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12:00am EST - The Power Trip Update and forced wipe go live today at 2pm EST / 7pm BST, bringing one of the largest monument overhauls Rust has seen in a while. The main focus this month is Player Maintained Monuments, with a new island-wide electrical grid powering machinery, rewards, and events across several familiar locations.

The update also introduces the new Satellite Crash event, crude oil production at Dome, a functional car lift at Oxum’s Gas Station, food freezers at Supermarket, plenty of balance and quality-of-life changes, and two new pieces of premium content in the Bar Games Pack and Stone Sculpture.

Our update stream goes live at 1pm EST.

Player Maintained Monuments

Player Maintained Monuments are the centerpiece of this month’s update, turning several existing monuments into connected pieces of island infrastructure rather than places players simply visit for loot. Power Plant serves as the heart of the system, with the amount of electricity restored there determining which new features become available elsewhere on the map.

Heavy Fuses, electrical boxes, pipes, terminals, pumps, generators, valves, and other machinery now connect Power Plant with Launch Site, Dome, Oil Rig, Airfield, Water Treatment, Oxum’s Gas Station, Supermarket, and selected roadside locations. Keeping the grid running will provide some valuable benefits, but it will also require an ongoing supply of fuses and a little cooperation—or competition—from the rest of the server.

Power Plant and Heavy Fuses

New Heavy Fuses can be found in ordinary loot crates and Underwater Labs crates, although their spawn rate has been reduced during the final balance passes. At Power Plant they go into a new heavy fuse box, with each additional bank of fuses raising the island to another power stage and unlocking more of the connected systems.

Getting there runs through Power Plant's existing puzzle. The old green card route is unchanged, and the heavy fuse box sits inside the green card room alongside the new red recycler. From there a switch and an ordinary fuse open up the blue card room upstairs, which is where the plant actually gets switched on. None of it is complicated once you know the way, but it does mean restoring the island grid is a proper monument run rather than something you can quietly do with a fuse in your pocket. There is also a second loot room at the plant that only becomes accessible once enough power has been restored, so the grid pays out directly at Power Plant on top of everything it switches on elsewhere.

Once inserted at Power Plant, Heavy Fuses cannot be removed or swapped. Trying to pull one out will give you a helpful electrical reminder not to do that. All installed fuses gradually lose condition, with fuses below 30% deteriorating faster. If none have fallen that low yet, the weakest fuse receives the extra deterioration instead. Steam rising from the cooling tower, powered turbines, lighting, generator effects, and new sounds provide visual and audio feedback as the grid comes online.

Recycler changes

Recyclers are receiving a major rebalance as part of the power system. Standard green recyclers outside safe zones now run at 50% efficiency by default, restoring to their previous 60% once enough power has been restored, and additionally picking up a duration buff from 5 seconds to 4.5 seconds once Power Plant is at maximum power.

Power Plant's nearby green recycler has been replaced by a new red recycler sitting in exactly the same spot, inside the usual green card room. It becomes usable at the highest power stage, currently returns 75% of materials, and runs on a four-second cycle, making it the best recycler on the island if players are willing to keep Power Plant running long enough to use it. It also shares a room with the heavy fuse box, so one green card run gets you both the grid and the reward.

Roadside power poles

Some electrical poles beside roads now have working electrical boxes and can be climbed without placing a ladder. While the island grid is active, these boxes provide up to 30 total power spread across six connections.

The actual output scales with the percentage of Heavy Fuses currently installed at Power Plant, so a partially restored grid will provide less than the full 30 power. Players can connect a wire without having building privilege, but removing a connection is protected by the building authorization at the other end, making it harder to casually unplug someone else’s setup.

Satellite Crash

The biggest new event connected to the power grid is Satellite Crash. A new control station in one of the Launch Site buildings is powered up with Tech Trash and an Aiming Module, and needs a well-restored grid before it will come to life. The existing MLRS Aiming Module has been renamed simply "Aiming Module" now that it serves more than one purpose.

