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 2026!

Last month, we celebrated Rust's 12th anniversary, marking an incredible journey. The game continues to experience year-over-year growth, which is quite remarkable for being 12 years old. Rust is now bigger than ever, and it's only going to get, much bigger this year. 

This year, Rust saw:

• Highest ever peak player count of 259,646 on Steam in 2025 

• Over 450,000,000 Game Sessions

• Over 5,800,000 unique players

• Over 700,000,000 hours played 

• Over 37,000,000 Drops claimed players

• 28,523 Workshop Submissions

Here's a recap of some of the major updates we did last year:

Primitive[rust.facepunch.com] We kickstarted the year with Primitive, introducing a new game mode and a whole load of new items and raiding methods

The Crafting Update[rust.facepunch.com] The Crafting Update added advanced cooking, farming (chickens, bees), new workbenches, Armor and more

Premium Servers[rust.facepunch.com] Premium Servers introduce a new server type, aiming to reduce cheating and improve fair, competitive play.

Jungle Update[rust.facepunch.com] One of the biggest updates of the year saw the Jungle biome added with climbable trees, deadly tigers and crocodiles, new monuments, boomerangs, blowpipes, and more!

Friends with Benefits[rust.facepunch.com] Friends with benefits was one of many updates which saw sweeping QOL updates, introducing party system and snappable deployables to name a few

Meta Shift[rust.facepunch.com] Meta shift was one of several updates which made sweeping changes to progression. Introducing Blueprint fragments, custom crosshair and changes to monument puzzles

Quality Of Life Over 400 QOL changes

Menu Overhauls Sweeping changes to main menu, server browser and store.

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.

What’s in store for 2026? Consistency! Continued guaranteed monthly updates on the first Thursday of every month, alongside regular fixes, quality-of-life enhancements, improvements, and exciting holiday events.

This year, Rust Mobile will be released globally. We're very excited to see how this performs, all early indicators are showing very promising signs. If you're intresting to learn more about Rust mobile or participate in the next closed beta next, visit:

https://rustmobile.com

Next month, on February 5th, we'll finally be shipping the Naval update. The update will include player-made boats, which will allow players to travel to the deep sea, explore new islands, and monuments with new AI encounters. This is going to be a massive update. 

Alongside next month’s Naval update, we’ve got a huge amount of content either planned or already in active development for 2026.

You can expect to see new monuments, including apartment complex. We’re also working on new player models and animations, which will improve both how characters look and move. The player update will unblock one of the biggest hurdles to player customisation. 

We’re expanding the ecosystem with new animals, cows and sheep, for example, alongside a proper animal breeding system. This opens up some interesting gameplay opportunities and adds more depth to the world beyond simple hunting. Bigger and better dung farms? 

We’re also taking time to revisit older content. That includes expanding on popular features that players already love, and taking another look at less popular systems to see if they can be improved or reworked with the benefit of everything we’ve learned since they first shipped.

As always, plans will evolve, priorities will shift, and we’ll keep talking openly as things take shape. But there’s a lot to look forward to.

As with prior years, we've set aside multiple months in our internal roadmap for light or no content. These gaps are deliberate to allow us to be versatile and adaptive to community feedback, to have time to focus on and address old content, and to 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 continues to be one of the biggest threats to Rust, and it’s something we invest heavily in, both technically and operationally.
2025 stats:

• 338,000+ total bans applied

• 296,000+ permanent bans applied (27% increase from last year)

• 42,000+ temporary bans applied (26% decrease from last year)

• 16,000,000+ cheat reports received (28% increase from last year)

• The majority of cheaters are now removed from the game in less than 7 hours of playtime, down from 10 hours at the start of 2025

In March, we released Premium Servers[support.facepunchstudios.com]. To access these servers, your Rust Steam inventory must be valued at $15 or more. This includes items from the Permanent Store, such as building skins, décor packs, and hazmat skins, as well as any other tradable Rust items with an attached value.

Since launch, there have been several attempts by bad actors to game the system in various ways. So far, we’ve successfully countered those attempts.

We’ve also seen strong and healthy retention across Premium Servers. They’re doing an excellent job of gatekeeping cheaters out, and I'm very happy with how this is working. At present, the $15 price point is doing its job well, and see no need to raise the barrier to entry. If you want the best cheat-free experience, premium servers are it. 

In May, we enabled server-side player culling by default across all servers. As a reminder, this is technology that stops networking players who are fully obscured by terrain and rocks, preventing or significantly limiting several high-impact cheat features such as ESP and aimbot.

In April, we opened our HackerOne program to the public. This allows players and researchers to report security vulnerabilities and exploits in exchange for a bug bounty. We also launched a dedicated security page on our website to make submitting reports easy, secure, and straightforward. To date, we’ve paid out over $300,000 through this program.

More recently, our anticheat partner, Easy Anti-Cheat, has begun additional efforts specifically targeting recoil cheats, often referred to as scripting. We continue to work very closely with the Epic Games EAC team, and there’s a lot of ongoing collaboration behind the scenes. We’ve got some big plans together for 2026.

