12:00am EST - The October update is here, and with it, a ton of shifts to meta along with several other additions.

The update is expected at normal time (2pm EST / 7pm GMT). Our update stream goes live at 1pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day.

Blueprint Fragments

Blueprint Fragments are back in Rust, shaking up how players progress through the workbench tiers. These fragments can’t be crafted — they have to be found while exploring monuments and high-tier loot spots — and they’re required to build Workbench Tier 2 and Tier 3.

Basic Fragments
Basic fragments always spawn on blue and red keycard desks (but not green). They can also be found inside puzzle rooms tied to green, blue, and red cards across various monuments. Collect enough of them, and 20 basic fragments can be upgraded into a single advanced fragment.

Advanced Fragments
Advanced fragments are rarer and tied to high-end loot. You’ll find them guaranteed in hackable crates (2 per crate), as well as in elite crates, Military Tunnels, and Launch Site.

This system brings fragments back as a key progression step, making puzzle runs and monument loot more important than ever.

Workbench Crafting Costs

Workbenches have been rebalanced with new requirements and cheaper scrap costs. To craft them now:

Workbench Tier 2: 5 basic blueprint fragments + 250 scrap (down from 500).
Workbench Tier 3: 5 advanced blueprint fragments + 500 scrap (down from 1250).

It’s worth noting that blueprint fragments are only needed for crafting — you won’t need them to repair your workbenches.

Loot Changes

Loot distribution across monuments has seen another major reshuffle, with diesel spawns shifting, puzzle rooms getting refreshed, and no-build zones reworked. Here’s what’s new:

Excavator
Loot has been shuffled, the no-build zone expanded, and extra cover added to ore collection points to give players a bit more safety from roof campers.

Nuke Silo
The Nuke Silo is now a full Tier 3 red card puzzle, rewarding advanced blueprint fragments and 3 elite crates inside the Nuke room. Radtown puzzle rooms now also spawn military crates.

Airfield
All loot spawns have been moved, diesel shifted into the puzzle, and overall loot quantity boosted to match modern standards. A long-standing bug has also been fixed, restoring 5 loot spawns that have been missing since 2018.

Dome
Most diesel spawns are now behind puzzles, with Dome being the latest to follow this rule. A recycler has also been added to the new green card puzzle room.

Power Plant
Loot spawns have been shuffled, diesel now sits behind the puzzle, and the no-build area has been switched to a sphere. Radiation has been removed from rubble piles for now, as its application was inconsistent and poorly received.

Launch Site
Loot has been reshuffled, with spawns moved into areas that were rarely explored before.

Water Treatment Plant
Diesel spawns have been updated, and the puzzle switch repositioned to make it more obvious for players struggling to find it.

Military Tunnels
The no-build zone has been switched to a sphere, loot locations shuffled, and more variation added so crates don’t always spawn in the same spots. Elite loot remains the same. Puzzle resets should now ignore players above ground, preventing them from stalling spawns.

General Changes

Most diesel spawns across the map have been shifted behind puzzle rooms.
Minor loot shuffles and puzzle adjustments have hit Lighthouses, Sewer Branch, Supermarkets, Gas Stations, Harbors, and Radtowns.
No-build volumes have been expanded or modified at several monuments.
Sphere Tank and Radtowns now feature a basic green card puzzle.

All in all, these changes push loot deeper into puzzles and make monument runs more dynamic and rewarding.

Other Meta Shifts

All catapult ammo now fires further
Catapult reload time reduced by 3 seconds
Catapult crafting cost reduced by 1 gear and 1 rope
Battering ram sheet metal cost reduced by 2
Ballista crafting cost reduced by 1 gear
Propane explosive bomb damage slightly increased (deployed and thrown)
Bee bomb now requires 1 less bee grenade
Incendiary ballista bolt low grade fuel cost reduced by 10
Pitchfork bolt wood cost reduced by 100
Wooden barricade cover stack size reduced from 5 → 3
Wooden barricade cover HP reduced from 120 → 80
Jacket removed from rare armor loot pool
Bear now yields 20 meat instead of 19
Mission rewards improved with more/better loot
Small Oil Rig no longer spawns in Tier 0 zones
Hackable crate loot table updated with more variance, reduced slots, and dynamic loot container
New shore crates added — spawn rarely near Tier 0 beaches with low-level items

Crosshair Customization

Crosshairs can now be fully customized in Rust, giving players a wide range of options to fine-tune their reticle for both style and function.

