1:45pm EST - The update is live and devblog just hit! Have a great wipe!

1:00pm EST - Our update stream is live! twitch.tv/rustafied

12:00am EST – With last month’s Naval Update now out in the wild, this month has been all about iteration. The team has been tightening up boats, refining Deep Sea systems, and smoothing out edge cases that only show up once thousands of you start stress-testing everything at once.

On top of that, the Storage Box Pack is officially live, and there’s a hefty performance and backend polish pass touching rendering, physics, AI, and networking across the board.

The update is expected at normal time (2pm EST / 7pm GMT). Our update stream goes live at 1pm EST.

Naval Improvements

With the Naval Update going live last month, this patch focuses heavily on improvements, balance tweaks, and expanding what player boats can actually do.

Deployables now properly snap to player boats, with spacing adjusted to account for wave motion. A wide range of deployables and IO entities are now allowed on boats by default — including electricity, industrial, water, and wallpaper. Flame turrets and shotgun traps can now be placed on boats as well. Large planters are now deployable on boats, with a sun raycast fix ensuring plants actually grow properly while at sea. Boats also now fully respect building privilege (IPrivilege), HBHF sensors work correctly onboard, and IO entities disconnect cleanly if a boat sinks.

Combat has been tuned as well. Cannon hits now slow boats more noticeably, giving naval fights more weight. Mounted cannon users now receive 50% damage protection, and cannon handling has been polished — fixing aim jitter at high ping, reload camera loops, and a spinning handle caused by buoyancy. ADS aim sway now increases with boat velocity, making it harder to snipe from a moving vessel while stationary boats remain accurate. AI boat reversing has been improved to avoid awkward reverse spam, and small impacts (like dropped items) no longer trigger exaggerated boat physics sounds.

Static boat building stations have been added to tropical islands, complete with magnet-style alignment to make positioning smoother. Player boat drag calculations have been improved using spherecasts for more consistent results, with a forward drag display now visible in the boat building UI. Searchlights now work correctly on boats after a local/world space fix, and the floating city boat shopkeeper's vending machine — which was accidentally placed under the sea — has been fixed.

Player boat decay has been rebalanced to a 24-hour delay before decay begins, followed by a 12-hour decay window. New convars also allow boats to always be rotated or demolished in edit mode, making adjustments far less frustrating. Supply drops that land on player boats are now properly lootable, and divesites no longer spawn underneath boats.

Deep Sea Adjustments

The Deep Sea continues to get refinement passes. The entrance portal now randomizes its location after every deep sea wipe, and the cooldown between openings is now random (defaulting to 1.5–2.5 hours), helping keep the experience less predictable. A toast notification and sound now alert players when the deep sea opens. Initial loot fill starts around 70% and gradually refills over time (excluding elite crates and airdrops), creating a more dynamic loot economy. Loot on ghost ships was also fixed — it wasn't respawning at all, and one ghost ship variant was incorrectly spawning 100% of its crates on open.

RHIBs can no longer enter the Deep Sea, and static boat building stations have been added to tropical islands. Treasure missions no longer get stuck if a player disconnects mid-progress, and the patrol boat scientist kill mission now properly fails if the deep sea closes. LOD tuning allows deep sea objects like boats and sails to render further out without globally increasing rendering costs. A duplicate ocean simulation load was also removed, saving a significant chunk of memory.

Respawn UI improvements landed as well — sleeping bags in the deep sea now show a distinct icon and are sorted separately from mainland bags, with a visual separator between the two groups. Deep sea notifications now properly reach vehicle passengers, and a fix prevents boats from exploding when exiting the deep sea near the edge of the map.

Storage Box Pack

The Storage Box Pack is officially going live, bringing a full lineup of themed, purpose-built storage boxes to your base.

Each box is designed around a specific category, with bold industrial styling and built-in illuminated labels that clearly display what belongs inside. Categories include Food, Clothing, Charcoal, Armor, Ammo, Guns, Meds, Tools, Metal, Wood, Sulfur, and more — making large bases instantly cleaner and easier to manage at a glance.

Visually, the set leans into rugged, utilitarian design. Expect reinforced metal frames, vented grates, heavy latches, and color-coded finishes that make each box stand out without feeling out of place in a Rust base. From the deep greens of Meds to the bright red Tools case and the weathered industrial tones of resource crates, the pack gives players a consistent, cohesive storage system rather than a random collection of skins.