The terminal displays a selection of satellites along with their payload size and remaining thruster burns. After selecting one, players can spend those limited burns through a set of coordinate controls to shift its automatically chosen target or tighten the size of the possible landing area. Using more fuel gives you better control over where it lands, but preserving that fuel can make the eventual salvage much more valuable.

Once the target is locked, the descent takes around 10 minutes, with the estimated location and countdown visible at the control station. The satellite eventually comes screaming across the terrain before smashing into the selected area with its own impact effects, explosion, audio, and global event presentation. The descent trail lingers for a few seconds afterwards, so anyone who saw it come down has a decent read on where to start running.

The new satellite crates remain too hot to open for five minutes, while the main wreckage takes eight minutes before it can be safely harvested. The remains also sit inside a small but intense radiation zone, so bring something to cover yourself with alongside whatever you were planning to fight over the loot with. Crates can contain High Quality Metal, Tech Trash, CCTV Cameras, Targeting Computers, turret-related components, and a chance of another Aiming Module.

Three new Thruster Modules can also be mined from the wreckage. Their condition is based on how much satellite fuel remained when the landing target was locked, and they can only be recycled. Leaving thruster burns unused can preserve up to half of each module's condition, allowing one to recycle into as many as 12 Explosives. That creates a pretty interesting tradeoff between dropping the satellite somewhere convenient and preserving the most valuable parts of the wreck.

The wreckage has its own health bar and protections similar to Patrol Helicopter remains. Clans will also pick up events for launching a satellite and for looting the crates afterwards. Once the event is complete, the Launch Site system enters a recalibration period of 12 to 16 in-game hours — roughly 30 to 40 minutes on default server settings — before another satellite can be targeted.

Crude oil at Dome

Dome's Sphere Tank now has three working crude oil pumps that can be connected to the inlet of a vehicle tanker module using the Hose Tool. Before the pumps begin producing, players need to activate new switches inside the red puzzle rooms at Small or Large Oil Rig, and those switches only come alive once enough power has been restored at Power Plant.

Small Oil Rig provides roughly half production, while Large Oil Rig provides the full rate. Activating both produces around 1.5 times the Large Oil Rig output, with the pumps running for roughly 20 minutes. Once the tanker has been filled, the crude can be removed through its output while the vehicle is positioned on a car lift.

This gives modular vehicles and tanker modules a substantial new purpose, while also connecting two offshore monuments, Dome, Power Plant, and the vehicle system into one fairly involved resource chain.

Airfield terminals

A refreshed control tower has arrived at Airfield. On the second floor you'll find two new terminals that charge from fuse boxes connected to the power grid. The smaller one increases the rate at which airdrops fall across the map. The larger one calls in a Chinook resupply crate to drop near the airfield tarmac.

Both terminals slowly lose charge once activated, and only become available again after that residual charge has fully drained, which is what paces the two events. They also draw from the same supply in practice, so charging both at once is difficult, and the Chinook side is the more demanding of the two — expect a partially restored grid to mean airdrops only.

New screens, indicator wires, powered doors, lighting, and audio provide feedback as the terminals charge and become available.

Water Treatment and roadside water

Water Treatment Plant now has an intact water tank at its centre, fed by two new gearboxes. With the Power Plant grid live, you place a gear into a gearbox and interact with it to start the valve wheel spinning, which pressurises the tank. Gears are consumed as the wheel turns and cannot be pulled back out once inserted, so this is an ongoing cost rather than a one-time setup.

Once the tank reaches full pressure its blades start spinning and clear the blockages, restoring water flow to pipes across the map. Pressure gauges on the tank and gearboxes show where you are. The cold start is the expensive part — coming back periodically to top the pressure up and keep the blockages clear is far cheaper than starting from zero.

Water pipes spawn around the roadsides of the map and sit empty until Water Treatment is running. Each pipe has three Hose Tool connections, and its output received a substantial late buff. Finding one near a powered roadside electrical pole could provide a very convenient location for a large farm, assuming nobody else on the server has the same idea.

