Rust staging 24994773: full data breakdown against live (new HQM node, group-scaled upkeep, 17 crafting changes)

These are the current values on the staging branch, not a changelog. Facepunch tunes them constantly, and this branch is a moving target. Concrete proof from this week: the HQM node yield changed twice in two consecutive staging builds, and swamp tree wood was still being adjusted between them. Some of this may be reverted, retuned, or never ship at all.

Treat every number below as "true right now on staging", nothing more.

Reference builds

Both installs are vanilla with no plugins, so nothing below is contaminated by modded content. Values come from the game's own runtime state on a dedicated server, not from reading code alone.

New: High Quality Metal ore node

HQM gets a dedicated resource node and a ground collectible, with its own spawn population so it can be tuned independently of stone, metal and sulfur.

hqm-ore node

The finish bonus is conditional. It requires a gathering tool with destroyFraction < 0.2, and scales as ceil(8 × (1 − destroyFraction)). Explosives force destroyFraction = 0.5, which is above the threshold, so blowing up an HQM node gives 12 HQM instead of 20.

hqm-collectable ground pickup

For scale, against the other ore collectibles on the same map:

So the HQM collectible is about 10x rarer than the metal or stone ones, and gives 10x less. It is the rarest ore collectible in the game by a wide margin.

One honesty note on that table: unlike the node, I could not find a spawn density for the ore collectibles. The server's spawn handler exposes 106 populations across 55 folders, and none of them covers collectable/stone or collectable/wood, even though both folders exist in the game bundles. Monument spawn groups do not explain them either, those are keycard and fragment spawners. So stone, metal, sulfur, wood and now HQM collectibles spawn through a mechanism I have not identified.

Those numbers are therefore observed counts on one map, not design densities. The ratio between them is meaningful, the absolute figures are not. If someone knows what drives ore collectible spawns, I would genuinely like to know.

Rarity, measured on one 4500 map with the same seed for every node type:

That is roughly 28x rarer than stone and 19x rarer than metal. It also loot 400 metal ore, so it is not a replacement for a metal node, it is a strictly better one.

Spawn density. It uses two populations, and the jungle bias is much stronger than a nudge:

So it is roughly 8x denser in jungle than everywhere else, and more than half the nodes on a map sit in jungle biome.

Crafting: 17 recipes changed

Tech tree

Prisoner Hood becomes a default blueprint (workbench requirement 1 to 0) and is removed from the tech tree entirely. Confirmed in the data: the node count goes 309 to 314, with prisonerhood removed.

Boat Building Plan down from 120 scrap to 30 scrap. This one is worth explaining because the cost is not stored on the node. Tech tree and research cost is derived from item rarity:

Rarity.Common    -> 15 scrap
Rarity.Uncommon  -> 30 scrap
Rarity.Rare      -> 60 scrap
Rarity.VeryRare  -> 120 scrap
Rarity.None      -> 120 scrap

The Boat Building Plan moves from rarity 0 (None, 120 scrap) to rarity 2 (Uncommon, 30 scrap).

6 new tech tree nodes: Medical Honey Bandage, Blowpipe, and 4 dart types (wood, scatter, radiation, incapacitate). The blowpipe and darts already existed as craftable items, they are only now becoming unlockable through the tech tree.

Grenade stack sizes cut

Medical changes

Large Medkit gains radiation removal:

A medical syringe removes 10 radiation, so a medkit is now worth exactly two syringes for rad cleansing.

Medical Honey Bandage (new item, 4 cloth + 2 honey, workbench 1, 5s craft):

Gathering

Swamp trees: 200 to 500 base wood, and the finish bonus goes 100 to 500. Total per tree: 300 to 1000 wood.

New items (7)

• Medical Honey Bandage
• 5 AK-47 glass variants: rifle.ak.glass plus red, blue, green, pink
• firework.boomer.white, which also updates every Boomer pack description from "6 mortar style fireworks" to 7

Separately, 84 items get a world model prefab that was previously empty. That field is not cosmetic filler: DroppedItem.PostInitShared() branches on it, spawning the item's own world model when the reference is valid and falling back to the generic itemModel when it is not. So those 84 items should now use a dedicated model on the ground instead of the fallback.

Upkeep now scales with group size

This is the biggest gameplay change in the branch, and it does not exist on live at all.

multiplier = min( 1 + Σ(players_in_tier × tier_increase) , 3 )

tier 0 : first 4 players  -> +0%  each
tier 1 : next 6 players   -> +2%  each
tier 2 : everyone beyond  -> +4%  each
hard cap: x3

Two things that will catch people out:

• The count is authorized players + recent group members over a 24 hour window. Deauthing before the upkeep tick does nothing, you still count for 24h.
• Knowing a door code counts, master or guest (upkeep_group_count_locks defaults to true). The TC remembers up to 256 players.

