Rust is finally adding backpacks to kick off its second decade
Pets won’t arrive this year, though
Having marked its 10 year anniversary last year, survival shooter Rust is seeing in its second decade by adding the long-awaited ability to boost your inventory with a backpack. The update will continue what developers Facepunch Studios say will be even more updates and improvements throughout 2024, even as other long-requested additions slide back to 2025 or later.
First, backpacks! After years of player-made mods, they’ll finally be made official on February 1st, with players able to craft backpacks as a new attire, allowing for increased storage space. Next month’s update will also see the number of shelters that players can place limited. Backpacks will be available a few weeks earlier in Rust’s Staging branch, if you’re playing on the test server.
Beyond that, Facepunch say they will keep up their monthly update frequency in 2024, with new features landing on the first Thursday of each month. Among the content confirmed to be in development are motorcycles, new weapons, reworked monuments and a new tutorial for newcomers - with Facepunch saying that Rust’s player base continues to grow even a decade after its release.
Other patches will aim to polish up the survival game’s world, allowing for new buildable canyons and lakes, and better rivers. There are also plans for procedurally-generated caves, along with improved rocks and cliffs. Facepunk also said they will be taking another look at how Rust’s nighttimes work in terms of brightness, with players frustrated in the past by nights being too bright or dark - leading to some players upping their display’s brightness to gain an advantage in PVP.
A key focus for the studio is improving performance, particularly dropping Rust’s hunger for memory to boost frames. Those tweaks are due to arrive within the next couple of months.
Meanwhile, Rust’s new Nexus system is in the works for later this year. The revised approach to servers is designed to let players smoothly hop between servers by flying or sailing, effectively connecting servers together into a unified world that players can travel around. Facepunch added that the new server setup could also allow for arctic maps and improvements such as better AI and increased resources in dangerous environments in the future, with Nexus sitting alongside the existing server setup when it arrives sometime in 2024.
Facepunch also addressed the issue of cheaters, promising that they are working to address exploits and cheats - but without revealing more at the apparent risk of undoing their anti-cheat efforts.
“Last year, we overdoubled our support team to aid in player support issues, which included anti-cheat matters,” the studio wrote in an update post. “This year we're dedicating more resources into anti cheat than ever and exploring some more radical measures.”
For all the improvements and updates due to arrive throughout 2024, there is one long-requested addition that won’t see a release this year: pets. Facepunch confirmed that they had worked on developing pets “for several months”, but ultimately stopped the project as the result of having “several obstacles to overcome first”. While pets apparently remain on the long list of goals, the developers confirmed that pets won’t make it into Rust this year.