December 2024 Rust Update Overview

The Rust update for the first Thursday of December just launched, bringing with it quality of life changes and fixes, wolf pack balancing, brand new features, and Rust’s 2024 11th birthday event. With December being a massive polishing update, let’s jump right into these Rust update patch notes.

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Quality of Life Changes

Peacekeeper Turret Hostile Indicator

Now, whenever you are hostile to a safe zone, a new icon will appear next to the original hostile icon, letting you know that you are close to a peacekeeper turret.

Work Cart Storage

A decently-sized special box drops onto all work carts on the map, allowing you to hold some extra loot.

Waterpump Depth Change

Waterpumps now work in smaller pools of water that pair perfectly with the new, long rivers.

Propane Tank Stack Size

Propane Tank’s Stack size has been readjusted from 5 all the way up to a new default size of 20.

Dropbox Input Increase

The space inside the input section of Dropboxes has been increased from 1 to 4 (do note the output section has received no changes).

Junkpile Despawn

A default junkpile will now be able to despawn even when they are just partially looted.

Fridge Storage

The storage inside the fridge has seen a hard increase from 30 slots all the way to supporting 48 slots.

Homing Missiles

Homing missiles can now additionally be found inside Bradley and attack helicopter loot crates.

Wolf AI Changes

The wolf AI enters the spotlight as the devs continue to balance the wolf’s power to be as fair as possible. More specifically, wolves have better animations for jumping, will quit jumping if struck with a player’s fire, and give up chase faster once they spot a player’s fire. Wolves’ speeds have been rebalanced so that they flow more organically, their sight has been reduced at night, and the wolves can give up chase if one of their pack members gets hit. Speaking of pack members, wolves will also now only respond to howls of their own pack, making sure groups of more than four wolves can no longer merge together.

Electricity QOL Changes

Tesla Coil

The maximum power usage for a tesla coil has been reduced from 35 to 25 since the extra power made no difference in the range of time to kill.

Storage Monitor

A passthrough slot has been added to Rust’s storage monitor.

Elevator Speed

The speeds of player-placed elevators have been increased by 50%.

Battery Full Charge Indicator

An output slot has been added to Rust’s large battery for when the battery is fully charged.

Modular Car Radios

You can now install a radio inside of any of Rust’s modular cars, and it is an item added to the Voice Props Pack with Rust’s December 2024 update. The item will cost 120 metal fragments to craft, and the Voice Props Pack DLC will be 40% off from the 9th – 19th of December.

Helicopter Shredding

The Rust December 2024 update introduces helicopter shredding, with any purchased helicopter in the game being able to be picked up by the magnet crane inside of a junkyard and turned into scrap based on its type and health.

Upgradeable High External Walls & Gates

In the Rust December 2024 update, both wooden high external walls and gates can now be upgraded to their stone versions with a hammer similar to the regular building blocks inside the game. The upgrade cost will simply be a stone-high external wall or gate. Furthermore, high external walls are now crafted in groups of three, with the stone walls requiring one sheet metal per craft. The high external gate recipe has been adjusted, with the newer one only requiring one sheet metal instead of previously needing three gears.

Vending Machine Statistics

You can now view a bunch of statistics about your Rust vending machine, such as transaction history, highest revenue items, and most-sold items. You can view the stats from several points in time, ranging from the last 30 minutes to all-time. You can also find a bunch of long-term stats that managed to work their way, such as Total Sales, Total Unique Customers, Total Repeat Customers, and Best Customer.

Legacy Shelter Revoke

You can now place down another Rust Legacy Shelter after reaching your cap of one. However, this process destroys your previously placed Rust Legacy Shelter. This comes with a check, though, as shelters will now take several seconds to place just to give the player a warning their last shelter is being destroyed and to stop the shelters from being used in PVP.

Variable Zoom Scope

The 16x scope has been completely reworked in the December 2024 update of Rust, now known as the Variable Zoom Scope. The scope now supports three zoom levels: 4x, 8x, and 16x. This solidifies the scope as being better than its 8x counterpart and even allows for a smaller zoom amount of faster target acquisition. You will be sure to never miss another shot with this new and improved version of the scope.

Scrap Exchange Vendor Changes

The dynamic pricing behavior introduced in a previous Rust update is now being applied to items you sell to vendors starting in the Rust December 2024 update. This change is expected to make less sold items worth more while decreasing the value of the most sold items by up to 50%. Hopefully, this change will make selling items in Rust a more valuable part of the game as the days go on and the island dives deeper into the wipe.

Underwater Visibility

Underwater visibility, a Rust feature that had just been tweaked recently by the developers, has even newer adjustments, with the player’s eyes now being able to see twice as far underwater. This has been paired with players being able to sink a bit further before their oxygen begins to deplete, making swimming feel more consistent. The key to these changes is to support the consistency and feel of the ocean in Rust, as being stuck there with no way out can be one of the most frustrating predicaments to end up in. These changes can be experienced live with the December 2024 update of Rust.

Risk Landmine Disarming

Landmines have received fixes, with them now having a 15% chance to explode when being disarmed by another player in the new Rust update. This was meant to always be the intended behavior of landmines since the beta, but an old bug prevented the feature from working.

Node Sparkles Changes

The behavior when hitting nodes has been modified as nodes will no longer show a spark before they are hit for the first time, instead sparkles on nodes will appear with the first hit. The first hit will now always be a sparkle hit, and resources will be rewarded as such. The developers are adding this to make it consistent with its tree X marker minigame counterpart, smooth the process of checking for the sparkle, and improve performance by removing the vast amount of sparkle entities on every node from the server. These changes can be experienced live when you enter Rust’s new December 2024 update.

Queue Improvements

Also brought with this month’s Rust patch were improvements to its queue system. This only really affects server owners apart from it now showing on Steam when you or a friend are waiting inside of a Rust queue.

Twitch Rivals

The next Twitch Rivals event will begin on the 9th of December and run all the way until the date of Friday the 13th. There will be several skins added for the 150 Twitch creators from around the world who will all meet paths and fight for a massive prize of $100,000 dollars. Follow our page when we release our article on how to earn all the Twitch Rivals Rust skins through each streamer and their chat.

Rust’s Birthday and Christmas

This update celebrates Rust’s 11th birthday, which is on the 11th of December. They note that the game will be going on a 50% sale for 10 days starting on Monday. Furthermore, Rust’s birthday cake and balloons can be found in the game starting next week, and Rust’s Christmas event date is announced, beginning on December 16th.

That’s all for Rust’s December 2024 update, bringing with it a whole bunch of quality-of-life changes and fixes that many players have been waiting to see. Make sure to install and check the update out, as it is live now. If you enjoyed this article, check out related articles on the side or this article on The Best Large Box Skins. See you next month for the January 2025 Rust update.

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