global.legacymonumentnotifications
• Client convar ui.monumentnotificationtoasts

For the full live pricing on everything mentioned here - from the new Easter skins to the Salvaged Axe's remade look - head over to the skins wiki. And if you want to see exactly what your own inventory is worth right now, the My Inventory dashboard tracks your collection's value over time automatically.