Rust "Breach and Clear" (September 2026): Monument Blockers, a Group Upkeep Tax, and a Month of Server Performance
Last verified: September 4, 2026. Released Thursday, September 3, 2026 at 2PM EDT with the monthly forced wipe.
September's wipe is the month Facepunch went after two things at once: how fast the first hours of a wipe play out, and how large groups bypass the game's difficulty by sheer numbers. Monument blockers slow early access to red-keycard loot, and Tool Cupboards now charge an upkeep tax that scales with the number of players in the base. Around those two sit HQM ore nodes, a drone marketplace that needs the Power Plant running, breakable attack helicopter armour, a handbrake for modular cars, and the largest set of server performance changes in months. Full details are in Facepunch's official Breach and Clear post. Here is what changed and what it means for a server.
Monument blockers
- Where: monuments with red keycard puzzle rooms.
- What they do: block the route to the loot until destroyed. They take a significant amount of damage to break and do not respawn once down. A handful of weaker blockers can be broken with melee.
- Decay: a blocker that is not destroyed within the first 24 hours of the wipe starts to decay on its own.
Facepunch's own framing is modest: they do not expect a large effect on progression speed, only a more interesting early wipe for the first players to reach those monuments.
Upkeep group scaling
Tool Cupboards now apply an additional upkeep tax based on how many players are in a base. The count includes:
- anyone authorised directly on the TC,
- anyone deauthorised from the TC in the last 24 hours,
- anyone authorised on a code lock in the base, including guest code access,
- anyone deauthorised from a code lock in the last 24 hours.
The rate is tiered:
| Players counted | Extra upkeep |
|---|---|
| First 4 | none |
| Next 6 | 2% per player |
| Every player after that | 4% per player |
| Cap | 300% |
So a TC with 6 players counted pays 4% more upkeep, and one with 12 pays 20% more. Hover over the upkeep cost while the TC is open to see the rate being applied. The stated intent is to give large groups a problem to solve without touching solos and small groups. Server owners get a set of ConVars in the Decay class to adjust the behaviour or disable it entirely.
HQM nodes and collectables
High quality metal ore nodes and collectables now spawn across the island. They are extremely scarce, with the best odds in the Jungle.
The drone marketplace now needs the Power Plant
The Drone Marketplace is connected to the Power Plant system from August's Power Trip update. The marketplace has a battery that charges while 4 or more fuses are active in the Power Plant, and it starts accepting purchases at 50%. With at least one fuse inserted the battery holds its level; below 50% the marketplace deactivates again. The charge shows on the marketplace map screen. In the reactions on Facepunch's post this was the least popular change of the month, which is worth knowing before players report the marketplace as broken.
Combat and balance
Attack helicopter and armoured HAB armour now falls off
Cockpit armour on the attack helicopter comes off in stages as it takes damage, exposing the pilot and gunner:
| Attack heli | Panel lost | Armoured HAB | Panel lost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 80% health (680 hp) | left | 90% (2250 hp) | left |
| 70% (595 hp) | right | 80% (2000 hp) | right |
| 60% (510 hp) | front | 70% (1750 hp) | back |
| 60% (1500 hp) | front |
Equipping HAB armour now plays an effect and takes 3 seconds.
Other combat changes
- Medical Honey Bandage: a new Workbench Level 1 healing item between the Bandage and the Medical Syringe, made from honey.
- Radwater in sprinklers now seeps through more armour types and does significant radiation damage to full kits. Hazmat suits still counter it.
- SAM sites vs drones: faster missiles and a larger detonation fuse against drones, so hostile drones go down reliably.
- Heavy Plate Helmet muffles game audio for the wearer and costs more to craft; Heavy Plate Jacket and Pants now make movement noise other players can hear.
- Semi-Automatic Pistol: more damage falloff at range, slightly higher crafting cost.
- Grenades: stack sizes reduced to 3 for the F1, Bee Grenade, Molotov and Flashbang; Beancans to 4.
- Homing launcher locks on faster. SMG bodies are slightly more common, rifle bodies slightly rarer.
- Large Medkit now removes radiation like the syringe and plays a sound when used. Pies last longer, and the Hunter's pie bleed reduction went up.
- Longsword swings are slightly more accurate with less time between swings. Swamp trees now yield wood in line with other trees.
