With the next update still a bit out, this week is looking heavy on experimentation, polish, and longer-term feature work. Hackweek projects are popping up across the commit list, the apartment complex monument continues to take shape, and a new set of Kevlar-style armor is starting to show up on AUX4.

Hackweek projects

Hackweek is a focused period of time where developers step away from their regular work to experiment, prototype, or build creative projects of their own choosing. It’s often used to explore new ideas, test out potential features, or improve tools and workflows, all without the usual roadmap constraints.

One very interesting hackweek project is Tier 1 healing.

Tier 1 healing
One of the more player-facing hackweek projects this week is focused on expanding early-game healing options. A new medical honey bandage is being prototyped, giving players another tier 1 recovery item beyond the usual cloth-based options. Recent commits show it already being tuned, with the stack size increased from 3 to 5 and a small healing-over-time effect added.

There’s also some natural resource work tied into this, with apple trees, apple spawns, and natural beehives being tested. Apples are now spawning and dropping correctly from trees, while tree prefab support has been expanded to allow multiple natural beehives to appear. It’s all still prototype work for now, but the general direction seems to be a more varied early-game healing loop built around scavenging natural resources like apples and honey.

In addition, there’s a ton of other hackweek projects in the works. Here is a summary of what we’re seeing this time around:

IO rewrite: A broader rewrite of Rust’s electrical / IO system. Early commits show generators, switches, lights, batteries, splitters, logic gates, memory cells, buttons, counters, and other components being converted or rebuilt under the new circuit system.
HQM collectable: A new high quality metal collectable is being tested as a rare jungle-only spawn. Not much is known yet, but it could add another reason to explore jungle areas if it makes it into the game.
Flotsam door: A new flotsam-themed door item is in early prototyping, with initial item setup and spawning now working. This looks like another ocean or scrap-themed deployable idea, though details are still light.
Illuminated pressure pad: A powered pressure pad skin is being tested which lights up when supplied with electricity, similar to the existing illuminated button skins. This appears to be more of a cosmetic / electrical skin concept for now.
Seagulls: Seagull assets and test scripts have been added, suggesting some early experimentation with new ambient wildlife. No word yet on whether these would be purely visual or have any gameplay function.
Voice moderation: A prototype voice moderation system is being tested which sends push-to-talk voice chat to an API in batches. The stated goal is to catch obvious racist voice chat rather than police normal in-game banter.
Advanced building planner: A prototype is combining the regular building planner and boat building planner into one tool, with swapping handled through a radial menu or context menu. It’s very early, but it could point toward cleaner building tool management.
Sound player entity: A new audio source entity is being prototyped with support for downloading and playing mp3, wav, and ogg files from a URL. This could be useful for custom content, server tools, or future interactive deployables if it continues.
CUI improvements: Several custom UI improvements are being tested, including tooltip support, multiline tooltips, CanvasGroup support, Mask support, slice scaling controls, and color tweening fixes. This is more modding and UI-framework focused, but could improve what community servers and internal tools can do.
Custom item descriptions: A prototype allows item descriptions to be changed, similar to custom item names or icons. Items with different custom descriptions are prevented from stacking, which would help avoid confusion.
Blueprint fragment spawners: Basic and advanced blueprint fragment pickup spawners have been added. It’s not clear if this is for future gameplay, testing, or custom server use, but it suggests experimentation with physical blueprint fragment pickups.
Parentable debug draw: Developer debug drawing tools are being expanded so drawn lines, arrows, spheres, capsules, text, and boxes can be parented to entities. This is mainly a dev tool improvement, but it helps with debugging moving objects and gameplay systems.
Creative mode UI: A small creative mode HUD indicator is being tested, along with debug commands to show, hide, or force-disable the overlay for media capture. This seems mostly focused on internal tools and cleaner creative/debug workflows.
Fuse icon cleanup: The fuse icon has been brightened so it no longer appears as a black square. Small change, but a nice example of quick hackweek polish.
Trading cards shader: There’s a small hackweek branch for trading card shader work, though the readable commits don’t give much detail yet. Worth keeping an eye on if more visual or collectible-related commits show up.

Player Model Progress

New player models have hit the AUX4 staging branch, giving players their first real look at their updated characters in-game. This is still very much a work in progress, and the early rollout has received some mixed reactions on social media as creators and players post screenshots of their new character models.

Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of work going into the broader player model and animation systems. That includes better handling for hair under hats, updated beard meshes, fixes for head and neck seams, improvements to ragdolls and corpses, and more setup for clothing pieces like BDU gear, ballistic armor, helmets, and leg armor. A good chunk of this appears to be about making wearables behave more consistently across different character models while reducing edge cases with hair, hats, and animations.

