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Here’s our first peek at how Rust’s server transitions could work

Shadowfrax has given us our first good look at how Rust's server-hopping feature could work in action

Earlier this month, esteemed Rust YouTuber Shadowfrax posted a video looking into an upcoming feature Facepunch has been testing for its flagship survival game: server transitions. The idea behind this, as the ‘frax explained at the time, is that players will be able to “move between servers with an as-yet-to-be-confirmed quantity of gear and items” by hopping into a seaworthy craft and venturing out to maps’ edges. Now, we’ve got our first peep at what this might look like in action.

“I’m excited to show you some actual server transitioning – yes, me boldly going between servers,” Shadowfrax says in his latest clip covering Rust’s work-in-progress features (below). The YouTuber got to test the feature “on a limited scale” as it functions right now, with two servers linked up in his dummy-run example. You can see the other from your current server as depicted by a rough outline of an island in the distance, across the sea. If you hop in a boat and zoom towards the island you’ll soon get a pop-up message as you near the map’s edges, which tells you how much further you need to travel before you’ll hit the other server.

If you keep on barrelling in that direction, you’ll then connect to the other server. So, it sounds like it’ll be easy-peasy to use. “It appears that right now there’s no restriction on what you can take with you in your inventory,” Shadowfrax also says, though only boats let you server-hop in at the moment.

It’s possible that a barge will let players hop between servers without needing their own boat in the future, too – which suggests there’s even the chance you could bring cars along – though this is all unconfirmed right now.

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It’s also worth noting, as the YouTuber explains in his previous video, that if server transitioning should hit the live game, it’ll only be between official servers for the foreseeable future, though it could potentially come to wider community servers later on.

As ever, though, all of the above is subject to change, and it sounds like the feature needs at least a couple more months’ work and “a lot of improvement” before it’ll be ready. But, it does give us a handy insight into what could be coming to Rust in the not-too-distant future. For more on this, you can always tune into some of Shadowfrax’s clips on his YouTube channel, as he tends to give us a handy idea of what’s headed Rust’s way before the monthly updates drop.