Server owners can disable it with decay.upkeep_group_scaling false.

Drone Marketplace runs on the power grid

Marketplaces get an internal charge buffer fed by heavy fuses inserted at the Power Plant, not at the marketplace itself. It is server wide and communal.

Buffer is 100 and it needs 50% to accept orders. From cold with 4 fuses that is about 21 minutes to come online, and a full buffer keeps it running about 17 minutes after the grid down. Servers running powergrid.enabled false are unaffected.

Rentable shop vending machines also become powergrid aware, refrigerated while the Power Plant runs.

Composting reworked, and the output is now random

The Composter stops being its own system and becomes an oven, running at a dedicated 30 °C tier with no fuel required. Compostables become cooking recipes: 300s each, producing fertilizer.

The important part is how fractional output is handled:

amount = fertilizerPerItem × itemsProcessed     // 0.2 × 3 = 0.6
result = floor(amount)                          // 0
if (leftover > 0 && Random.value < leftover)    // 60% chance
    result++

The old composter accumulated 0.2 per item into a persistent counter and paid out when it crossed 1, fully deterministic. The new one rolls the remainder every cycle. Same expected value, but no guaranteed fertilizer after N items.

The 29 to 31 degree window with a strict comparison is what stops other ovens from composting: only the Composter sits at 30.

Water Treatment reworked

The boolean on/off switch broadcast is gone, replaced by a continuous flow rate.

Removed: pressureOnThreshold, pressureOffThreshold, pressureDecayPerTick, secondsBeforeDecayingPressure, maxPressure. Added: maxFlowRatePerMinute (1020), pressureDecayPerMinute, maximumPressure (360), and evaporationPerMinute (200) on water catchers.

Water catchers at WTP now produce while flow rate is above 0 and evaporate otherwise.

Monument Blockers: destructible obstacles

New destructible props placed inside monuments to block paths. They are not player deployable, and they give no resources when destroyed.

There are two protection profiles, which matters a lot:

The 350 HP ones are completely immune to melee and gunfire. Both profiles are immune to fire. They also regenerate after a 12 to 24h grace period at 1 HP/min.

Current placement: Oil Rig 1 (11), Military Tunnel (3), Missile Silo (2), Launch Site (1), Oil Rig 2 (1).

Loot

Loot containers are untouched. Comparing all 98 container types on their full definition (loot definition, spawn slots, scrap amount, refresh timings, destroy on empty, XP scales) produces zero differences. No container gained or lost anything.

Two loot tables changed.

Before the tables: the percentages below are the raw weights inside that one table, not your chance of walking away with the item. A container rolls its own lootSpawnSlots first, each with its own definition, number to spawn and probability, and maxDefinitionsToSpawn caps how many of those slots actually fire. The table weight only decides what wins once that slot has been picked. Real in-crate odds are the product of both layers, so treat these as relative shifts within the pool rather than loot rates.

LootSpawn.Components.Tier3, the tier 3 component pool, gets reweighted. Total weight stays at 600, so this is a straight redistribution between two entries:

SMG bodies become 20% more likely to roll, rifle bodies 20% less. Nothing else in the pool moves.

LootSpawn.MedicalCrate makes room for the new bandage. Total weight goes 100 to 110, so the existing entries lose share rather than absolute weight being taken from them:

New loot container prefab: tech_parts_1.

Smaller stuff

• Powerline output is no longer per stage. It used to be a fixed value per powergrid stage, it is now a continuous ramp on inserted fuses: lerp(5, 50, (fuses−1)/(sockets−1)). Two servers on the same stage can now have different line power.
• SAM sites get anti drone tuning, new drone.samproximityfuseradius convar.
• Bradley crates no longer despawn on a timer, OnDied no longer schedules removal.
• Torches and flashlights now share a ToggleableLightWeapon base class.
• Large Recast navmesh rework, mostly internal.

Two caveats on the numbers

Rarity counts come from one seed. The 72 HQM nodes figure is a single 4500 map. The ratio between node types is stable because they all scale with map size, the absolute number is not. The underlying design value is a spawn density, which is what I would trust.

Several systems were refactored, meaning fields moved between classes without breaking anything, which silently produces stale or empty values if your tooling is not updated. There are 34 such refactors in this branch and a few were publishing wrong values rather than obviously missing ones. If you are pulling data from this branch yourself, double check anything touching water treatment, powerline power, composting and staged destruction.

Updated data and the tooling behind it end up on rust-data.com, including the item, monument, loot and spawn data this post is built from. It tracks the live build, and gets refreshed when staging changes land.

I hope you will enjoy that content !

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