The Apartment Complex has arrived on staging, giving players their first real look at Rust’s upcoming rentable monument. Along with that, Softcore is getting raid windows and 2x gather, charity plushies are on the way, and more work continues on the satellite crash event.

Apartment Complex hits staging

The new Apartment Complex monument has officially made its way onto staging, giving us the first proper look at one of the more unique monuments Rust has seen in a while. The whole area has a gritty city block feel, complete with tall apartment buildings, shop stalls, streets, vehicles, turrets, a train station, playground, and a healthy dose of “this place has definitely seen better days” energy.

At its core, this is a safe zone monument built around rentable spaces. Players can rent shops to sell items, rent apartments as temporary living spaces, and move through a multi-floor hotel-style building with elevators, upkeep payments, private rooms, and plenty of details tucked around the place. Not every building is accessible right now, and this is still very much staging, but the overall concept is now playable enough to get a real sense of where it’s headed.

Rentable shops
One of the main features of the Apartment Complex is the shop area, which lets players rent out small storefronts inside the monument. Once rented, a shopkeeper NPC appears and the space basically works like a safer, more official vending machine setup. Players can manage sell orders, stock items, set prices, and even paint the sign above the shop.

The current staging prices show a scrap down payment and an hourly cost to keep the shop running, although those numbers are almost certainly subject to change before release. The big gameplay hook here is obvious: this gives players a way to sell items from a safe zone without needing to build and defend a vending machine base. It also appears to be drone accessible, which could make the Apartment Complex a pretty active trading hub if it goes live in this form.

Renting a room
Across from the shop area is the main apartment building, which works more like a hotel than a traditional base. Players can head to the front desk and rent one of several room tiers, starting with cheaper basement rooms, moving up to medium apartments, and eventually reaching the penthouse. Each room comes with its own upkeep cost, paid in scrap over time.

The rooms include a mix of utility and comfort depending on the tier. Even the basement option comes with basics like a sleeping bag, stove, water source, small storage, locker, phone, and a tier 1 workbench. Medium apartments step things up with more storage, a bed, fridge, bathroom, and better living space, while the penthouse adds even more storage, better views, a furnace, couch seating, and even a Chippy machine. It’s still Rust, though, so don’t expect luxury without a little grime.

Safe zone outside, combat zone inside
The Apartment Complex itself is a safe zone, with turrets around the monument keeping things in check. The rented rooms, however, are a different story. Inside apartments, players are placed into a combat zone, meaning these rooms are not just untouchable safe zone bubbles. Recent commits have focused heavily on getting this behavior working properly, including allowing players to hold weapons inside rooms without being marked hostile just for doing so.

Exactly how room raiding, break-ins, or player conflict inside these rented spaces will work is still not totally clear. There has been work on safezone overrides, combat triggers, and room damage rules, but on staging it’s still hard to say what the final intended balance will be. For now, the important takeaway is that apartments are private rentable spaces, but not necessarily fully safe ones.

Apartment terminal and extra details
There’s also a guarded basement room with a computer station, which ties into the newer Apartment terminal UI work. Recent commits show the terminal opening from the basement computer station, along with CCTV cameras added to small, medium, and large apartment prefabs. Clicking a rented room through the terminal can show a camera feed inside that room, which is both very useful and just a little bit creepy. Perfect Rust feature, really.

Beyond the core renting systems, the monument has a ton of world detail already in place. There are elevators, mailboxes, room numbers, roof access with a helipad, a playground, detailed interiors, empty buildings which may or may not get future use, and a lot of ongoing polish around lighting, culling, sounds, and performance. The Apartment Complex has been in development for a while, but now that it has merged into main and appeared on staging, it’s suddenly feeling a lot closer to being a real part of the game.

Charity plushies

Also coming up are some new charity plushies, with three different cuddly little guys tied to three different organizations. The current set includes plushies supporting Ronald McDonald House, Cancer Research UK, and Humane World for Animals.

We don’t have the full store details just yet, but these appear to be upcoming charitable items similar in spirit to past Rust charity releases. Along with the recent commit work on charity plushie outlines, it looks like these are getting prepped for release soon. More info on pricing, timing, and proceeds should come once they officially hit the store.

