NEW ITEM: ARMOURED LADDER HATCHThe Armoured Ladder Hatch is a new top-tier construction. A direct upgrade from the Metal Ladder Hatch, the Armoured Ladder Hatch is built for players who want maximum durability on their vertical access points.Unlocked at Tier 3, it’s available in both square and triangle variants, slots straight into existing frames.Unlocked at Tier 3, it’s available in both square and triangle variants, slots straight into existing frames.NEW ITEM: WATER WHEELRenewable energy is the best energy. You liked wind and solar? Now it's time for another classic, Hydro!Water wheels can be placed in rivers to passively generate electricity from the water flowing along its base. When placed in the ocean they do generate some charge, but more inconsistently as the tides change. Either way you will need to make sure that the waterflow coming in is not blocked by anything!The wheels can also be used as giant hamster wheels if you want to hop in and convert some calories into power. And before you ask, yes you can force handcuffed players into them.TECH TREE MULTI-UNLOCKINGThe tech tree unlocking process received a long-overdue upgrade this month! Instead of painfully having to select and unlock each item as you go down the tree, you are now able to select any node you want and will be shown a preview path that leads to the desired item. Pressing the unlock button then automatically unlocks the whole path at once, playing a satisfying animation.New sound effects have also been added, the unlock animation was improved and the tree is now centered when zooming in and out - interacting with this UI should feel a lot better overall.NOTABLE CHANGESChainsaw FrenzyChainsaw now always hits the X when farming treesWatchtowersWatchtowers can no longer be spam placed next to each otherSleepy JunkpilesFixed junkpiles spawning on sleeping bagsIO counterCan now set the reset value of the IO counterDeep Sea Sleeping BagsAdded a visual indicator to distinguish between sleeping bags in the deep sea on death screenEXTENDED PLANT RIPENESSWe've increased the time plants are in their "ripe" stage to 24 hours (was 14). This should hopefully be less punishing for players who can't log back on to harvest their plants more than once per day.Note that the growable flowers were already at 28 hours so they are unchanged.SHIELD COLLISION CHANGEWe've noted the new meta around shields becoming a bit too popular over the last month. Ideally shields are a powerful defensive tool but they come at the cost of reducing your offensive capabilities.To better fit that direction we're now switching the hitbox based on whether you are actively holding up the shield. When idle the shield uses a smaller square hitbox and it will use the current larger hitbox while it is being held up.We've also fixed a bug that resulted in additional recoil being applied when shooting at a shield, this was only meant to be applied when attacking a shield with a melee weapon.COLOURED BUTTONSWe saw a cool community concept for coloured buttons and decided to implement it as a part of this patch, the functionality is really similar to wires with a similar colour set - the only difference being that red is the default colour for buttons to match how they previously looked. The more technical and cooler side of this is that we previously didn't support nested radial menus, the new coloured buttons are the first to support them and should allow for more complex nested menus in the future. CUSTOM CHAT CHANNEL TAG COLOURSAfter a recent request, I've added some extra colour pickers to the accessibility options.These allow you to change the colour of the tags for Discord DMs, team chat, cards chat, etc.Hopefully this makes things a bit clearer!LIGHT TOGGLE RADIAL MENUThe old ToggleLight feature/bind has had a major upgrade this month!“Light Toggle Radial” has been added to the controls menu as a replacement for the previous togglelight bind, and will use the same default/current bind.Tap the keybind to retain the original behaviour: all equipped light sources toggle simultaneously.Hold the keybind to open a radial menu (when multiple light sources are equipped), allowing you to toggle each one individually.This is especially useful in situations where you don’t want everything toggled at once - for example, when using night vision goggles alongside a weapon-mounted flashlight. There's potential to expand this feature into a more generic "item state toggle" feature in the future, that could also toggle things such as weapon fire mode.OVERFISHING & FISHING IN THE DEEP SEAFishing inside your base or botting the fishing minigame doesn't align with the true spirit of fishing. To get the best catches you should be hunting down secluded spots and casting your line there. Plus, if you want to do things passively, fishing traps exist for a reason.So we've added an overfishing mechanic. If a certain amount of fish have been caught in the vicinity within a certain time span, the area becomes "overfished". In overfished