Crosshair Styles
Choose between dot, plus, cross, and T-style (missing top arm). Some styles allow adjustments to gap, size, and line length.

Color Options
Pick from full RGB color selection or preset colors like white, red, green, and cyan.

Opacity & Thickness
Adjust overall transparency for visibility and set line thickness to your preference.

Dynamic Behavior
Enable a dynamic crosshair that expands while moving or shooting, or turn it off completely for a static reticle.

Center Gap
Fine-tune the spacing in the middle of your crosshair to suit precision shots.

Outline / Shadow
Toggle an outline or shadow to improve visibility against bright or dark backgrounds.

Settings Integration
All crosshair options are integrated directly into the settings menu, with buttons to import, export, or reset your crosshair via new popup dialogs.

This system adds a long-requested layer of personalization, letting players craft a crosshair that fits their exact playstyle.

Bike Hopping

Bicycles are now a whole lot more fun thanks to the addition of bunny hopping. By right-clicking, you can launch your bike into a jump — but there are some rules. You can only hop once every three seconds, only while grounded, not when waterlogged, and you’ll need at least 10% sprint to pull it off. The jump height scales with your speed and remaining sprint, and each hop costs 10% sprint to use. It’s a slick new way to clear obstacles, gain style points, or just mess around with some airtime while pedaling around the map.

Drone Dropping

Player-controlled drones just got a big upgrade with today’s update, adding new functionality and risks to using them.

Drones now feature a single-item storage slot that can be remotely dropped mid-flight.
SAM sites will target player-controlled drones, making air deliveries more dangerous.
Autoturrets will fire on non-authed, player-owned drones, while ignoring marketplace drones.
The drone camera view has been improved, letting you look further down (from 60° to 80°).

With these changes, drones are no longer just scouting tools — they can now deliver items across the map, but at the cost of being vulnerable to air defenses.

Turret Fixes

Turret interference has been reworked to address the long-standing issue of turrets placed outside a base disabling ones inside. The new system is more efficient and less exploitable.

System Changes

Turrets within 40m are now cached instead of constantly running physics queries.
Interference logic has been rewritten to remove queues and recursion.
A turret can only overload itself, never forcing recalculations on neighbors.
When a turret turns on, if it would push a nearby one over the limit, it overloads itself instead.
When a turret turns off, nearby overloaded turrets will check if they can reactivate.

Overload Priority
The tricky part was deciding which overloaded turret should turn back on first. Initially this was based on the order they were powered, but that allowed abuse — stacking dozens of turrets so raiders had to wipe them all before any outside turrets came online. Now, priority goes to turrets with the fewest active neighbors, favoring FOBs and smaller setups over turret-heavy bases.

This should make turret interference more predictable and balanced, while preventing players from gaming the system with mass turret stacking.

Fixes

There are a ton of various fixes going live with the update today:

Fixed “Died to KillerName” showing with a random death reason when joining at the start of a wipe
Fixed sleeping players above ground being killed by train tunnel puzzle resets
Minor fixes to Workshop
Fixed client incorrectly showing 100 HP when using max HP tea
Adjusted Pookie Bear volumes to prevent stacking
Shadow cascades now set to a minimum of 2 to reduce light leaking
Various fixes to BasePlayer
Fixed monument notification sounds
Fixed HttpImage not working with extensionless URLs
Fixed RF broadcasters staying on after a server restart if saved while broadcasting
Fixed issues with the Arctic puzzle reset
Fixed other puzzle reset bugs (mostly tied to server restarts)
Fixed ent scale command to accept floats instead of only integers
Fixed scrolling bug in server browser
Fixed colliders and deploy volumes on test generator
Fixed chainsaw hit sounds not playing in first person
Fixed SAM sites not reloading after long inactivity
Fixed various hotbar food eating issues
Fixed log restarting each time the server restarted instead of appending
Fixed Christmas lights bugs
Fixed siege weapons getting stuck in pulling mode if the server restarted mid-pull

Other Stuff

Beds are now skinnable
HMLMG is now skinnable
New admin convar enable_marker_teleport lets admins teleport by right-clicking the map instead of placing a marker
Added analytics tracking for puzzle resets
Sprinkler optimizations
Console optimizations