It’s another busy week in Rust development, with work spread across a pretty wide range of upcoming features and backend improvements. The apartment complex monument continues to take shape, new player models are being polished on staging, Game Room DLC work is moving along, and a bunch of Hackweek prototypes are still popping up throughout the commits.

There’s also progress on the Industrial Decor Pack, several new weapons in development, auto turret workshop support, and a variety of fixes and optimizations behind the scenes. As always, not everything here is guaranteed for the next update, but there’s plenty in motion as we get closer to June.

Hackweek projects

Hackweek continues this week, with several projects either carrying over from last week or showing up more clearly in the commits now. As a reminder, Hackweek is a focused period where developers step away from their regular roadmap work to experiment, prototype, or build creative projects of their own choosing. Some of these ideas may turn into real features, some may change heavily, and some may never make it past the testing stage.

Tier 1 healing: This early-game healing prototype continues from last week’s work on medical honey bandages, apples, apple trees, and natural beehives. This week’s commits are lighter, but show some additional tuning being exposed for the system.
Different supply drops: A new supply drop variation system is being prototyped, with drop selection moved to a radial menu. Different drop types now have different smoke colors: blue for default, green for medical / food, orange for resources / building supplies, and yellow for weapons / ammo / tools. The cargo plane has also been set up to support these different supply drop types, though the actual loot tables still need to be added.
IO rewrite: The electrical system rewrite from last week is continuing with a pretty substantial optimization pass. The work includes circuit evaluation budgeting, fewer allocations, smarter dirty-component evaluation, reduced flag changes, feedback-loop protection, and light entity optimizations. Not the flashiest project on the list, but potentially a meaningful backend improvement for large electrical setups.
Illuminated buttons and pressure pads: The illuminated pressure pad work from last week has continued with polished textures, updated icons, LODs, gibs, and prefab updates. Illuminated buttons are also being improved so they light up both when power is received and when power is sent.
Item Compacter: A new deployable concept described as a mini recycler for your base. The idea is to give players somewhere to dump junk items instead of tossing them on the floor, returning very small amounts of resources like wood or metal fragments in the process.
Granular mortar UI: Mortar UI is getting some experimental aiming improvements, including a finer angle scale and degree min/max adjustments. This looks aimed at making mortar targeting a bit more precise and easier to read.
Lake crate: A lake-only loot crate prototype is in the works, with lake-only spawns and a tool crate loot pool. There’s also mention of a double spawn, so this may be testing a new reason for players to visit and contest lake areas.
Nameplate distance sizing: Nameplates are being tested with distance-based auto sizing. Pretty straightforward: improve readability by scaling nameplates more cleanly depending on how far away a player is.
Hanging ivy: A small environment-art project adding hanging ivy models, materials, textures, and three decorative plant variants. This could add some nice visual variety to overgrown areas, monuments, or future map dressing.
Map download fix: A practical reliability improvement for incomplete or cancelled map downloads. Instead of writing empty map files to disk and potentially breaking reconnects, maps now download as temporary files and only get renamed once complete.
Parentable debug draw: Developer debug drawing tools continue to improve. Last week added support for parenting debug shapes to entities, and this week adds identifiers so individual debug draw shapes or text can be cleared. Mostly a dev tool, but useful for testing moving objects and gameplay systems.
Other Hackweek projects: Also still on the radar from last week are the HQM collectable, flotsam door, seagulls, voice moderation, advanced building planner, sound player entity, CUI improvements, custom item descriptions, blueprint fragment spawners, creative mode UI, fuse icon cleanup, and trading cards shader work. There haven’t been major readable follow-up commits for all of those this round, but they remain part of the broader Hackweek spread we’ve seen over the last couple weeks.

Game Room DLC

Work on the Game Room DLC continues this week, with pool seeing the bulk of the action. The pool table is getting a full gameplay pass, including aiming lines, cue visibility, camera improvements, pocketing logic, physics cleanup, UI setup, and better network reconciliation. There’s also work on making the whole thing feel less janky in practice, with fixes for mountable floating, awkward dismount angles, players jumping after shots, and pool balls rolling forever after bouncing off walls.

Pool isn’t the only thing showing up under the Game Room branch either. Russian roulette continues to progress as an early prototype, and a new darts branch has appeared with work starting on darts viewmodels. As always with unreleased DLC work, details are still limited and things can change, but the direction is pretty clear: more playable indoor games are in the works, with pool currently looking like the most developed of the bunch.

Industrial Decor Pack

Speaking of DLCs, the Industrial Decor Pack work continues to point toward a pretty complete set of factory-themed deployables. The main pieces in the mix include industrial storage variants, an industrial garage door, industrial shelves, and the industrial torch. The garage door gives the pack a larger base-building piece, while the torch and shelves round things out with more decorative / utility-style deployables for players going for that warehouse, factory, or bunker vibe.

There’s also been more work on making these items behave cleanly with existing systems. Industrial shelves are being set up with spraycan color changing, the industrial torch has been getting its world model and animation passes, and the garage door continues to get polish. The pack has also expanded into related store and skin viewer work, which usually means things are being prepared for proper presentation and release. Nothing is confirmed until it’s live, but this continues to look like one of the more complete DLC candidates currently in the pipeline.

