Rust's Spring Clean update nerfs the shield meta and boosts early game energy

The Rust April update is here, and after a couple of months spent deploying and refining its massive Naval overhaul, Facepunch Studios is getting back to something a little simpler. Don’t let that fool you, however, because the ‘Spring Clean’ patch notes are still packed with welcome additions. These include the new Water Wheel, which could prove a great power solution in the early game, and a nerf to the troublesome shield meta that has become increasingly dominant in the survival game of late.

At the top of these new Rust patch notes are two more craftable items. The Armored Ladder Hatch is unlocked at tier three for 60 Scrap, and built using 35 High-Quality Metal, six Gears, and a Wooden Ladder. That makes it quite the investment, but a worthwhile one if you’re looking for some reliable protection for your access points.

The Water Wheel adds to our renewable energy options. It’s best used in a river, generating up to 30 power if well-placed. You can put one in the ocean if you want, but it’ll be more inconsistent due to the changing tides. For a better result, you can use it as a human hamster wheel, which can generate up to double the energy output if you put in the work. Alternatively, force a handcuffed prisoner in there and encourage them to do it for you.

Facepunch says shields have become “a bit too popular over the last month,” overstepping their boundaries due to overly generous hitboxes that were active all the time. With the new update, that bigger blocking zone will now only apply while you’re actually holding the shield up, with a smaller, more square-shaped hitbox the rest of the time. A bug that caused shooting shields to generate additional recoil has also been squashed.

One of the most satisfying changes in Rust’s decade-plus history is its new tech-tree unlock chaining. Have enough Scrap to hand to open up an entire research path? Instead of having to laboriously click through each stage one by one, you can now select the last item in a list and then choose to unlock them all at once. This isn’t just a time saver, it also comes with the rapid-fire animation and sound of them all lighting up in sequence one after another, and it hits my brain just right.

There’s a new radial menu for toggling low-light solutions. Hold your chosen keybind, and you’ll be able to manually switch each of your equipped light sources on and off, one by one. This lets you activate your night-vision goggles without also flipping on your flashlight, for example. If you wish to simply turn them all on or off as before, you can tap the key instead. Facepunch says it’s considering expanding this into a “more generic ‘item state toggle’ feature in the future” for the likes of weapon fire mode, if it proves popular.

In search of “the true spirit of fishing,” Facepunch is nerfing the ability to repeatedly AFK farm in the same spot. Catch too many fish in one place within a certain time, and it’ll be marked as ‘overfished,’ leaving you with nothing but junk on your reel until you give the area long enough to replenish. This value can be adjusted by server admins if you feel it’s too punishing (or too generous). Fishing in the Deep Sea, meanwhile, no longer brings in Herrings or Anchovies, concentrating the loot pool towards higher-value targets.

There’s a range of new, differently colored buttons, which are also the first implementation of nested radial menus in Rust. Facepunch says this initial rollout “should allow for more complex nested menus in the future.” Elsewhere, Chainsaws now always hit the best part when cutting down trees, plants stay ripe for a full 24 hours (up from 14), and you can assign a custom reset value for your IO Counters. Sleeping Bags on the death screen now indicate if they’re in the Deep Sea, and there’s a radius on Watchtower building so you can’t spam several of them in close proximity any more.

Rounding out this month’s additions is a new-look UI for the F1 console, complete with handy command list screen, visual remakes for the Salvaged Axe and Medical Syringe, more custom chat label colors, and an altimeter for hot air balloons. Facepunch has also implemented its own terrain rendering system, replacing the old Unity model. It notes that this “should look broadly the same visually,” but by moving much of the work across to the GPU you should notice an overall gain in CPU performance.

The Rust Spring Clean update is live now. The Easter Egg Hunt is also underway and will run until Thursday April 16. That means there are new themed cosmetics in the Rust item store, including a particularly terrifying Easter Bunny suit. I’ll be having nightmares about that one for a while.