Rust Breach and Clear Update: Monument Blockers, Upkeep Group Scaling, Attack Heli Armour & More

The Rust Breach and Clear update (September 2026) is here. This month brings a mix of brand-new gameplay systems and big balance philosophy: Monument Blockers, a much-discussed upkeep tax on large groups, breakable Attack Heli and HAB armour, HQM nodes, and a drone marketplace now tied to the Power Plant — plus a substantial wave of performance work.

Here's everything you need to know about Breach and Clear.

🧱 Monument Blockers

Monument blockers are a new obstacle added to monuments with red keycard puzzle rooms. They're intended to slow down early access to the loot at those monuments. They require a significant amount of damage to destroy, but once destroyed they won't respawn. You may also find a handful of weaker monument blockers which can be destroyed by melee.

Facepunch doesn't expect this to have an enormous impact on progression speed, but it might make the early wipe a little more interesting for the first joiners. In the event they aren't destroyed within the first 24 hours, they will start to decay.

👥 Upkeep Group Scaling

One of the most discussed changes of the update. Starting this month, Tool Cupboards now apply an additional upkeep tax based on the number of players in a base. When calculating that number, the game considers:

• Any players directly authed on the TC
• Any players deauthed from the TC in the last 24 hours
• Any players authed on a code lock in the base (including guest code access)
• Any players deauthed from a code lock in the last 24 hours

The upkeep rates are tiered based on number of players:

• First 4 players — no tax
• Next 6 players — 2% tax per player
• Subsequent players — 4% tax per player

This means a TC with 6 players authed will have +4% upkeep, while a TC with 12 players will have +20% upkeep. There is a maximum tax amount of 300%. You can see the current tax rate applied by hovering over the upkeep cost while the TC is open.

Facepunch acknowledges large groups are a tricky balance problem that essentially bypass most difficulty mechanics through sheer numbers. They don't want to make large-group play inviable — Rust is a sandbox best played with friends. Instead they're hoping this adds an "interesting problem" for large groups to solve "that doesn't come at the expense of small groups and solos." As usual, they'll monitor it over time and adjust, and server owners have a set of ConVars in the Decay class to modify these behaviours, including disabling it entirely.

⛏️ HQM Node & Collectable

High Quality Metal ore nodes and collectables can now be found across the island. They're extremely scarce, but you'll have more luck finding the HQM node in the Jungle.

🛒 Marketplace Power

The Drone marketplace is now connected to last month's Power Plant system, requiring the server to keep the power plant running in order to operate drone deliveries. The marketplace now has a built-in power level that slowly increases when 4 or more fuses are active in the Power Plant.

Once the battery hits 50% it can start accepting purchases. As long as at least one fuse is inserted into the Power Plant the battery won't decrease — but if it drops below 50% the marketplace deactivates again. You can see the current charge level from the marketplace map screen. Rentable shops also now refrigerate food if the power plant is active.

🍯 Medical Honey Bandage

A brand-new healing item on the Workbench Level 1, designed to bridge the gap between the regular Bandage and Medical Syringe. It gives aspiring beekeepers another way to put their honey reserves to good use — players with thriving bee farms often end up with more honey than they know what to do with.

🚁 Attack Heli / HAB Conditional Armour

Responding to feedback that the Attack Helicopter is too difficult to counter, its existing cockpit armour now falls off in stages as it becomes damaged, exposing both the pilot and gunner. Pilots will now have to be more careful with how close they fly to the sun.

Armoured HABs also get conditional armour:

Hot Air Balloon armour now also falls off with damage, and equipping HAB armour now plays an effect and takes 3 seconds.

🚗 Modular Car Handling Improvements

The steering, turning and suspension of modular cars have all been tweaked to feel better, with improved driving for players with higher latency. A new handbrake mechanic (CTRL key) lets you do hairpin turns, tighter corners, drifts, and even doughnuts.

☢️ Radwater Sprinkler Buff & SAM Site Buff

• Radwater buff — Radwater now seeps through more armour types when used in Sprinklers, causing significant radiation to those in full kits or lower radiation protection gear. Hazmats remain an effective counter.
• SAM Site vs drones — missiles now fly faster and have a larger detonation fuse area, taking down hostile drones much more reliably.

