Rust Update History

What is the Rust update history?

Facepunch ships one major content update for Rust every month, dropping on the first Thursday at 19:00 UTC alongside the force wipe. Each update is announced as a Steam Community post on the official Rust hub, with a short codename (think "SHIPSHAPE", "NAVAL UPDATE", "PIVOT OR DIE", "META SHIFT") and full patch notes covering new items, balance changes, monument tweaks and bug fixes.

This page is the complete archive — every monthly update we can identify in Steam's announcement feed, sorted newest first. Each entry links straight to the official Facepunch announcement so you can read the full patch notes in their original form. Smaller hotfixes between monthly updates aren't included here; for those, check the Facepunch developer commits feed.

How is this list maintained?

It's not maintained manually. A nightly GitHub Action calls the Steam News API, filters all announcements down to wipe-day posts (date-matched to within ±36 hours of the computed first Thursday of each month, with non-wipe titles like "Community Update" and "Steam Awards" excluded), and writes the result to a JSON file this page reads on load. The morning after each force wipe, the new update post lands automatically.

Why do Rust updates ship monthly?

Facepunch's monthly cadence is one of the longest-running in live-service gaming. The same team has shipped a Rust update every first Thursday since the game launched in 2013 — over 140 consecutive monthly updates by 2026. Each update introduces new content (items, monuments, gameplay systems) and is paired with the global force wipe so every server can deploy the new content cleanly. See our Rust Wipe Schedule for the live countdown to the next one.

Common update themes

• New monuments — Lighthouse, Power Plant, Trainyard, Launch Site, Outpost, Bandit Camp etc. were each added in a specific monthly update.
• New weapons / vehicles — Modular cars, Minicopter, Submarine, Snowmobile, Boats, MLRS, Helis all arrived in named monthly drops.
• System overhauls — Recoil rework, electricity, raidable bases, NPC AI, fishing, farming 2.0 — the big system-level changes typically anchor the monthly update they ship in.
• Holiday events — Halloween (Easter Eggs / candy), Christmas (snow, presents under trees), Easter (egg hunt) all return on roughly the same monthly cadence each year.