Oxum’s Gas Station

Oxum's Gas Station now has a functional garage. It powers up either from the island grid or from a small backup generator around the side of the building running on Low Grade Fuel, so it still works when the grid is down. A switch on the outer wall opens and closes the garage door, provided that switch has power.

Inside, the car lift raises and lowers modular vehicles for editing and repair, and provides a place to extract crude from tanker modules, since crude can only be removed while the vehicle is on a lift. The lift itself is immortal, but what sits on it is not — crush colliders at the top and bottom of its travel will gib a vehicle driven into the ceiling or the ground, and that now extends to horses, bikes, and anything else that ends up in the mechanism.

There is also a reason to put the lift back where you found it. Raising it reveals a cave underneath with a chance at higher quality car part spawns, including a new advanced vehicle parts crate that is visually distinct from the regular version and stocked with medium-quality parts rather than low-quality components.

The garage should be genuinely useful for working with vehicles, although a set of colliders that turn cars into component soup will obviously see plenty of less productive use too.

Supermarket freezers

Supermarkets now have working freezers that become active while the island grid is running. Rather than filling up once and sitting there, they run frequent small refreshes, with a much larger and more varied restock arriving every so many cycles. A big refresh also can't be wiped out by the smaller ones that follow it unless somebody has actually opened the freezer since, so a freezer nobody has touched in a while is worth more than one that has been picked over.

It may not be as dramatic as dragging a satellite out of orbit, but free chilled food is still free chilled food — and something at Supermarket finally appears to understand basic food safety.

Bar Games Pack

The new Bar Games Pack adds playable games and a collection of pub-style items for player bases. The main attraction is a full pool table supporting both single-player and multiplayer matches, with working ball physics, aiming controls, sound effects, scoring rules, and proper game resets.

Precise aiming can be handled through smaller mouse movements, while A and D provide larger adjustments. The balls now begin in the correct rack, visibly fall into the pockets instead of instantly disappearing, and use improved networking so they do not vanish or launch out of the table when players leave and return to the area. Placement, pickup, repair, mounting, dismounting, and low-framerate behavior also received extensive polish.

The playable dartboard supports solo and multiplayer games with proper scoring, player-colored darts, bullseye effects, win effects, and a built-in how-to-play note. Dartboards can even be placed on boats, because clearly what Rust’s naval combat was missing was competitive darts.

The pack also includes a powered jukebox with an LCD display showing the current radio station or cassette, wooden and metal bar stools, skins for the Mini Fridge and the Shotgun Trap, and bar-themed wall and floor coverings plus decorative sprays. Three additional radio stations have also been added to the game.

Stone Sculpture

Stone Sculpture is arriving as a separate premium item, giving players a much more advanced way to create custom artwork than the older Ice Sculpture system. Instead of repeatedly hitting a block in the world, interacting with the sculpture’s pedestal opens a dedicated editing interface with much finer control.

The editor includes subtractive carving, additive sculpting, push, pull, slab, Clip Curve, and smoothing tools. Players can choose between different shapes and adjust their size, strength, and hardness, while an on-screen guide previews which portion of the stone will be added or removed. Brush sizes are limited automatically by the remaining sculptable area, preventing tools from extending far outside the block.

Stone Sculptures also support bullet penetration, with shots losing 20% of their damage as they pass through. The system received extensive performance, networking, collision, save, undo, lighting, camera, and interface work, so players should be free to create whatever tasteful monuments the Rust community is famous for.

High wall upkeep

High External Wooden Walls, High External Stone Walls, their matching gates, and the Legacy and Ice variants now contribute to building upkeep when connected to a nearby structure.

Their cost is a static 20% upkeep rather than the size-based percentage applied to the rest of your base, which places them squarely between building blocks at 10% and 33%. Large compounds will need to account for their perimeter when stocking the Tool Cupboard, and external Tool Cupboards get noticeably more expensive to maintain.