Looking ahead to 2026, we’re continuing to hire additional support staff and developers dedicated to anticheat. We’ll also be introducing a new third-party anticheat layer that we’ll be working closely with. More details on that once we’re ready to talk about it publicly, but it'll be soon.

Performance is always an ongoing process. We’re constantly adding and improving features every single month, many of which never make the headlines and sit quietly in changelogs. There’s no magic button we can press to suddenly make Rust run faster. Instead, it’s a slow grind of small gains that add up over time.

Over the past few years, we’ve hired several people whose sole focus is performance. A lot of this work is experimental and, frankly, tedious. Things that should/could work in theory often don’t in the real world, and it can take days to weeks just to prove something isn’t viable. Sometimes you spend a long time getting to a result that simply says “nope”.

And, like every year, we do mess up performance from time to time. When that happens, we review what went wrong and keep adjusting our internal processes to get better at catching issues earlier. 

That said, we did ship some genuinely great improvements in 2025, the BIG ones:

• Load and server connection times reduced by around 65%

• Significant reductions to RAM and VRAM usage

One area we’ve always hated is load times. For years, loading into Rust was easily one of the worst parts of the experience, it was embarrassing compared to other games. Long waits, inconsistent times, reconnecting after a crash or kick taking forever. It actively held the game back, and we knew it.

As we continue to add more content and systems, performance can take a hit. We’re constantly fighting that trade-off. It’s a balance between pushing Rust forward and making sure it still runs well across a huge range of machines.

Most players seem to understand the reality of this. Rust is a sandbox game. You can go to the largest, worst-performing monument in the game, drop a massive base next to it, have a dozen smaller teams build nearby, then throw 40 players into the area, raid while 500 players are connected to the server. Honestly, it’s a miracle Rust works as well as it does sometimes. These are exactly the kinds of situations we have to design and optimise for.

Looking ahead, we’ve got a lot of performance work underway. Much of it is deep, underlying changes to things like render pipelines, navmesh. We’re also regularly checking in with the Rust Mobile team to see what they’ve solved there, and whether any of those solutions realistically make sense to bring back to PC.

Performance is never “done”, but we’re committed to keeping Rust playable as it continues to grow. If we hit all performance roadmap taskings in 2026 and it works out as we hope, 2026 will be a good year. 

DLC

Over the past two years, we’ve grown a dedicated DLC team, I want to be really clear about what that means as I often see meme comments on socials. This is a team we’ve explicitly hired for DLC work, not people moved off existing Rust development.

This team does not take resources away from regular Rust development. DLC work is (95%)  separate from our core monthly update pipeline. It’s an add-on, not a replacement, and if anything, having a focused DLC team has at times helped us push more free content into the game by taking pressure off other teams.

If you look back at 2025, you’ll probably notice a pattern. Nearly every month we shipped a new in-house DLC item, pack or skinnable. That wasn’t accidental, and it’s a pace we’re comfortable maintaining. You can expect this to continue into 2026.

Compared to most games, I genuinely believe we offer good value for money. That’s something we don’t want to lose as Rust continues to grow.

One of the things we’re actively exploring is what a battlepass-style system could look like in Rust. This doesn’t mean we’re copying another game, and it doesn’t mean anything is locked in yet. If we do this, it has to feel very “Rust”, fair, respectful and good value. If you're a frequent user who purchasing DLC, this system should feel rewarding.

As with everything we do on Rust, we’ll be listening closely to feedback and adapting as we go. We’ll talk more openly about this once we’ve got something concrete to show and discuss, which will likely be around the middle of 2026.

We'll continue supporting the skinning community, we're not out to discontinue it with these plans. Going forward, we'll be adding one or two new skinnable item to the game monthly, working our way through the most popular items first. 
To date, we've helped payout over $32,701,869 to the community skinners!

The good news is, if you really want to try the naval content early, you can. Just be aware it comes with bugs, performance issues and all the rough edges we are still working through. We have fresh servers live on the Rust Staging branch that you can jump into.

If you want to help test, break things and give feedback, you are more than welcome. To learn how to get onto Rust Staging, check this out: 

https://rust.facepunch.com/staging

If demand exceeds current capacity, we'll be adding new servers.  

Something we'll be looking at this later year is a reward system for good and accurate bug reports, a human actually reads every single bug report and flags it appropriately. Since Staging has the most bugs, we hope this system will incentivise its use. 

Full blog and 2025 changelog recap here.[rust.facepunch.com]

We're through to the final round!

But in case you're new here, over the years, Rust has undergone some huge changes - including graphic, physics, and engine updates and rebuilds, all because we’ve wanted to make Rust what it is, and what it could be.

We're guided by the community, and agile enough to deliver or pivot when we need to, month after month. And this year - Rust's 12th year - we've added a new biome, new animals, new vehicles, weapons, and so much more. As well as third party collabs, drops on Kick, more events on Twitch, raising lots of money for Charity, and doing so much more! 

To be a finalist is an achievement in itself, but we need the community to help us win it.

Please vote for Rust in the Labor of Love category.