12:00am EST - With the big Naval Update just one week away, the team is cranking on finishing touches for this game changing patch.

Naval Update Polish

The Naval Update is landing next week, and the final stretch has been all about polish, stability, and performance. Recent changes focus on tightening up boat mechanics, vehicle interactions, and spawning behavior, ensuring things like docks, fuel barrels, and rowboats behave as expected. There’s also been continued refinement to boat building and editing, with reduced overhead when exiting edit mode and a lot of profiling work aimed at smoothing out performance and responsiveness.

On the combat and AI side, turret behavior and NPC logic have seen meaningful tuning. Turrets now behave more predictably, with better handling, cleaner animations, and adjusted accuracy for AI use. Naval AI has also received upgrades to pathfinding and flanking behavior, making encounters at sea feel more intentional and less janky. Overall, it’s a classic pre-release cleanup pass as the team gets everything locked in for launch. Our article next week will cover everything you need to know about the Naval Update.

Artist Pack DLC

The Artist Pack DLC is shaping up to launch alongside the February 5th update and is focused heavily on creative expression and visual customization. So far, the DLC includes a paintball gun, paintball overalls, an art easel deployable, multiple new canvases in various sizes, paintable picture frames (including light-up variants), a paintable window, and a paintable reactive target. The overall goal appears to be giving players more tools to create, decorate, and experiment visually—both for fun and utility.

This week’s work has largely been about refinement and polish. The team added new paintball overalls and improved how their colors sync with paintball effects, while the paintball gun itself received viewmodel tweaks, ammo icon updates, and better impact visuals. Damage behavior has also been adjusted so paintballs do minimal damage by default, with increased damage only applying when targets are wearing the overalls. On the creative side, paintable targets and canvases saw improvements, alongside a round of bug fixes to address color updates and deployable quirks. Overall, it’s steady progress toward making the DLC feel cohesive and ready for release.

Homebrew 4 Incoming

Homebrew 4 is the next round of Rust Twitch Drops, kicking off alongside the February 5 update and running through February 15. This event brings a fresh batch of cosmetics to earn just by watching participating Rust streamers on Twitch, including 10 exclusive drops and 4 general drops available across the event. As with previous Homebrew events, it’s a solid mix of creator-themed skins and limited-time rewards, giving players plenty of incentive to tune in, link their accounts, and pad out their inventories before the drops rotate out.

Other Stuff

Gameplay and content in progress

The roof stability fix has been rolled back and hardcoded off to prevent a rare but severe performance issue, reverting to the older, safer behavior while further fixes are worked on
New mortar prototype in development
Ongoing work on the Boxes DLC, adding themed skins for different storage types
Continued work on the Crypt stone building skin
Added support for parachutes to be placed in the hotbar
Updated blockout work for the UZI 9mm

UI, animation, and presentation

Console UI improvements continue
Updated snowmobile driving animations for better realism
Fixed and properly set up boogie board animations
Added new animations for three-player poker
Updated character skins for the chicken costume and grass underwear
Regraded ambient lighting to improve visibility in darker areas
Changed lightbulb emissive material to opaque
Reverted the M249 icon and added a single turret icon

Workshop and skins

BBQ is now set up as a skinnable item in the workshop
Added a rigged salvaged hammer viewmodel mesh

Technical and backend improvements

Server profiling improvements
Continued testing and iteration on monument blockers
Merged multiple prefab updates with required manual conflict resolution
Added safer error handling around setup effects
Added logging to help diagnose mission objective index issues

Fixes and logic adjustments

Fixed rug deployability on windows
Adjusted mission reward logic to check available inventory space on completion
Mission rewards now respect item stack sizes and required slot calculations
Fixed radar rotation and corrected paint tint behavior
Improved saving behavior for child storage containers in workcarts
Adjusted map settings related to workcart storage
Added improved handling for decal layer transmission in the standard shader