Rust March 2026 Update — Shipshape Patch Notes

The March 2026 force wipe landed on Thursday, March 5 — and Facepunch dropped a meaty one. The Shipshape update is essentially a full polish pass on everything nautical, building on the naval foundation from earlier this year while fixing the roughest edges that frustrated players since launch. Here's everything that changed.

Longer Days

The single change most players will notice immediately: daytime is now about 20 minutes longer. Nights stay the same length (~10 minutes), so this is pure addition — more window for farming, building, and fighting before the dark. If you've been frustrated losing daylight mid-raid or mid-farm run, this one's for you.

Electricity, Industrial and Water IO on Boats

The big feature. You can now wire up electrical components on player-built boats — solar panels, batteries, switches, smart alarms, storage monitors, the works. Almost everything is supported with a few exceptions blocked for balance or performance reasons: auto turrets, SAM sites, windmills, CCTV cameras, seismic sensors, hanging lights, door controllers, and hoppers are all off the table for now. Everything else is fair game.

This opens up genuinely interesting boat designs — automated lighting, smart storage monitoring, wired defences. Facepunch notes these restrictions are "subject to change in the future", so expect the list to evolve.

Wallpaper works on boats too now, if you want your ship to feel a bit more lived-in. For a full breakdown of electrical components and how they chain together, see the electrical guide.

Boat Building Fixes

A long list of paper cuts got addressed this month. The ones worth knowing about:

Building blocks can now be rotated and demolished at any time in edit mode — the old 5-minute timer is gone. The dive site buoys that were stopping full-sized boats dead in the water have been fixed. Sails getting randomly destroyed after rotation have been fixed (turns out a rotated sail could end up placed off the edge, then groundwatch would nuke it when you picked something up nearby). The Deploy & Edit steering wheel now always shows even if the location is invalid, with a clear error message explaining why — previously this just silently didn't work.

Deployable snapping also works on boats now. Hold Left Shift while placing and it snaps exactly like it does on land.

Deep Sea Changes

The Deep Sea got a significant balance pass:

Loot now respawns slowly over time rather than all at once. The initial loot fill when it opens has been cut to about 70% of what it was, so the early rush is less of a lottery. The spawn side is now random each opening instead of predictable. Deep Sea no longer opens immediately after a server wipe — you'll get some time to get established first. RHIBs are blocked from accessing it now. A notification sound plays when it opens.

The network range in Deep Sea has been increased from 300 metres to 620 metres, meaning you can spot ships from much further out. This isn't viable on the mainland due to density, but out at sea there's enough headroom to support it.

A static Boat Building Station has been added to every Deep Sea island so you can repair and modify your ship while you're out there. These stations have a slight magnet pull to help you dock — power down your boat nearby and it'll pull itself in.

Cannons and Combat on Boats

Boats that take cannon hits now suffer a movement speed penalty. Repeated hits can knock a ship down to 30% of its max speed. Facepunch is watching how this plays out but the intent is more interesting ship combat with actual boarding opportunities rather than just trading cannon fire. Player protection while mounted to cannons has also been buffed.

There's also aim sway now when aiming weapons on moving boats, scaled to the boat's speed. The idea is to encourage cannon use over just AK spraying from a deck, without completely ruling it out. Poorly aimed rockets still very much on the table.

Destructible Boat Wrecks

Sunken player-built boats can now be damaged block by block. You can actually dig into a wreck and loot what's inside rather than watching it sink with everything on it. Good for recovering gear from a fight, and genuinely useful if you just had a particularly bad storm.

Boat Decay Changes

Decay delay has doubled from 12 hours to 24 hours, but decay duration has been cut from 18 hours to 12 hours. Translation: you can go offline longer without your boat starting to decay, but once it starts it goes faster. Abandoned boats clean up quicker. Active boats stay alive longer.

A reminder that your boat only counts as "used" when it receives steering wheel input — just sitting on it doesn't count.

Naval Scientist Improvements

Naval scientists got a solid AI pass. They can no longer see through smoke grenades, which makes smoke a genuinely viable tool against them. If this works well, Facepunch plans to port the same tech to prevent them seeing through bushes.

A long-standing bug where hazmat suit gave almost no protection against scientists or turrets has been fixed specifically for naval scientists. Hazmat goes from 5% to 30% protection. Full metal goes from 25% to 50%. Both numbers were clearly wrong before.

The miss rate has been adjusted — they miss less often but hit for less damage. The practical effect is you'll see your health ticking down steadily rather than taking random large chunks with warning. They also now have flashlights and lasersights, so night fights feel different. Their long-range sniper response has been fixed too — they'll now reposition more aggressively when taking fire from distance.

Anti-Cheat: TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot

Facepunch is beginning to test TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot enforcement on a handful of official servers. Servers that opt in get a "Secure" tag in the browser. This is currently opt-in for community servers, but the end goal is to make it global.

If you're on a PC from roughly the last 8 years you're likely already compatible. Facepunch has a guide on checking and enabling TPM/Secure Boot if you're unsure. The specific servers currently testing this are EU 3, EU East 3, EU 14, EU Large 2, US West 3, and US East 3.

Performance and Technical

A couple of notable engine-level changes landed this month. The 64,000 collider limit per physics broadphase cell is effectively gone — Facepunch now runs a custom version of Unity with a custom PhysX build, removing the ceiling. The theoretical limit is now 4 billion per cell (you'd hit performance issues long before that).

Mission server performance has been significantly improved. A work queue that was consuming up to 6% of server frametime has been cut down to 0.15% after a refactor. The lag spikes when talking to mission provider NPCs are also resolved as a side effect.

Collectable plants in the world — hemp, berries, pumpkins, wheat — no longer have server-side colliders, only client-side. Same for plants growing in planters. No gameplay changes, just less physics overhead.

Shadow settings have been consolidated into a simpler Quality preset dropdown rather than a separate section. Easier to configure, more control over the balance between performance and visuals.

MIDI Issue

If you're on Windows 11 24H2 or 25H2 and have used MIDI instruments or a Stream Deck with Rust: Windows has rolled out a new MIDI interface that breaks the current Rust implementation, potentially causing a constant buildup of virtual MIDI devices that degrades performance over time. Facepunch recommends disabling midiconvar.enabled and global.processmidiinput for now. A fix is being worked on.

Storage Box Pack DLC

Also shipping this month: the Storage Box Pack, 16 labelled skins for the Large Wood Box — one for each major resource and item category (Ammo, Armor, Charcoal, Clothing, Components, Explosives, Food, Guns, Meds, Metal, Ore, Scrap, Stone, Sulfur, Tools, Wood). Available from the in-game store.

2026 Roadmap

Facepunch published their 2026 roadmap alongside this update. You can track it at rust.facepunch.com/roadmap — it'll be updated as patches drop throughout the year.

Next Force Wipe

The next force wipe is the first Thursday of April. Check the wipe schedule for the exact date and countdown.

Source: Facepunch Shipshape devblog, March 5, 2026.