Vehicles
Modular car steering, turning and suspension were retuned, including for players on higher latency, and cars gained a handbrake on CTRL for hairpin turns and drifting. Under the hood, vehicles are now pooled instead of destroyed and recreated at the edge of network range, which removes the 20 to 30 ms stutters players got when driving past them. Boats are next on that list, and a boat's decay timer now saves correctly across restarts.
Quality of life and art
- Flashlight remake: new model, textures and animations; right-click toggles it like a torch.
- Arrows got new models and fletching. Over 70 new world models replace the burlap sack for dropped items.
- Random skin when crafting: a new option at the top of the skin list applies a random unlocked skin to each craft, saved per item.
- Paint brush visualizer projects the brush onto the object while painting, and hex codes work in the colour picker again.
- Water Treatment Plant rework: each gearbox turned fully gives 3 real-time hours of water flow, both give 6, output scales with tank pressure, pipes lose water when the tank runs dry, and there are more pipes on the map.
- Composter UI now shows how long items take to become fertilizer.
- Workshop skinning opens for all four Wood Armor pieces, and the Crystal Assault Rifle DLC skin arrives in five colours.
Server performance: what changed under the hood
This is the part of the post that matters most to anyone running a server, and it is substantial.
- Network range audit. Around 300 entity types that are never seen from far away, such as signs, mushrooms and driftwood, moved to the "close" network range. Less network overhead for client and server, no gameplay change.
- New navmesh, still opt-in. The navmesh introduced in an earlier patch behind the
-useNewNavmeshlaunch parameter has had its performance improved, save sizes reduced and bugs fixed. Facepunch is enabling it on some of its own servers this month and wants to make it the default in a hotfix or next patch. Server owners: the navmesh is saved to disk and loaded on restart, so boots can be faster, and NPC navigation moves off the main thread onto background threads. Players: animals may wander into bases or monuments. - Events survive restarts. Oil rigs, cargo ship, patrol helicopter, Bradley and satellite crash sites now save and load their state, so a daily restart no longer deletes the hackable crate you were sitting on.
- Physics engine. A new BVH broadphase in the customised PhysX build means physics cost scales with what changes rather than with the total collider count, which grows all wipe. On one Facepunch server, weekend performance doubled after the change.
- Scripting on worker threads. Facepunch found a way to run Unity scripting APIs off the main thread in release builds. First use: server occlusion generation on a 4.5k map dropped from 44 seconds to 22.
- Memory. Around 10 MB less across world objects, roughly 630 MB less VRAM from resized ambient occlusion textures, and early testing shows over 0.5 GB saved overall. The old Mutex pool is deprecated and will be removed next patch.
- New ConVar:
deepsea.terrain_everywhereenables deep sea terrain on the main land.
Facepunch official servers
EU Primitive 2, CAN Primitive 1 and US West Primitive 1 are retired to consolidate players, with other primitive servers remaining in those regions. EU Hardcore 1 and US East Hardcore 1 drop from 4250 to 3750 map size.
Server admin notes for the September cycle
- Forced wipe landed September 3, 2PM EDT. Standard first-Thursday cadence; the next PC forced wipe is October 1, 2026. Full cadence in the Rust wipe schedule guide.
- Plugin window. As every month, Oxide/Carbon and plugin updates trail the patch by hours to days. Update the framework first, then the plugins, then open the doors.
- Decide your upkeep-tax policy and say it in the description. The Decay ConVars let you keep flat upkeep, soften the tiers, or run vanilla. Large-group servers will ask on day one.
- Marketplace complaints are a Power Plant question. If drone deliveries stop, check fuses before checking plugins. Anything that modifies the Power Plant now affects the marketplace too.
- Monument blockers decay after 24 hours, so a low-pop server that never breaks them still opens up by day two.
- Test the new navmesh on a staging server first. It is one launch flag away and will likely become default soon; better to find out how your NPCs and base layouts react before that.
- Daily restarts are safer. With event state saved across restarts, a scheduled restart during oil rig or cargo no longer wipes the loot. Keep the schedule, lose the apology posts.
- Two small ones players will notice: unlocked garage doors can be picked up without building privilege, consistent with other doors, and Dome fuel pumps now store 1,000 crude instead of 10,000.
Previous monthly updates: Power Trip (August) · Common Ground (July) · Built Different (June) · Spring Clean (April).
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