As we move further into July, the developers continue making steady progress on several major features still in development. This week brings another round of work on player maintained monuments, the upcoming Game Room DLC, Satellite Crash, livestock systems, and plenty of smaller quality-of-life improvements.

Player maintained monuments

Work continues on the player maintained monuments system, with the developers expanding the mechanic across Power Plant, Airfield, Gas Station, Water Treatment, Dome, and Large Oil Rig.

The feature appears to revolve around players restoring and powering sections of existing monuments, with electrical grids, generators, fuse boxes, pumps, loot rooms, and other systems all tied together through a shared progression setup.

This week brought more Power Plant grid work, new visual power cables at Airfield, maintainable features at Gas Station, Water Treatment pipe setup, Oil Rig signage, and early Dome work. The developers also continued building out monument blockers, including blast doors, collapsed corridors, barrels, tables, and other debris players may need to clear before bringing everything back online.

Game Room DLC

The Game Room DLC saw another busy week, with pool, darts, bar stools, flooring, sprays, and the jukebox all getting more polish. Pool now has separate single-player and multiplayer options, clearer match controls, improved cue animations, and better handling for low frame rates, while darts received a long list of fixes covering scoring, placement, collisions, resets, and networking.

Elsewhere, the developers finished more work on the bar stools, added tic-tac-toe sprays, converted one of the themed wallpapers into flooring, and continued setting up the jukebox and shotgun trap skin. Several parts of the DLC were also merged into main, suggesting this one is getting closer to being ready for staging.

Satellite crash

The upcoming Satellite Crash event continues to take shape, with this week's commits focusing on making the encounter feel much more dynamic. The satellite's final descent has been extended from 8 to 20 seconds, giving players more time to watch it come screaming down before impact. Once it crashes, the impact will now clear nearby trees and vegetation, leaving behind a much more dramatic crash site.

The loot event itself also received a major upgrade. Instead of using existing crates, the crash now spawns one of three brand-new satellite crate variants, chosen at random. These crates remain inaccessible until the surrounding fire burns out, forcing players to either wait or fight over the area before claiming the loot. The developers also continued work on the targeting computer, including an optional requirement that the Power Plant electrical grid be restored before players can call in a crash, further tying the event into the new player maintained monument system.

Livestock

Livestock continues to make steady progress, with the developers beginning to build out the systems that will support multiple farm animals. Cows now use a new shared LivestockAnimal class, have improved patrol behaviors, updated walking states, and even break into a run if the player they're following gets too far ahead. Initial work also began on calves, suggesting herds may soon include younger animals as well.

Alongside the animal AI, the first dedicated fencing system is starting to take shape. The developers are working on snapping fences together, allowing new sections to connect directly to existing fence posts for much easier placement. While still very much a work in progress, it's another sign that Rust's farming overhaul is beginning to come together. There was even an early squirrel test branch spotted this week, though it's likely just being used to prototype additional animal behaviors rather than confirming squirrels as a new feature.

Underground train network

The underground train network overhaul continues to expand, with the developers building out what appears to be a much larger and more varied system of stations and tunnels. This week's work included additional station layouts, new inspection and storage rooms, HVAC areas, corridor connections, and more tunnel variations, along with dedicated test maps to help speed up development.

While it's still firmly in the greybox stage, the scale of the project is becoming much clearer. Rather than simply refreshing the existing underground network, it looks like the developers are redesigning large portions of it with new layouts and points of interest, potentially giving players a lot more reason to venture below the surface.

Workbench recycle bin

A brand-new quality of life feature also appeared this week in the form of a Workbench Recycle Bin upgrade. Instead of refunded ingredients spilling into your inventory every time you cancel a craft, the recycle bin provides its own dedicated 16-slot storage that automatically collects those returned materials.

The storage is take-only, meaning you can't use it as extra inventory space or manually add items to it, but it should make managing crafting refunds much cleaner—especially during long crafting sessions where your inventory is already packed. It's a small addition, but one that could end up saving players a surprising amount of inventory juggling.

Other stuff

Continued work on the experimental underground player basements feature, with the first greybox layouts now underway.
Sculptures received another major round of improvements, including a much smoother clay-like sculpting system and significant performance optimizations.
Animal fencing continues to evolve with snapping support, making it easier to connect new fence sections to existing posts.
The Snow Jacket is getting a buff, increasing both its cold and bite protection to give it a more useful role in Arctic biomes.
Spoiled produce will now stack to 20 instead of 10.
Players can now choose to display a single sleeping bag or bed as a compass marker for easier navigation.
Shields are getting a new option to stay strapped to your back instead of being held, complete with a dedicated toggle.
A dedicated snapping keybind has been added for deployable placement and wiring tools.
Vehicle icons can now be used as chat emojis, with improved emoji search and autocomplete.
Continued work on the M92, flare, smoke grenade, flashlight, salvaged hammer, and other weapon refreshes.
The Premium tab continues to expand, gaining a built-in Skin Viewer and FAQ page.
Skin Viewer now supports charity plushies, improved model rotation, random material variations, and additional cosmetic items.
The Founders Door progressed from a greybox into a fully modeled asset with textures, LODs, and destruction gibs.
The demo editor received more quality-of-life improvements, polishing its cinematic camera and timeline tools.
Continued optimization work on the new Rust Render Pipeline, including shader improvements, memory reductions, and additional rendering fixes.
Major backend work continues on multithreaded server saving, with hundreds of entity tests now passing as the developers move more systems off the main thread.
The main menu and F1 menu both received significant performance optimizations, dramatically reducing opening times and memory allocations.
Apartment Complex work focused mostly on polish, including analytics for room and shop usage, additional master key improvements, and various visual fixes.
Fixed Deep Sea scientists failing to spawn.
Alternate looting now handles clothing more intelligently when inventories are full.
The Steam inventory screen now fails more gracefully if Steam is unavailable.
Numerous UI, networking, collision, and automated testing fixes were merged into main.