Work continues on several upcoming Rust features this week, with the new apartment complex monument, satellite crash event, and player maintained monuments all seeing more development. There’s also some M16A2 turret cleanup, expanding storage sorting support, and a solid pile of fixes for UI, animations, Steam inventory, and other assorted items.

Apartment complex progress

Work continues on the upcoming apartment complex, a new monument in development which looks set to introduce a pretty big first for Rust: rentable apartments. Instead of just roaming through, looting, and leaving like most monuments, this one is being built around players actually renting spaces, opening shops, and potentially having a temporary place to stash some loot. Because apparently the next logical step after surviving naked on a beach is becoming a landlord, tenant, or burglar. Maybe all three.

This week, the developers continued tightening up how all that will work. Rentable vending machines now have a lockpicking mechanic, allowing players to use a lockpick on a rented machine they don’t own to gain temporary access to its inventory. Apartment rent and shop costs are also seeing more backend work, with fees, protection time, and hourly rent values being replicated properly. On top of that, guest functionality has been removed for now, meaning apartments are owner-only when it comes to opening and closing doors. There’s also been more work on furniture spawn persistence, elevator/floor handling, lighting, rooftop access, sentry cover, and general art pass / set dressing throughout the building.

Satellite crash progress

The upcoming satellite crash event also saw a bunch of progress this week. This is another new event in the works which, as the name suggests, involves a satellite coming down from orbit and crashing into the map. The developers have been steadily building out the full event flow, and this week’s commits make it sound like the crash site itself is getting a lot more functional.

Recent work includes server notifications now triggering when the satellite actually impacts, rather than earlier in the sequence, along with translation phrases, post-crash logic fixes, and cleanup around the satellite data. The crash remains now have save/load support, despawn after a set delay, and include a prevent-building volume around the wreckage. There’s also work on a new computer storage entity tied into the remains, with inventory access, powering-up behavior, and a hidden mount until powered. In other words, it’s starting to look less like a falling skybox prop and more like a proper Rust event — crash, scramble, loot, chaos, repeat.

M16A2 turret tweaks

The M16A2 saw some more follow-up work this week, specifically around how it behaves when placed inside an Auto Turret. Given the M16A2 is a burst-fire weapon, there are some extra quirks to sort out compared to the usual full-auto turret setup. Recent commits show fixes for burst firing in turrets, some AutoTurret cleanup, and a fix for a null reference error tied to this work.

It’s not a massive feature reveal, but it is a good sign the new rifle is being properly integrated into existing Rust systems instead of just tossed into the loot pool and left to vibe. The M16A2 branch was merged into main again this week, with the turret burst-fire branch also merged in, so this looks like another round of polish for making sure the weapon plays nicely with all the weird places Rust players are inevitably going to stick it.

Player maintained monuments

Player maintained monuments also continue to move along, with this system looking to give certain monuments more of a player-driven upkeep loop instead of just being static places you loot and leave. The general idea appears to be that players will be able to maintain or power parts of specific monuments, unlocking extra functionality or better rewards while that maintenance is active.

This week, the focus was on power grid support and gas station functionality. Power Plant got some fixes for high grade fuseboxes using the wrong loot panel type, while Outpost and Bandit Camp recyclers had power grid settings enabled for demo purposes. Over on the gas station side, maintainable gas stations are now being set up to spawn better car parts, currently with a mockup prefab in place. Still very much a work in progress, but the shape of the feature is getting clearer: keep the place running, get better stuff out of it. Capitalism, but with more radiation.

Other Stuff

Storage adaptor sorting was added to vending machines, fridges, and wall cabinets.
CCTV / drone VOIP listening got a rewrite. The new system should more reliably let remote listeners hear VOIP through cameras and drones by checking for computer-mounted players instead of using the older secondary network group setup.
Steam inventory and store lookups were optimized. The store no longer pulls every Steam item property, catalog lookups are faster, known item sets are cached, and switching Steam accounts should no longer make every item show up as new.
Photograph notes got a fix for text not updating properly.
Vending admin UI got a fix for the “remove all” warning dialog persisting after disconnecting.
Deep sea NPC shops no longer show up in Outpost search.
Flag collision was fixed.
PlayerRigUpdate2 continued with more animation cleanup:

Non-local players should no longer miss some melee weapon animations.
Held entities with animation subsystems now receive player signals like attack and throw.
Updated third-person 16-frame sprint/run animation work.
Torch animation warnings fixed.
Player censor performance improved to around 0.02ms.

Storage / networking backend work continued with EntityRef support for RPCs, SyncVars, and the RPC source generator.
Render pipeline work continued:

Motion vector issues fixed for override shaders, depth, and skinned meshes.
Custom motion vector pass removed from the standard shader.
RRP server compile errors and warnings fixed.
AtmosphereVolumeDrawPass got a client-only guard.

Texture filtering got a visual polish pass, with 8x anisotropic filtering set on textures used on larger flat surfaces.
Deep sea terrain sampling got a lot of backend fixes and tests:

Height and normal sampling now better accounts for deep sea cases.
Several TerrainHeightMap methods were refactored.
New unit and performance tests were added.

Props asset scene was split into commonly used prefabs and everything else, which should help load times on many servers using modded maps.
Small backpack workshop setup continued with updated mesh, skinnable setup, and object mesh work.
Sculptures continued with rock sculpture fixes and UI work:

UI2 sculpture admin panel working.
Rock sculpture no longer turns into ice on pickup.
On-deploy default data fix.
Hit-guide shadow casting disabled.

Game Room DLC work continued with pool mini game third-person animation updates and viewmodel animation blockout.
Monument filters were updated:

Monument type filters added to SpawnFilter.
Metal detector spawns added to lakes, canyons, and oasis.

Monument info work continued with all monument info scriptables created and auto-fill tweaks.
Automated entity bounds tests were updated for bear traps, sails, shelves, deploy volumes, sockets, and overhang rules.
Shadow map caching merged to main, with follow-up server compile error fixes.
Workshop input handling was fixed so the workshop file dialog no longer uses the old input system.
Drone controls were fixed to be keyboard-layout aware.
Quarry visuals got polish:

Belt scroll speed now better matches rotating parts.
Mining quarry top engine LOD1 material issue fixed.

Shield UI got a disconnect fix so the power bar doesn’t stay stuck on screen after disconnecting.
Phone booth handset positioning was fixed.
Demo config timing was adjusted so configs run after replicated variables are applied.
Deep sea teleport consistency got a speculative fix.
A codegen/editor notification was added for when Clean & Generate finishes running and reloading, likely dev-facing only.