New weapons in the works

Along with all the DLC and monument work, there are also several new weapons showing up across the commits this week. The bowless crossbow appears to be the furthest along of the bunch, with work on sounds, third-person animations, viewmodel animations, attachment positions, holster placement, and skin viewer / store setup. There’s still no full picture of how it’ll function in-game, but it’s clearly moving through the normal pipeline of getting models, audio, animations, and presentation hooked up.

There are also a few other weapon projects in earlier stages. The M16A2 is now seeing gamemesh, viewmodel rig, and animation work, while the UZI 9mm has had material, texture, and LOD work. A Glass AR has also shown up with a blockout mesh and initial prefab setup. Details are still light on all of these, so it’s too early to say how they’ll fit into Rust’s weapon lineup, but there’s definitely a broad batch of weapon development happening behind the scenes.

New player models

The updated Rust player models are now on staging, and there’s already been a lot of discussion around how everyone’s character looks with the new setup. As Alistair clarified, what you’re seeing on Staging now is not necessarily final, and your player model may still change before this goes live with the June update. So if your new look has you questioning everything, maybe don’t get too attached just yet.

Behind the scenes, there’s still a lot of work happening on this system. Recent commits include more skinning fixes for clothing, underwear, swimwear, BDU gear, armor, hats, beards, hair, glasses, mannequins, player previews, and various third-person / viewmodel animation updates. Player customization is also still on the roadmap for Q4 2026, which should eventually let players change their appearance directly. For now, this is more about getting the new player model foundation cleaned up and ready for release.

Apartment complex progress

Work continues on the apartment complex monument this week, with a pretty broad pass on both visuals and functionality. Along with more terrain polish, lighting work, cobwebs, cockroaches, ripped carpet decals, and general set dressing around the streets and outskirts, the team has also been cleaning up LODs, batching, splat maps, collision, and procgen placement issues.

There’s some more interesting functionality starting to show up in the mix too. A number of apartment props are being converted into entities, furniture is being organized so it can only spawn while an apartment is rented, room IDs are being adjusted for door numbers, and work has even started on turning props into a functional apartment complex elevator. Still very much a work in progress, but the apartment complex is clearly moving beyond a simple art pass into something with more systems and interaction behind it.

Other stuff

Auto turret workshop skin support is being worked on, with the auto turret getting skinnable setup, updated icons, skin viewer support, and a workshop toggle for the AK inside the turret.
A new player-maintained monuments branch is in the works, including crude oil production that can be turned on and off, a playable sphere tank scene, and a crude oil producer added to Dome.
The satellite crash prototype continues to move forward with entity refactors, UI work, and new thruster effect behavior when tightening radius. Still very early, but definitely one to keep an eye on.
Work continues on AI recast integration, with a new navmesh added but disabled by default. This appears to be ongoing backend AI navigation work rather than something players will notice right away.
Several spraycan / reskin systems are being refactored to better preserve entity state when items are reskinned. This ties into fixes for electric furnaces, barrels, industrial shelves, and other deployables.
Barrel conveyor filters have been fixed so barrels properly show up again after reskin support was added.
Wallpaper skin picker has been fixed so default skins show up again after a regression from last month.
IO wire and hose visuals have received fixes, including restored hose material colors, invisible wire material fixes, and better visibility when showing IO directions.
Waterwheel audio has been cleaned up, with water loop and electric zap sounds now using proper occlusion settings.
Server browser description loading has been fixed for cases where server info and descriptions failed to load properly.
Steam nickname and team cache fixes should reduce cases where teammate names appear stale or incorrect after joining, leaving, or changing teams.
A rain grace system has been merged, though the exact player-facing effect is still unclear from the commits.
The FPV drone prototype continues, with UI work and gibs added for a kamikaze FPV drone.
A small vehicle branch showed a “van test,” though there’s not enough detail yet to say much more.
Mortar fixes continue, including a fix for demos breaking if started while mounted on a mortar.
Several Unity 6.3.15 cleanup tasks are ongoing, including scroll speed fixes, macOS mouse delta tuning, decimal input field fixes, shop marker text scaling fixes, and rendering fixes after TMP / Unity updates.
Texture generation and deep sea data have received memory optimization work, including moving some data from managed arrays to NativeArrays and reducing a large startup allocation.
Rendering and instancing work continues around BatchRendererGroup and Rust’s standard shader compatibility.
Console command parsing has received more allocation and performance optimizations, including StringView work and faster quote-splitting logic.
Console history has been fixed so carriage returns no longer confuse the input field.
Rust relay server / FakePlayer work continues with fixes for occlusion, network startup, subscriber checks, and NREs.
A Battering Ram NRE has been fixed.
Torch fire effect texture compression artifacts have been fixed.
Various developer tools and editor workflows have received polish, including devtools scaling fixes, reflection probe editor toggles, LOD baker improvements, texture analyzer fixes, and Unity test fixes.