BDU (Kevlar) Armor

A new set of armor and clothing is also in the mix, with ballistic gear and BDU pieces now partially live on the AUX4 staging branch. This includes the Ballistic Helmet, Ballistic Vest, Ballistic Leg Armor, BDU Shirt, and BDU Pants. The ballistic pieces are also being referred to as Kevlar armor, which is a bit of a throwback to Rust’s legacy armor from the old days.

This is still very much a work in progress, so don’t expect everything to be final just yet. Recent commits point to ongoing setup for worldmodels, icons, LODs, item prefabs, and wearable cleanup, along with fixes for things like the ballistic vest item ID and BDU shirt body mesh. Still, it’s a notable first look at a new armor set making its way into testing.

*Photos by Mister Shelby

Apartment complex progress

Work continues on the upcoming apartment complex monument, with a good chunk of this week focused on turning the space from blockout into something more complete. Several apartment sections are being finalized, including work across buildings A through F, along with continued passes on the basement, corridors, entrances, lighting, collision, layers, and interior materials.

There’s also been a bunch of detail work going in around the surrounding space, with kiosks, benches, playground blockouts, decorative props, neon elements, LODs, and general prefab cleanup all seeing attention. It still looks like this one is in the construction and polish phase, but the amount of activity suggests the apartment complex is becoming a more fully realized monument.

Game Room DLC

Work continues on the upcoming Game Room DLC, with pool and darts both seeing some fresh activity this week. The pool table appears to be the bigger focus at the moment, with commits covering the deployable setup, physics simulation, cue ball setup, a full 15-ball triangle rack, wall collision, and client/server syncing so the table behaves properly in multiplayer.

Darts are also getting some cleanup, including fixes for third-person dart throwing, better checks for which player is currently at the board, and cleanup for thrown darts after a timer. It’s still all in development, but between pool and darts, the Game Room DLC is shaping up to be a more interactive set of deployables rather than just decorative items.

Fixes

Reinforced workbench upgrades have seen a balance tweak, with explosive resistance reduced from 0.5 to 0.2.
Several held item animation issues have been fixed, including bandage and syringe animations persisting when they shouldn’t, along with related sound issues after holstering.
Door controller wiring has seen a fix, along with additional electrical cleanup around boat wire isolation and computer IO behavior.
IO wires have been moved over to a different shader to fix rendering issues where wires could appear transparent.
Spectator mode received a fix for incorrect mounted rotation / position overrides, along with a separate spectate map fix.
Deployable snapping fixes were merged into main.
A fix was merged for throwable aim getting stuck.
Electric furnace fixes include gibs cleanup and a temporary fix for electric furnace skin rendering in Twitch Drops.
A deep sea vending machine leak fix was merged.
Console autocomplete received another fix.
Heavily formatted player names should now display more reliably in chat and UI panels.
The charm picker has been fixed when skins_access is set to 1.
The fuse icon has been brightened so it no longer appears as a black square.
NVIDIA Reflex support detection has been adjusted to use the DLSS support check, as the previous Reflex check could return null even on supported hardware.
Shadow caching has been added back to the experimental options menu, with fixes for spot lights not rendering correctly when shadow caching is enabled.
AI navmesh fixes include old animals no longer always fleeing, along with some cleanup to reduce navmesh-related warnings when AI spawn.
Demo and cinematic fixes include item pooling cleanup when scrubbing demos, particle cinematic recycling fixes, shot dubbing improvements, and mortar demo animation cleanup.
Backend fixes and optimizations include SetFlag network update improvements, tick interpolator cache fixes, UI HUD optimizations, server warning fixes, and hot reload cleanup.

Other stuff

Mortar work continues, with placement feedback now using the target normal so invalid terrain or angle placement should show the correct error toast.
Terrain hole rendering saw more behind-the-scenes work, including editor tools, foliage hole handling, probe / cubemap fixes, and changes to rendering order.
Render pipeline testing continues, with work on refraction, render pipeline switching behavior, and keeping player censorship functional across both the current and newer render pipelines.
Rust Relay server work saw more networking tweaks, including packet de-duping adjustments.
Train and locomotive cinematic tools received updates, including console commands to control locomotives and timeline support for train control.
Shot dubbing and demo tools saw improvements, including per-axis pan / tilt / roll override tracks, depth of field recording fixes, and cleaner labeling for position tracks.
A new M16A2 branch has appeared, with commits mentioning a gamemesh update and work-in-progress textures. Not much more to go on yet, but that’s one to keep an eye on.
Early setup has started for the 2026 charity plushie.
Industrial DLC polish continues, including industrial garage door collider updates and industrial torch animation / prefab work.
A vehicle-related branch showed up with a commit mentioning a car and glass being added, though there isn’t enough detail yet to say much more.
Unity upgrade work continues, including movement toward Unity 6.3.15f1 and some legacy input code being updated to use the newer input system.
Build and tooling cleanup continues across FPBuild, analyzer updates, mismatched serialized property detection, and general automated build fixes.