Rust Shipshape Update (March 2026): What Server Admins Need to Know
The Shipshape update shipped on March 5, 2026 as the monthly patch following February's massive Naval overhaul. Rather than adding entirely new content, Facepunch focused on stability, quality-of-life fixes, and balance passes. For server admins this is arguably the more important release — it changes boat decay timers, overhauls deep-sea spawning performance, and unlocks electricity deployables on player boats, all of which affect how your server runs day-to-day.
Branch: Stable (main branch). No experimental opt-in required. Force-update your server with +app_update 258550 validate via SteamCMD.
Key Changes at a Glance
- Boat decay grace period extended from 12 hours to 24 hours after last activity
- Decay duration shortened from 18 hours to 12 hours (faster cleanup once decay starts)
- Day/night cycle extended — daytime increased by ~20 minutes
- Electricity, industrial, and water I/O items are now deployable on player boats
- Boat building blocks can be rotated or demolished at any time in edit mode (no 5-minute timer)
- Deep sea island network range increased from 300 m to 640 m
- Improved spawning performance for water junkpiles and deep sea entities
- Aim sway added when shooting weapons on a moving boat
Boat Decay: What Changed and Why It Matters
The original Naval Update shipped with aggressive decay settings that caught many players off-guard. Ships that hadn't been interacted with for just 12 hours would begin decaying, and the entire decay process completed in 18 hours — leaving a window of only 30 hours total before a fully built vessel was gone.
Shipshape corrects this in two ways:
| Setting | Before Shipshape | After Shipshape |
|---|---|---|
| Grace period (no decay) | 12 hours | 24 hours |
| Decay duration | 18 hours | 12 hours |
| Total lifespan (inactive) | 30 hours | 36 hours |
Admin tip: If you are running a low-pop server and want to prevent ghost ships and abandoned builds from cluttering the ocean, you can override decay via decay.scale in server.cfg. A value of 2.0 doubles the decay rate; 0.5 halves it.
Deep Sea Performance: Server-Side Improvements
One of the biggest complaints from server owners after the Naval Update was unexpected TPS drops around deep-sea islands and ghost ship patrol routes. Facepunch addressed this with several optimizations:
Spawning Overhead Reduction
Water junkpile and deep-sea entity spawning were rewritten to batch-process on background threads rather than the main simulation tick. On a 200-player server the improvement is noticeable — expect 5–10% lower average CPU usage in coastal zones.
Network Culling Range
The network update range for deep-sea islands was doubled from 300 m to 640 m. This means clients receive entity state data at a larger radius, which reduces the jarring pop-in effect when a boat approaches an island at speed. It does slightly increase bandwidth per connected player near those zones, but the tradeoff is a better experience overall.
Recommended server.cfg Tweaks Post-Shipshape
Electricity on Boats: Server Entity Count Impact
Shipshape unlocks electrical, industrial, and water I/O components for deployment on modular boats. Players can now wire up auto turrets, smart switches, and water catchers directly on their vessels. This is great for gameplay but has real implications for server entity budgets.
Entity limit warning: Each electrical component (wire, switch, turret) adds to the global entity count. On high-population servers already near the entity cap, heavily modded boats can push you over the limit. Monitor your entity count with entity.count in the F1 console and consider lowering server.entityrate if you see issues.
Useful Admin Commands for Boat Management
| Command | Effect |
|---|---|
entity.count |
Shows current total entity count on the server |
entity.find_radius boats 100 |
Lists boat entities within 100 m of your position |
boat.population [n] |
Sets the NPC/ambient boat population target |
ocean.patrol_count [n] |
Controls the number of active Ghost Ship events |
global.decay_tick_rate [s] |
How often (seconds) the decay system runs its tick |
Day Cycle Change: Player Behavior Impact
The roughly 20-minute increase to daytime is subtle but matters for server population. More daylight hours encourages exploration — players feel less rushed to reach safety before dark. However, it also means nocturnal raid windows (when vision is limited) are shorter, which some competitive PvP servers may want to adjust back via their time-scale settings.
PvP server tip: If your community prefers the original day/night balance, set env.time_scale to a slightly higher value (e.g., 1.2) during daytime to effectively shorten the longer day back toward the pre-Shipshape feel.
Oxide / uMod Plugin Compatibility
Facepunch did not introduce significant API breaks in Shipshape. However, any plugin that hooks into boat entity spawning or the electricity deployment system should be tested:
- Electricity-on-boats may conflict with plugins that whitelist deployables by entity type — update your whitelists.
- Boat spawn plugins that hard-coded the 12-hour grace timer need updating to reflect the new 24-hour value.
- Anti-grief plugins that track entity ownership on vehicles should be tested with the new rotatable boat blocks — the ownership model for rotated pieces changed slightly.
Wipe Schedule Note
Shipshape released on the first Thursday of March 2026, which is the standard forced-wipe date. All servers wiped on March 5. The next forced wipe aligns with the April 2026 update (first Thursday of April). Blueprint wipes are at your discretion — Facepunch did not add new tech tree entries in Shipshape, so there is no gameplay reason to force a BP wipe.
Want a lag-free naval experience on your server? Supercraft Rust hosting runs on NVMe-backed dedicated hardware with enough CPU headroom to handle Ghost Ships and modular boat physics without frame drops.