Rust Power Trip Update: Player Maintained Monuments, Satellite Crash, Bar Games Pack & More

The Rust Power Trip update (August 6, 2026) is here, and it's one of the most ambitious patches Facepunch has shipped this year. The headline feature is a brand new system called Player Maintained Monuments — a set of interconnected features that tie Rust's monuments together and push players to interact with each other in entirely new ways.

From restarting the Power Plant to crashing satellites, pumping the Dome, and calling in airstrikes from the Airfield tower, this update fundamentally changes how the map works. Here's everything you need to know.

⚡ Player Maintained Monuments

This month Facepunch released a set of features they call Player Maintained Monuments — tying together existing monuments in new and interesting ways while pushing players to interact with each other in the process. The central mechanic: a restorable Power Plant that powers a web of connected features across the entire island.

Powering Up The Power Plant

The power plant can be fired back up using new Heavy Fuses, which are found as loot and must be inserted into special fuse boxes located at the power plant. Not everything unlocks at once — some systems connected to the power plant require more fuses than others to become functional.

Once the power plant is providing power:

• Powerline poles with transformers (the white cylinder-looking things along roads) now provide power for electrical circuits.
• Powerlines can now be climbed — no ladder needed, just approach and jump.
• Green recyclers (outside safezones) received a 10% nerf to their baseline efficiency of 50% — but are restored to 60% with sufficient power, and get a duration buff from 5s to 4.5s once the plant is at maximum power.
• Yellow recyclers (inside safezones) remain unchanged.
• A single special new red recycler with 75% efficiency has been added to the power plant, only usable at maximum power.

🛰️ Satellite Crash

A brand new in-game event! Power up the new Satellite Control Computer at the Launch Site with an aiming module, then take control of a satellite of your choosing. Use the thruster buttons to target the crash location before locking it in — though there's no manual, so you'll have to figure out which thruster button does what first!

Once locked in, the satellite starts its descent, visible to all players on the server. After a short while it impacts and spills its new satellite loot crates. Once they've cooled down, they're ready to loot — but remember, the whole server knows where they are too.

🛢️ Dome Pumping

Once the Power Plant is running, a new switch on the Large Oil Rig becomes usable. This controls the flow of crude oil to the Dome. Once activated, it pumps Crude for 20 minutes.

However, you can't retrieve it by yourself — you'll need to use the Tanker vehicle module to drain the oil and then transport it to a car lift to extract it. There's also a switch on the Small Oil Rig that pumps at half the rate — and you can enable both switches at once to get 1.5x the Crude.

🧊 Supermarket Freezer

There's a new freezer inside the Supermarket that provides a steady stream of chilled food so long as it's receiving power from the power plant. Every so often, it provides a larger food cache than usual. Happy shopping!

💧 Water Treatment Plant Production

Water pipes now spawn around the roadsides of the map. To start, the pipes are empty and won't produce any water. To get them pumping, the Water Treatment Plant has to be maintained.

Two gearboxes have been added inside the monument — turning them pressurises the new intact water tank at its centre. To get a gearbox moving, the power plant's grid needs to be live, then you place a gear into the gearbox and interact with it to start the valve wheel spinning. Gears are consumed as the wheel turns and can't be pulled back out once inserted.

When the tank reaches full pressure, the blades start spinning and clearing up the blockages, restoring water flow across the map. After that, coming back every once in a while to keep the pressure up is much easier than a cold start.

🚗 Gas Station Car Garage

In Oxum's, the car garage has received a tune-up. When the power grid is active — or when the backup generator around the side is turned on — the garage powers up with new features:

• The garage door can be opened or closed with a switch on the outer wall (as long as that switch has power).
• The car lift becomes operable — lower it down, drive a car on, and use it like any other car lift. When you're done, raise the lift back up and head down into the cave for a chance at higher quality car part spawns.

🛫 Airfield Terminal Tower

A newly refreshed control tower has hit the airfield. On the second floor you'll find two new terminals that charge up from fuse boxes connected to the power grid:

• The smaller terminal increases the rate at which air drops fall across the map when charged.
• When the larger terminal is charged, a Chinook resupply crate can be called in to drop near the airfield tarmac.

The terminals slowly lose charge after they're activated. Once they've drained completely, they're available for use again.

🎱 Bar Games Pack DLC

This month's DLC is the Bar Games Pack — featuring the unique and complex mini-games Pool and Darts, plus a range of bar game-themed items to turn any base into the hottest joint in town.