Balance changes

Several additional balance changes are included with the update:

Auto Turret crafting cost increased from 10 to 25 High Quality Metal.
AKs once again spawn with four Rifle Bullets in the magazine.
Bucket Helmet crafting cost has been reduced.
Bucket Helmet projectile and bite protection increased by 5%.
Collared Shirt gains 2% projectile protection and 3% radiation protection.
Blowpipe Cloth cost reduced from 25 to 10.
Blowpipe Wood Dart damage increased from 40 to 50.
Snow Jacket cold and bite protection increased.
Spoiled Produce stack size increased from 10 to 20.
Catapult reload time increased from three seconds to six.
Wolf Headdress now requires a Workbench Level 1.
Nest Hat and the Lunar New Year animal masks now function as Wolf Headdress skins.
Resource nodes can no longer spawn inside safe zones.
Fishing Villages now sell usable Kayaks and Paddles rather than blueprints.
Water Well vendors carry less general stock and take longer to restock, while ammunition and Medical Syringes retain their previous availability.
Siege weapons can once again take fire damage as intended.

Workbench recycle bin

The Workbench Recycle Bin upgrade now has its own interactable 16-slot storage container. When a craft is cancelled, the returned ingredients are automatically deposited into the bin rather than being pushed back into the player’s inventory or dropped because there is no room.

The storage is take-only, so players cannot manually add items or use it as an extra general-purpose box. It should still make cancelling large crafting queues much cleaner, particularly when your inventory is already packed.

Bags and compass markers

Beds and sleeping bags now have an option in their radial menu to display them on the compass. Only one spawn point can be tracked at a time, allowing players to mark an important base, raid bag, or other location without covering the compass in icons.

Bags can also be favorited, making important spawn points easier to pick out from the increasingly horrifying list that appears later in a wipe.

Shield toggle

Players now have a dedicated option to keep an equipped shield strapped to their back rather than automatically holding it. The shield can be toggled between its carried and readied states, letting players keep it equipped without constantly having it in their hands. Switching between the two stances has a short cooldown of a couple of seconds, added deliberately so players commit to a stance rather than spamming the toggle mid-fight.

Several related animation and visibility problems have also been cleaned up, including the compass clipping through the shield while bracing.

Demo viewer overhaul

Rust’s redesigned demo viewer is also being included, although it currently needs to be enabled with demo.newui true. The new interface includes an updated timeline, track controls, hierarchy and inspector panels, scene tools, lighting settings, puppets, animation tracks, dolly cameras, camera previews, depth-of-field controls, undo and redo support, and improvements to cinematic exporting.

The previous viewer remains available as a fallback while players and creators get used to the replacement.

Apartment changes

Apartment rent boxes are now capped at 72 hours of Scrap, preventing players from depositing extremely long rental periods in advance. Breaking into an occupied apartment with a Master Key now uses a dedicated held-key animation and requires the player to aim at the door lock with the center of the screen.

The break-in interaction will no longer appear on empty apartments or while another break-in is already underway, and opening or closing the door during the process should no longer cancel it unexpectedly. A new key-jingling sound plays during the break-in, while several first-person, third-person, save, and synchronization problems have also been fixed.

Players dismounting the Apartment Complex swing set at speed will now be ragdolled and launched based on their momentum. Finally, the swing technology catches up with the rest of Rust’s transportation options.