If you’re the type who labels every box with a sign anyway, this one’s going to feel right at home. Expect to see it on the item store closer to update.

Edit: The Storage Box Pack is live on the item store for $17.99

Performance & Rendering

A large chunk of this update is focused on performance and engine-level polish.

Various physics and spheres have been optimized for better scaling at lower sphere counts, backed by new unit and performance tests. The terrain renderer received upgrades including R16 heightmap support, GPU compute height updates, and improved min/max height culling.

Baked island meshes were heavily optimized, with massive collider reductions in some cases and an underwater dissolve pass to better match visuals. Indirect instancing received multiple fixes (including ghost objects and detaching doors), along with VRAM improvements on Mac. Duplicate ocean simulation loading was removed entirely, saving substantial memory.

Standard shader motion vectors have been disabled on model prefabs, with tooling added to track down any remaining stragglers. Lighting and darkness values have also been tuned as part of ongoing visual refinement.

This is one of those quieter patches where performance gains are doing a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes.

Server & Networking

Server browser work continues to evolve under the hood. Compression handling has been improved with a shared HttpClient implementation, and empty servers are now filtered server-side rather than client-side.

Region handling continues to be iterated on, with ping retained for now while sorting improvements are tested. The network protocol has been bumped due to item field cleanup work, making this a wipe-required update. A new server.randomize_seed convar has also been added for launch-time seed variation.

Additional groundwork for relay server functionality and packet handling has also landed.

Secure Boot / TPM

Coming with today’s update, servers now have the option to require TPM and Secure Boot using the server.useServerWideRequiredSystemConfig setting. Servers that enable this requirement will receive a special “Secure” tag in the server browser, indicating that the additional system protections are active.

The long-term plan is to move toward global enforcement, but for now the feature is rolling out as an optional server setting to encourage player adoption and ensure compatibility across systems. Facepunch has also published a guide to help players check for and enable TPM and Secure Boot if needed.

Other Stuff

Here’s a quick roundup of additional changes bundled into this update:

BBQ is now skinnable and first one hit the item store!
Daytime / nighttime changes (nights are darker by default)
Line drawing tool - hold shift to draw straight lines with direction lock, HUD indicator, preview method.
Artwork and paintings disappearing on some servers has been fixed. Entity IDs were being truncated in certain cases, causing saved artwork to vanish.
Voice chat duplication resolved — a bug that could cause a player's voice to play twice has been addressed.
High-speed boat dismounting no longer throws players off player-made boats when exiting at speed.
PT Boat and RHIB hand animations corrected so steering wheel and throttle movements display properly.
Dead plants can once again be cleared by pressing E, restoring normal farming cleanup behavior.
Fishing villages now include 16 fallback spawn points to prevent rare cases where no valid spawn location could be found.
Large Oil Rig vent antihack false positives fixed — shooting directly down from vents will no longer trigger Line of Sight violations.
Cargo Ship map marker layering corrected so it consistently appears beneath crate markers.
Coconut physics corrected so they no longer roll endlessly across terrain.
Animals and naval scientists that could become stuck fleeing or passive will now properly engage again.
Naval scientist laser sights now correctly activate during daytime.
Weather seed handling fixed so presets now apply the correct weather conditions.
Scientists armor calculation corrected (hazmat ~30%, full metal ~50%).
Spectate now orbits the last known position if a player disconnects.
LootContainer null inventory crash fixed.
Doors no longer incorrectly show “Placing through walls” when valid.
Train coupling audio double-play fixed.
Fluid splitter/combiner deploy regression resolved.
Multiple deployable collider cleanups and boat placement fixes.
Store UI fixes (currency fonts, countdown issues, owned item ordering, gallery arrows).
Added debug.showentities command to visualize invisible entities.
New fillcontainer and fillcontainer_radius commands for randomized container filling.
Editor map creator improvements and Scene View ddraw support.
Continued PlayerRigUpdate2 animation and pipeline tooling work.
Early blockout rigs for M16A2 and mortar; Molotov refresh work underway.
Twitch drop rendering updates and store media improvements.