The Rust Industrial update is here to make your bases run more smoothly than ever. The February 2023 Rust update brings dramatic changes to one of the best survival games on PC, introducing automation tools to help overhaul your Rust base building capabilities. Among the features on offer are ways to automate your storage sorting, automatic crafting, and a nice cosy furnace for those colder nights after a Rust wipe.
At the heart of the new Rust Industrial update is the Pipe Tool – a handy wrench that functions a bit like the Wire and Hose tools. You can plonk a Storage Adaptor onto any existing storage entity to make it ready for the Industrial systems, with no additional power requirements. Once you’ve done this, you’ll be able to connect your Industrial entities up using the Pipe Tool.
Pipes come in four different colours, allowing you to more easily keep track of your network and what’s connected to where. Pipes follow standard distance rules the same way wires and hoses do, except that anchor points must be a small distance apart from each other and you won’t be able to build pipes through building blocks or vending machines (though they will pass through doors and the like).
The Storage Adaptor works with most forms of storage, and can generally access all slots for both input and output of stored items – though furnaces use separate input and output slots, and lockers require separate Storage Adaptors for each of the individual lockers in the block.
Also included is an Industrial Conveyor, which will move any item it is connected to by default, with the option to add a filter with up to 12 items or item categories to designate which specific resources it should move. You may also assign a maximum amount to fill the target location with, along with a minimum stack size that must be reached before the Conveyor will move the items.
The Industrial Splitter/Combiner, as you might be able to guess, allows you to either spread out incoming stacks evenly between multiple destinations, or bring together resources from several places and combine them all into one set.
Finally – and perhaps most usefully of all – the Industrial Crafter can be fitted with the item blueprint of our choice and powered up to take materials from a connected storage box and turn them into the item of your choice. It needs to be attached to an appropriate crafting bench for the item you want to make, and will take the same amount of time to perform the crafting as a player would, but the ability to do so passively while you’re off sorting other things out is unquestionably useful.
Alongside these automation tools is a new Electric Furnace – this operates similarly to other furnaces in Rust but takes power rather than consuming fuel items. It will also smelt a little faster than traditional furnaces, but Facepunch Studios notes that the lack of its own fuel means you won’t get charcoal out of it.
All in all, the Rust Industrial update is certainly shaping up to be one of the most exciting Rust updates in a while! As someone who delved deeply into the Minecraft Technic packs and ‘Feed the Beast’ mods which offered similar pipe-based automation solutions, I’m certainly eager to see such tools in action here. The Rust Industrial update is now live with the February 2023 patch.
Facepunch has also announced its intention to make Rust water more wet. If you’re jumping in to check out the February update, you’ll want to make sure you’re up to speed on the best Rust vehicles and know all the Rust console commands to help make the most of your server heading into the next wipe.