Other changes

Weapon attachment equip sounds now have a maximum audible distance of 20 meters, reduced from 60.
Mortar controls have been adjusted for finer angle calculations.
Vehicle item icons can now be used as chat emojis.
Emoji search now works with display names and partial matches.
Sprays are sorted consistently in their radial menu.
Deployed boomboxes now have individual volume controls.
A Creative Mode indicator appears when a player is using Creative Mode.
The Heavy Fuse inventory icon has been made brighter.
The old Legacy F1 menu has been removed.
The fullscreen blur no longer slowly fades away when closing the inventory or F1 menu.
Main menu and F1 menu opening performance has been improved.
Rust+ camera resolution has been doubled without increasing the number of server raycasts.
Rust+ no longer receives the procedural map seed.
Vending Machine, Cargo Ship, Patrol Helicopter, and Traveling Vendor map markers are no longer sent to Rust+.
Reload animations now display correctly on remote players.
Horse sounds now play correctly.
Player footstep frequency has been corrected after an animation-speed regression.
Industrial generator audio falloff has been fixed.
Deployable Netting no longer sounds like a chain-link fence when struck.
Cactus variants no longer produce metallic impact sounds.
The Small Backpack workshop model has been fixed.
Auto Turret and Industrial Auto Turret culling distances now match.
The interior bus now correctly spells “EMERGENCY,” saving the update at the last possible moment.
A large collection of items now use proper dropped world models instead of appearing as generic Burlap Sacks.
A dedicated rebindable key has been added for snapping, used by both the wire tool and deployable placement, along with a fix for autorun interfering with wire tools.
Wooden, elite, and Bradley loot crates and their variants have received new models, textures, and destruction pieces.
Comfort is now calculated from the player's centre rather than their feet, and 23 deployables including plushies, trophies, balloons, and rugs had incorrectly configured comfort ranges corrected. The Bear Rug's comfort radius has been increased from 1.1 to 3 meters, though full comfort still requires standing within 2 meters.
Clans now receive events for inserting a Heavy Fuse at Power Plant, activating an Oil Rig switch, powering Water Treatment, launching a satellite, and looting satellite crates.
Navmesh generation is roughly twice as fast, with fixes for missing tiles, saves that failed to load, and several NPC movement problems.
A low-level memory pooling system was replaced with a version measured at up to 20% faster in developer tests, and JSON handling was rewritten to reduce unnecessary garbage collection.
Loot containers can no longer spawn item stacks larger than an item's maximum stack size, splitting them into multiple stacks instead.
Wooden arrows have been revamped with new meshes and fletching, requiring updated rigs and prefabs across every weapon that used them.
The Small Backpack is this month's workshop skinnable, and the first wearable in a while.
Startup loading times are roughly twice as fast on most machines, with only essential assets loaded before the main menu.
The game UI navigation order has been changed back so the crafting button sits on the right again.
Texture sharpness has been improved overall, particularly when using TSSAA or DLSS.
The Vagabond's deep sea treasure mission no longer requires returning to the Vagabond after finding the treasure, and both it and the Hunter's mission now display mystery reward icons.
The Hunter NPC's treasure mission has been renamed from "Vagabond Treasure" to "Treasure Hunter" to stop it being confused with the Vagabond's own mission.
The console input field character limit has been removed, and the F1 console no longer stalls when displaying long text.

Fixes

A sizable batch of fixes is also included:

Fixed Hardcore players being unable to loot sleepers inside safe zones.
Fixed Softcore Tier 2 and Tier 3 Workbench corpses missing loot containers.
Fixed Armored Hot Air Balloons rebuilding with the wrong maximum health after a restart.
Fixed placement checks incorrectly blocking Wooden and Barbed Wooden Barricades.
Fixed Triangle Planters not snapping correctly to triangle floors.
Fixed items being undraggable into the bottom row of the main inventory.
Fixed the compass clipping through a shield while bracing.
Fixed the screen flickering when beginning an NPC conversation.
Fixed fuel pump amounts being clamped or calculated incorrectly.
Fixed a one-second freeze the first time the crafting menu was opened.
Fixed crafting recipes refusing valid reskinned ingredients.
Fixed NPCs sometimes becoming stuck rather than following their paths.
Fixed several painting controls behaving differently depending on frame rate.
Fixed teammate nametags disappearing while swimming near the water’s surface.
Fixed custom UI tooltips briefly appearing in the wrong location.
Fixed some custom UI buttons initially displaying the wrong color.
Fixed text colors not working correctly on ornate frames.
Fixed the F1 menu blur fading incorrectly when closing the menu.
Fixed custom pie menus opening over an already-open inventory.
Fixed Workbench Level 3 and BBQ placement clipping through wallpapers.
Fixed some shadows displaying incorrectly in recorded demos.
Fixed Pool Table dismounts occasionally killing players.
Fixed pool balls being missing after players moved out of network range.
Fixed pool balls occasionally glitching out of the table.
Fixed Battering Ram hit detection problems.
Fixed a Water Wheel destruction error.
Fixed an Apartment terminal post-processing error.
Fixed Apartment Room save exceptions under the new multithreaded saving system.
Fixed Mini Fridge destruction pieces remaining illuminated after the fridge was destroyed.
Fixed a memory leak regression in the newer pooling system.
Removed a confusing local chat message when first spectating another player.
Fixed clothing alt-looted from corpse bags not being worn when you were already wearing something, and being dropped rather than moved into the body bag when your inventory was full.
Fixed sleeping bags displaying an outdated name when inspected with a Hammer.
Fixed elevator buttons not working after a server restart until the elevator had been used once.
Fixed grenades sometimes dropping at your feet instead of being thrown after switching away from and back to them.
Fixed shields being visible when they should not have been, along with several melee throwing bugs.
Fixed the Collared Shirt having no protection values at all.
Fixed inventory limit rules on modular cars.
Fixed the Supermarket freezer not refreshing its contents after a server restart, and other loot containers restarting rather than resuming their refresh countdowns on reboot.
Fixed liquid containers continuing to drain into a connected container after the connection was cleared from the source.
Fixed crude pumps not producing or storing oil locally when connected to a tanker that already contained water.
Fixed viewmodel attachments sometimes not appearing when rapidly switching between weapons.
Fixed reskinning a Mini Fridge not preserving its storage adaptor.
Fixed Escape opening the main menu while a pie menu was still open.
Fixed the map zooming in indefinitely.
Fixed nametags appearing to float higher above players' heads at longer distances when autosizing was enabled.
Fixed roadside car wrecks and telephone poles occasionally spawning close enough to rail tracks to block trains.
Fixed scientists not spawning at Deep Sea, and several cases of NPCs failing to spawn, move, or flee when a player was unreachable.
Fixed sharks not playing their subtle movement sounds while charging.
Fixed the Wolf Headdress having a five minute despawn time after its skin setup.
Fixed Sunglasses lenses using the wrong materials, with some appearing turquoise instead of black.
Fixed the M4 Shotgun's flashlight and laser sight being incorrectly positioned in third person.
Fixed the twig foundation placement guide's rotation not matching its texture.
Fixed a floating wire at Power Plant and a set of advanced vehicle part spawns clipping into the ground at Oxum's.
Fixed powerline pole cables hanging in an inaccurate position now that the steps are no longer always present.
Fixed the clan leaderboard never refreshing after its first load.
Fixed pasting a long string into the console being slow.
Fixed +prevskin and +nextskin not being bound by default.
Fixed barricades being placeable on top of the Water Treatment tank, and not being placeable on terrain beside a water pipe outlet.
Fixed being able to continue stealing items in an apartment or shop after a break-in has ended.
Fixed being able to jump through the ceiling of the medium apartment.
Fixed being unable to shoot other players inside apartments in Hardcore.
Fixed being able to move safe zone NPCs with a Hot Air Balloon.
Fixed decals not appearing at all on low settings.
Fixed viewmodels for high fire rate weapons glitching at low frame rates.
Fixed Paintball overalls always appearing white, and the Paintball Gun world model not reflecting its current pellet count or colour.
Fixed health bar blurring and artifacts at low UI scale.
Fixed Rust+ cameras not updating while controlling a turret.
Fixed the workshop item list not scrolling all the way down.
Fixed main menu errors when Steam is unreachable.
Fixed several melee antihack false positives.
Fixed animals walking through vine trees, and RustNav.Draw occasionally killing a player's connection.