• Pool Table — a self-contained mini-game for one or two players. Place it as a normal deployable, walk around the table, jump on to get ready to hit the cue ball, pick your desired power amount, and flick your mouse up to shoot. Standard pool rules apply!
• Dart Board — a self-contained mini-game for solo and multiplayer fun. Play in real-time and set your score for others to beat.
• Interactive Juke Box deployable.
• Skins for the Mini Fridge and Shotgun Trap.
• Unique bar stools seating, plus themed wallpapers and sprays.

The Bar Games Pack can be purchased in-game or from the Rust Steam item store.

🗿 Stone Sculpture Item DLC

On the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Oxidemandias, king of grubs: Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!"

Leave a lasting legacy with the Stone Sculpture — an interactive deployable that lets you carve away at stone until you create the shape of your heart's desire (or just sculpt your favourite appendage). Either is a surefire way to stand proud.

🛠️ Quality of Life & Balance Changes

Respawn Point Improvements

• You can now toggle a respawn option (bag/bed/etc) to display on the compass. Only one can be marked at once, and you need to interact with the bag directly to enable it — freeing up the standard "home" map marker.
• You can now Favourite bags on the death screen — these bags appear first in the respawn list.

Recycle Bin Workbench Upgrade

The Recycle Bin workbench upgrade got an upgrade of its own! It now has its own inventory, accessed by interacting with the bin itself. All bonus items returned by the Recycle Bin upgrade now go directly into this new inventory, ready to collect at your convenience. It's take-only though, so you can't fill it with loot yourself.

Nodes In Safe Zones Removed

Ore nodes and woodpiles can no longer spawn in safe zones. Since they could only be harvested using a rock, they tended to pile up and eventually drained the global spawn population, preventing new nodes from appearing elsewhere on the map.

Wolf Headdress Balance

The Wolf Headdress has always been a strong early and mid wipe option, providing good head protection and the ability to combine with a bandana. To give other helmets a chance in early bow fights, its crafting is now locked behind a Tier 1 workbench. Additionally, the lunar new year animal masks — which had the same stats — are now set up as skins, letting you freely re-skin between all variants and avoiding clutter in the crafting menu.

Toggling Shields

You can now swap between having the shield on your back (aiming down sights) vs. having it to the side (blocking with it). Set up the bind in your settings panel and switch between the two stances every couple of seconds. A cooldown was added to prevent spam-switching, which would have led to more randomness in gun fights rather than strategic play.

High Wall Upkeep

High walls now have a static upkeep cost of 20% — sitting between building blocks (10% → 33%). This keeps them the intended way to make compounds while discouraging spamming them to claim large areas of the map. It makes external TCs more expensive to maintain and should help clear up old compounds after a base is raided.

Water Well Vendor Stock

Water wells were seeing increasing use as an alternative to farming — with the extreme example of buying 10x jackhammers and 10x advanced teas a few hours into wipe, leading to much faster progression than intended. Vendor stock has been rebalanced to bring the water well back to its intended role as a stepping stone into farming.

🐛 Fixes & Removals

As always, the update ships with a wide range of fixes:

• Fixed an exploit with the treasure hunt mission given by the Hunter NPC which enabled shorter repeat cooldowns.
• Renamed the Hunter NPC treasure mission from 'Vagabond Treasure' to 'Treasure Hunter' (Vagabond is a different NPC with their own treasure hunt mission).
• Fixed viewmodels for guns with high firing rates having animation glitches at low FPS.
• Fixed paintball overalls always appearing as white.
• Fixed paintball gun equipped world model not always appearing in the correct state.
• Fixed NPC dialogue panel not correctly accounting for frame delta time.
• Fixed crashes/freezes/exceptions related to UniTask pool allowing 2 threads to get the same instance.
• Fixed Rust+ camera not updating when controlling a turret.
• Fixed workshop item list not scrolling all the way down.

Removed: UsePlayerUpdateJobs 2 mode (Jobs 3 is now default), and stopped sending vending machine and event map markers (cargo, helis, travelling vendor) to Rust+.

Conclusion

The Power Trip update is a landmark release that makes the map itself a living, player-driven system. Restoring the power plant becomes a server-wide goal with rewards that ripple across the entire island — from recycler efficiency and water pipes to oil pumping, air drops, and satellite crashes. Whether you're a solo player chasing the red recycler or a clan coordinating the fuses and the dome oil run, there's something new for everyone.

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