11 YEARS
Servers are now wiped and Santa is packing up and clearing out the bodies, but we hope you enjoyed the Holiday Season. We're getting back to work after a couple of weeks off, which is why this blog is lighter than usual, but we're looking forward to the journey ahead in 2025!
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At the end of last year, we celebrated Rust's 11th anniversary, marking an incredible journey. The game continues to experience year-over-year growth, which is quite remarkable for being 11 years old. Rust is now bigger than ever!
This year, we saw:
- Over 325 million game sessions
- Over 40 million hours played
- Over 5.5 million unique players
Here's a recap of some of the major updates we did last year:
World Update 2.0
Road Renegades
Bags To Riches
Waves Of Change
Lighting The Way
Seismic Shift
Quality Of Life
New Weapons
Alongside a metric ton of improvements and bug fixes.
Rust continues to be a labour of love from all of us at Facepunch, and we couldn't have done it without your passion and feedback. Thank you for your continued support, be it playing the game, telling friends, and engaging and communicating with us. We've very much enjoyed everything we've worked on for the game this year.
LOOKING FORWARD
What’s in store for 2025? Consistency! Continued guaranteed monthly updates on the first Thursday of every month, alongside regular fixes, quality-of-life enhancements, improvements, and exciting holiday events.
Next Month
On February 6th, we'll release the Primitive update. The update will be one of the most impactful updates to date in changing the dynamics of early-game raiding and combat by introducing siege vehicles, primitive weapons, shields, and a dedicated game mode.
The Primitive update represents a time in Rust where the already scarce technology and the usual homemade armaments and ammunition have been depleted from Rust's current setting, forcing survivors to fashion crude weapons with less sophisticated methods of attack and defence.
The Siege Tower can be used to climb over exterior walls while players remain in cover. And it can be pushed or horse-drawn and has several floors, with extendable drawbridges that double up as shutters.
The Catapult will be a projectile launcher for longer distances that can utilise multiple projectiles such as boulders, radioactive barrels, and propane tank IEDs. While it does have wheels, its size makes it something that a vehicle or horse will have to help you move it towards your next target.
The Ballista is a combination of a catapult and a large crossbow which was highly accurate given the heft of its projectiles. And in Rust, those features remain with the Ballista also having multiple ammo types, being able to do heavy damage to people, doors, and vehicles.
Finally, the Battering Ram will be another addition that is driveable like a traditional vehicle, with a triggerable ram that damages building blocks in a radius.
As well as these new weapons and vehicles, we have been working on a variety of shields, a 4 shot mini-crossbow, and updates to melee damages and ranges.
With this comes some improvements to horses, including their ability to tow the new siege weapons, and new skins to customise your primitive approach to gameplay and expression.
Can't wait till February? Rust Staging Aux2 branch is publicly playable, allowing everyone to test and give feedback.
Forwards
Alongside next month's Primitive update, we have a ton of content currently in development, and if you're keeping an eye on our commits page, you'll already know some of what's on the way. This year, you can expect to see Cooking 2.0 bringing many changes to food management and unique buffs to foods, a Jungle biome featuring dangerous animals such as crocodiles and tigers, and changes to softcore and hardcore game modes.
Outlined above is skimming the surface of only a few key features. We have a lot more planned.
But what about?
Performance?
Performance is always an ongoing process. We're constantly adding and improving new features monthly, often hidden in changelogs. There is no magic button to increase performance. Instead, it is a slow process of small gains.
We hired several people over the past couple of months whose sole job is focused on performance-related tasks, these are positions which never existed before, we never had staff dedicated to performance full-time, they're getting to grips with the Rust project and are already hard at work identifying and fixing issues. A recent example is Daniel's server profiler.
We'll continue to share news on performance in our monthly development blogs.
Old Content?
As like with prior years we've set aside multiple months in our internal roadmap of light or no content. These gaps are deliberate to allow us to be versatile and adaptive to community feedback, have time to focus and address old content and improve recent content. We have a lot we can keep building upon, not all content we add to Rust is supposed to become meta, but rather adding yet another way of achieving a goal.
Cheating?
Repeating the words of last year's blog: Anticheat is a hugely complex topic. We work closely with Epic Games' Easy Anti-cheat, to aid in detecting and banning cheaters in Rust. We don't disclose what we do and don't do when it comes to anti-cheat for good reason. The more information we disclose publicly, the more it can assist cheaters and cheat developers to circumvent measures, it's a huge cat-and-mouse game.
One of the best anti-cheat measures is obscurity. The fewer people know what EAC and we are doing, the better. This comes with the drawback of not communicating enough, on the outside, it appears we're doing nothing. Almost every month, we're shipping improvements or fixing/restricting cheat features. We've fixed several high-priority exploits upon discovery or disclosure within hours through hotfixes we don't note publicly. EAC sometimes pushes several improvements weekly, which are applied when you start the game.
We continue to promise to you is we're actively monitoring and combating cheaters daily. Our internal systems keep improving, as do EAC.
In past blogs I talked about server-side player culling, if a player is behind a hill and you can't see them, don't network the player to disrupt ESP cheat features. We're slowly iterating this and have tested it on live servers, we're working on getting this to the most performant state possible to work on mid-high population servers.
Another feature we're exploring and want your feedback on it, is a form of premium servers. The overwhelming number of cheaters banned have Rust Steam inventory valued at below $20. A large number of long-term regular players have Rust Steam inventories of over $20. If we used this as a gate to entry for some servers, it would mean these servers would see considerably fewer cheat-related players, is this something you want? Would you play on these servers? We're still collecting data to determine the exact barrier to entry. The reason for looking at Rust's Steam Inventory price, in short, is because it's a metric that can't be spoofed and gamed easily, unlike game data. The big negative here is servers rely on a steady flow of players, new and old; this gate could have a net negative impact on the server's population and, thus, the overall gameplay experience - we'd love to hear your thoughts.
This year:
- We've taken down over 1300 cheats-related media on social platforms.
- 290,000+ bans applied
- 57,000+ Temporary
- 233,000+ Permanent
- The majority of cheaters have been removed from the game in less than 12 hours of playtime
- This has lowered this to 10 hours of playtime in the last 3-months
- 12,617,47 Cheat reports received
- 1,200,000~ cheating reports received on Facepunch servers
11 YEARS OF RUST IN NUMBERS
While we celebrated a fantastic 2024 for the game, we realise a lot of what we've achieved boils down to 11 years of passion from the team. And passion from the community.
It's not always easy to put that into words, but we've managed to put it into numbers below.
Take a look at what you've helped us achieve over the last 11 years!
THE LAST DAYS OF RUSTMAS
Twitch Drops! Hurry!
Yes, Santa has packed up and cleared out, but there are still a few days left to claim free rewards for watching creators on Twitch!
All you need to do is check out anyone streaming Rust on Twitch by Monday 6th of January, and you can bag yourself some sweet Christmas-themed Twitch Drops to make sure you and your base look jubilant all year round if Christmas is more than just a holiday to you!