areas, only junk will come up from cast lines. The area will repopulate after it has time to refresh, and fishing can resume then. There are plenty of ConVars for community servers to tweak the mechanic to their liking (including disabling it completely) so don't worry about it being forced. Additionally, overfishing has no impact on the fish traps as the primary intent for the feature is to mitigate in-base afk fish farming. To balance this out, fishing in the Deep Sea is getting a buff! You can no longer catch Herrings or Anchovies in the deep sea, which means the loot pool has been concentrated towards higher-value catches.BUNNY COSTUMEThis year we’ve somehow created an even more silly costume to terrorise the nakeds with, the Bunny Costume.Coming in three cute and cracked varieties so you can dress for any occasion.  The Bunny Costume is only available for a limited time on the Rust Steam item storeEXCAVATOR RUSTIGE EGGBringing in a little decorum this Easter, we have the latest Rustigé Egg coming in exquisite amethyst and gold. Open it up to reveal an eggcellent mini Excavator scene and a unique tune.Available for a limited time on the Rust Steam item storeEASTER 2026Happy Easter! Easter Egg Hunt is back today until the 16th of April and there's a whole range of fun items now available too!If you don't make the podium, that's okay. The painted eggs you collect can be upgraded to Bronze eggs once you collect 10. If you collect 10 bronze eggs then you can upgrade to a silver egg, eventually all the way to gold!There are various items available to help you during your hunt - the Easter Basket will allow instant pickup of eggs and the Bunny Onesie and Ears will provide you with an advantage via Egg Vision.Easter Store ItemsEASTER WALLPAPERSWhat better way to spring clean your base this year than applying these fresh new individual wallpapers for your walls and floors.Available as individual limited wallpapers on the Rust Steam item storePERFORMANCE: USEPLAYERUPDATEJOBS UPGRADEUsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 on By DefaultSince rolling out march's Shipshape update, we have enabled UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 on all our servers and it's been a smooth ride, most of the time. It revealed a couple bugs with the demo system, but those have been fixed. And it's been helping our servers - you can see where we've switched one of our servers:As a result, I'm changing the servervar to be set to 2 by default. For a short while the 0 and 1 modes will still be available, but I'm planning to rip out support for them - if your server has custom mods that target player update loop, you should look to upgrade those.UsePlayerUpdateJobs 3 - new experimental levelThe above image shows the performance gain on a fresh-ish server, but as the world grows old it starts to slow down and bottlenecks become worse. Here's an example of a server mid-way through update cycle with 360 players:There are a number of issues highlighted above in the ~20ms section:The areas marked with 1 and 2 are running serial code. For 1(2.3ms) it's running our server side antihack logic, for 2(3.8ms) it's updating player's network streamingFor number 3 - we spend 0.3ms because one of async tasks doesn't finish earlyFor number 4 - our use of C# asyncs is leading to allocations, so our optims have a taxProblems 2 and 4 are related - to fix problem 2, we would use more asyncs, but that would cause more allocations, inflating problem 4. To deal with this, we started rolling out our fork of UniTask, a framework for cheaper creation of tasks. In Jobs 3 mode, all task creation code has been converted to UniTasks instead of C# Tasks to eliminate related allocations, we converted more of antihack to Burst Jobs and parallelized player network streaming logic further.We're currently trialling it out internally, but it's publicly available for experimenting. I'll be keeping an eye out on feedback.PERFORMANCE: NEW TERRAIN RENDERERContinuing moving to a more GPU driven rendering pipeline we are rolling out our own terrain rendering system (no longer using Unity's). Everything should look broadly the same visually but a lot of the work has moved to the GPU. The new terrain has massively reduced drawcalls and more aggressive culling. This results in an overall gain in CPU performance.Performance DetailsTerrain can be situational but for a performance snapshot example I'll take a profile on top of this hill:I can compare the metrics by turning new terrain on/off:Rendering metricsDrawcall reduction: ~1000 (2.71k -> 1.07k)Shadowcaster reduction: ~550CPU main threadUnity's terrain CPU update completely removed: ~0.25ms gainThe combined reduction in drawcalls and terrain.CullAllTerrains update result in a median: ~0.65ms gain.The numbers will vary (and can sometimes be even better) but overall you should see decent improvement in CPU times.GPU performanceWhile most of the work has moved to the GPU, the improved culling and terrain rendering technique has mi...