Rust's "Surviving 12 Years" Update: 2025 Recap and 2026 Roadmap

Rust's servers are wiped, Santa's finished clearing out the bodies, and Facepunch is back at their desks after a couple of weeks off - which means it's time for the traditional first devblog of the year: a recap of everything Rust did in 2025, and a first look at what's landing in 2026. It's a lighter blog than usual, but there's a genuinely good year of numbers to go through, and the next big content update is only a month away.

A record year for Rust

Rust quietly passed its 12th anniversary in December, and by pretty much every measure 2025 was the game's biggest year yet:

• Highest-ever peak player count on Steam: 259,646 concurrent players
• Over 450,000,000 game sessions
• Over 5,800,000 unique players
• Over 700,000,000 hours played
• Over 37,000,000 Twitch Drops claimed
• 28,523 Workshop submissions - you can browse what the community's been making on our own Workshop tracker

For a 12-year-old game to still be growing year-over-year rather than settling into decline is rare, and Facepunch was upfront that they expect 2026 to be bigger again.

Everything Rust shipped in 2025

It was a genuinely packed year of monthly updates. The highlights, as Facepunch summarised them:

• Primitive - kicked the year off with a new game mode plus a load of new items and raiding methods built around it
• The Crafting Update - advanced cooking, farming (chickens and bees), new workbenches, and armor
• Premium Servers - a new server type built to cut down on cheating and improve fair, competitive play
• Jungle Update - one of the year's biggest, adding the jungle biome, climbable trees, tigers, crocodiles, new monuments, boomerangs, and blowpipes
• Friends with Benefits - a wave of quality-of-life work including the new party system and snappable deployables
• Meta Shift - blueprint fragments, custom crosshairs, and changes to monument puzzles as part of a wider progression rework
• Quality of Life - a dedicated pass of over 400 QOL changes
• Menu Overhauls - a sweeping redesign of the main menu, server browser, and item store

Facepunch's own framing for the year: not everything they ship is meant to become the new meta - a lot of it is just another way of reaching the same goal, adding depth rather than replacing what already works.

The fight against cheaters

Anticheat remains one of the biggest investments Facepunch makes in Rust, and 2025's numbers show both the scale of the problem and where the effort is landing:

• Over 338,000 total bans applied
• Over 296,000 permanent bans - up 27% year-over-year
• Over 42,000 temporary bans - down 26% year-over-year
• Over 16,000,000 cheat reports received - up 28% year-over-year

The average cheater is now removed from the game in under 7 hours of playtime, down from 10 hours at the start of the year. A few things drove that:

Premium Servers, launched in March, gate access behind a Rust Steam inventory worth $15 or more - including Permanent Store items like building skins, décor packs, and hazmat skins, not just tradable cosmetics. Facepunch says several attempts to game that requirement have all been successfully countered so far, retention on these servers has been strong, and they see no need to raise the $15 bar for now - if you want the cleanest experience Rust currently offers, that's it.

In May, server-side player culling was switched on by default across every server. It stops the server from ever networking players who are fully hidden behind terrain or rocks, which cuts off a lot of the value of ESP and aimbot cheats at the source rather than trying to detect them after the fact.

In April, Facepunch opened its HackerOne bug bounty program to the public, alongside a dedicated security page for reporting vulnerabilities and exploits. Over $300,000 has been paid out through the program to date.

More recently, Easy Anti-Cheat has been running additional efforts specifically aimed at recoil-script cheating, done in close collaboration with Epic's EAC team. Looking ahead, Facepunch is hiring more anticheat-dedicated staff for 2026 and says a new third-party anticheat layer is coming - details to follow once it's ready to talk about publicly.

Where the performance budget went

Performance work rarely makes headline patch notes - it's mostly small, unglamorous gains that quietly add up, and a fair amount of dead-end experimentation along the way. Facepunch has had a team dedicated purely to performance for a few years now, and 2025's two standout wins were:

• Load and server connection times cut by roughly 65%
• Significant reductions in both RAM and VRAM usage

Load times in particular had been a sore point for years - long, inconsistent waits, made worse by a crash or kick forcing a full reconnect. Facepunch was candid that it actively held the game back and that they knew it.

The tension they described is a familiar one for a sandbox this size: every new system adds some cost, and Rust's worst-case scenario isn't a tidy 1v1 - it's forty players raiding a mega-base next to the worst-performing monument on the map while five hundred people are connected to the server. Designing and optimising for that ceiling, rather than the average case, is what most of the underlying render pipeline and navmesh work planned for 2026 is aimed at. Facepunch is also keeping an eye on what the Rust Mobile team solves on their end, in case any of those fixes carry back over to PC.

The DLC team, explained

Facepunch used part of this blog to directly address a recurring community complaint: that a dedicated DLC team means Rust's core development is being starved to fund cosmetics. Their point was blunt - the DLC team was hired specifically for DLC work, not moved off regular Rust development, and roughly 95% of it runs separate from the core monthly update pipeline. If anything, they argue, having a focused team has taken pressure off other teams and let more free content ship, not less.

2025 kept up a steady rhythm of nearly one new in-house DLC item, pack, or skinnable every month, and Facepunch expects that pace to continue through 2026. They're also exploring what a battlepass-style system could look like - nothing is locked in, and Facepunch was clear it needs to feel "very Rust": fair, respectful, and good value, rather than a copy of what other games do. Expect more concrete details around the middle of 2026.

The skinning community isn't being sidelined in any of this - Facepunch reaffirmed plans to add one or two new skinnable items every month, working through the most-requested items first. To date, the community has been paid out over $32,701,869 through Rust's skin program. You can see how that money maps onto today's market on our own Skins Insights page, or browse live pricing across every marketplace on Market Index.

What's coming in 2026

Facepunch's theme for the year is consistency: guaranteed monthly updates on the first Thursday of every month, alongside the usual fixes, QOL work, and holiday events.

Rust Mobile is set for a global release this year, with early signs described as "very promising." Anyone wanting to try the next closed beta or learn more can sign up at rustmobile.com.

The next big one lands sooner than that, though - on February 5th, Facepunch is shipping the Naval Update, adding player-made boats capable of reaching the deep sea, new islands and monuments, and new AI encounters out on the water. Facepunch is calling it a massive update in its own right.

Beyond that, 2026's roadmap already includes:

• New monuments, including an apartment complex
• New player models and animations, aimed at unblocking deeper player customisation
• New animals - cows and sheep among them - alongside a proper animal breeding system
• A renewed look at older, less-popular systems to see what can be reworked or improved with everything Facepunch has learned since they first shipped

As in previous years, several months are deliberately left light on content in the internal roadmap. Facepunch frames these gaps as intentional slack - room to react to community feedback, revisit older systems, and polish recent additions rather than always chasing the next new thing.

Try the Naval Update early on Staging

If you don't want to wait until February 5th, the naval content is already playable on the Rust Staging branch, bugs, performance issues, and rough edges included. Facepunch is actively looking for testers to break things and report back - instructions on getting onto Staging are up at rust.facepunch.com/staging. If demand outgrows the current server capacity, more will be added.

Worth noting for anyone testing: Facepunch says every bug report on Staging is read by a human, and they're looking at a reward system later this year for good, accurate reports - one more reason to file something properly instead of just venting in chat.

Want to track where 2025's new items and skins are trading right now? Check current pricing across every major marketplace on the wiki's full skins browser, see what's in the current rotation on the item store page, or track your own collection's value on My Inventory.