Softcore changes

Softcore is getting a pretty substantial shakeup, with raid windows and increased gather rates now being tested. The idea is to make Softcore a bit more approachable for players who don’t want their base erased at 4am, while still keeping regular Rust raiding during specific windows. Outside of those windows, building blocks, doors, and windows are protected from explosive and projectile damage, and MLRS strikes are blocked.

There are some important exceptions. Twig, deployables, high externals, and melee damage still work outside the raid window, and during the active raid window it’s back to regular Rust business as usual. Softcore is also being set up with 2x gather by default for trees, ores, harvestable corpses, and collectibles, though that does not apply to player-planted growables. Server owners should also be able to configure whether raid windows are enabled and when they kick in, so there’s room for this to vary depending on the server.

Satellite crash progress

Work also continues on the satellite crash event, with the latest commits focusing on how the whole thing is targeted and presented to players. A new world-space monitor UI is being worked on, showing a targeting map, possible crash locations, zoom controls, and a more focused view of where the satellite is being sent.

There’s also been more backend work on target validation, including multi-frame target checking, sampling tweaks, an auto-lock countdown, and a bumped targeting budget. In plain English: the developers appear to be making sure the satellite can pick a good crash location without doing anything too cursed. Still no full picture of the final gameplay loop yet, but the monitor and targeting work makes this system feel a lot more real than it did a few weeks ago.

Other stuff

A bunch of other work is also floating around this week:

Player Maintained Monuments work continues, with standard recyclers now set up to require an online powergrid while safezone recyclers remain unaffected.
Water Treatment Plant maintainables are in progress, including pipes spawning around the map and spigots that dispense water.
Airfield maintainable features saw more setup work, including cooldowns, charge-up IO changes, and more fitting placeholder props.
The Game Room DLC continues to move along with pool table work, new third-person dart throw animations, dart scoring updates, and more minifridge art polish.
Glowing wallpapers are being worked on, with references to glowing graffiti, neon carpets, fireflies, mushrooms, foxfire walls, concrete tiles, and a glowing space carpet.
Reskin quality of life is in progress, including greying out the currently selected skin and fixes for item ownership being preserved through reskins.
Attachment charms got more UI cleanup, including selected charm indicators, blueprint selection fixes, accessory icons, and repair bench polish.
Clan table work continues, with the newer Logs and Score sections now showing up in-game. The score menu also breaks down why points are gained or lost, alongside UI fixes for logo painting, streamer mode avatars, movement behavior, keybinds, and clan announcement limits.
The M16A2 received some animation polish for mag drops, shell ejection, and magazine visibility.
The Arrow Revamp branch saw prefab and icon work, along with early poison arrow setup.
Shadow Caching is being tested as an experimental graphics option, with potential FPS gains around lights but some obvious visual glitches still to sort out.
Render pipeline testing continues with motion blur, sharpen, vignette, hurt overlay, radiation, CCTV, grain, chromatic aberration, and other post-processing work.
Cargo Ship fixes landed for bots and sleepers disappearing, along with network optimizations for loot bags, dynamic containers, fireballs, and heli gibs.
A new “Blocked by industrial piping” error should make building placement issues around industrial pipes less confusing.
Settings search got improvements, including arrow buttons and fixes for cycling results.
Radtown got an HLOD fix so it should look better from a distance.
Bear traps and landmines had broken grass displacement fixed.
Several deployable bounds fixes were made for wooden frames, wooden barricades, barbed barricades, floor spikes, and medieval barricades.
NPC conversation cleanup was fixed for players disconnecting mid-conversation.
Softcore also picked up some smaller fixes, including TC stacking behavior and raid countdown cleanup.
Weapon racks got a runtime optimization by moving rack mount config over to a prefab attribute.
Binoculars are seeing weapon refresh work with a new world model rig.
Wood armor is getting skinning support with updated UVs, materials, and textures.
A new Global Warfare Twitch Drops event appears to be coming July 30th, though we’ll wait for more details before digging too far into that one.