📋 Notable Balance Changes

• Heavy Plate Helmet — now suppresses noise when worn; crafting cost increased.
• Heavy Plate Jacket/Pants — players wearing them now make noise when moving, audible to others.
• Swamp trees — wood harvest significantly increased to match other tree types.
• Semi-Pistol — increased damage falloff (less damage at range), crafting cost increased.
• Pies — various pies get extended durations and adjusted recipes; Hunters pie bleed reduction increased.
• Grenades — stack sizes reduced to 3 for F1, Bee Grenade, Molotov and Flashbangs; Beancans set to 4.
• Homing launcher — reduced lock-on duration for earlier firing.
• Bodies — SMG bodies now slightly more common, rifle bodies slightly reduced.
• Large Medkit — now removes radiation to match Medical Syringes; also plays a sound when used.
• Composter UI — now shows how quickly things turn into fertilizer, similar to furnaces.

🎨 Visual Refresh & Cosmetic Content

• Flashlight remake — new high-quality model, high-resolution textures, new animations; right-click toggles it on/off like torches, with a different admire animation based on whether it's on.
• Arrow revamp — wooden arrows updated with more visual interest and new fletching (actually in-game this time).
• Salvaged Hammer refresh — new high-quality model, textures and animations.
• Workshop skinnable: Wood Armor — all four pieces (Chestplate, Pants, Helmet, Gloves) now skinnable.
• Crystal Assault Rifle DLC — AR skin machined from gemstones, 5 colour variations showing the magazine and inner workings.
• 70+ new world models — replacing the burlap sack for dropped items ranging from electrical components to clothing.
• Random skin crafting — a new "random" option crafts that item with a random unlocked skin, saved per item.
• Paint Brush Visualizer Tool — projects the current paintbrush onto the object you're painting, saving time with different brush sizes at varying zoom levels.

🏭 Water Treatment Plant Mini Rework

The pressurized tank and gearboxes at the Water Treatment Plant have been simplified. Each gearbox turned fully provides 3 hours (real time) of water flow to the pipes; maximum pressure with both gearboxes keeps the pipes operational for 6 hours. Water production scales linearly with tank pressure, and pipes now lose water when the tank runs dry. The IO output has increased (one water pipe ≈ 2 pumps with better push rates), and pipes are both more numerous and more consistently placed.

⚡ Performance — A Major Focus

• Physics improvements — a new broadphase mode using a BVH structure. Old implementations scaled with the number of colliders (constantly growing during a wipe); now they scale with the number of changes. Testing doubled performance on one server.
• Scripting multithreading — a way to let Unity treat any thread as the main thread, opening the door to parallelizing previously unparallelizable game code. An initial trial on Server Occlusion generation cut generation from ~37s to ~22s on a 4.5k world.
• Memory improvements — reduced memory on ~15k objects (~10mb), ~630mb of VRAM from AO texture resizing, plus distant object texture reduction — early testing shows a healthy memory saving of over 0.5GB.
• Vehicle pooling — vehicles are now disabled and reused instead of fully destroyed/recreated when out of network range, removing 20-30ms stutters.
• Network range audit — around 300 entities (signs, mushrooms, driftwood, etc.) set to a 'close' network range, reducing client+server network overhead without affecting gameplay visuals.
• Mutex Pool deprecation — treated as deprecated, to be removed in the next patch.

🎬 Demo & Community Server Changes

• Demo improvements — fixes to dolly camera undo, dolly edit preview, a redesigned sandbox panel, parenting (lights to players for now), and a new curve editor for animating keyframes (speed ramping / camera sweeping). Test: demo.newui 1.
• Facepunch servers — retiring EU Primitive 2, CAN Primitive 1, and US West Primitive 1 (with Facepunch primitive servers still available in those regions), and reducing map size from 4250 to 3750 on EU Hardcore 1 and US East Hardcore 1.

🆕 Other Additions

• Added new clan achievements.
• Added the deepsea.terrain_everywhere convar to enable deep sea terrain on the main land.

Conclusion

Breach and Clear pairs meaningful balance philosophy — the contested upkeep group scaling and the counter-friendly Attack Heli armour — with a big push on performance that should be felt on both server and client. Combined with the system connectivity work (the marketplace now depending on the Power Plant) and a large cosmetic refresh, there's a lot to dig into this month.

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