The May force wipe landed on Thursday the 7th with Facepunch's "Upgrade Hard, Raid Harder" update, and this one has more admin-relevant content than the last few combined. Workbench upgrades fundamentally change the early-to-mid wipe economy, the new Mortar adds a real indirect-fire option to siege play, and there's a stack of model and UI refreshes that your players will notice the second they log in. Here's the full read from a server-admin angle.
Workbench Upgrades – The Headline Change
This is the big one. Workbenches are no longer fire-and-forget crafting stations. There's a new storage add-on that slots upgrade modules straight into the bench, and you can stack effects to suit how your team wipes.
Nine upgrade modules ship with the patch. Each one changes a different aspect of how the workbench behaves:
- Accelerated – speeds up batch crafting, with the speed bonus stacking the more items you queue
- Range – doubles the workbench's effective radius, which matters more than it sounds for big bases where the bench is tucked in a corner
- Reinforced – significant health buff plus reduced explosive damage taken, turning the workbench into something raiders have to actually plan around
- Efficiency – chance to produce a bonus item when crafting in batches
- Recycle Bin – chance to refund some of the ingredient cost on craft
- Salvage – knocks scrap costs down for tech tree unlocks
- Comfort – the bench projects a comfort zone (yes, like a campfire)
- Defensive – adds an armour slot to compatible clothing crafted on it
- Prototype – doubles scrap cost with a real failure chance, which is its own kind of gambling
The implication for server admins is mostly about raid balance. A Reinforced Tier 3 workbench is a meaningfully harder breach point than the old version, and groups that can stack a Range + Reinforced loadout get to consolidate a lot of base function in one harder-to-clear room. If you run a server with custom raid economy plugins, test how those interact with the new module costs and HP values before the meta-watchers find the exploit.
No new ConVars to disable the upgrade system that I've seen, and I wouldn't disable it anyway. It's likely to be the most-discussed change of the wipe.
The Mortar – New Indirect-Fire Deployable
The Mortar is the first proper indirect-fire weapon Rust has had. Place it, mount it, adjust the firing angle, drop a shell. Two ammo types ship with it:
- Mortar Shell – high explosive, minor structural damage on impact
- Fragmentation Mortar Shell – wider area lethal damage, less useful against builds, very useful against grouped players
Damage values weren't fully locked in on staging by the time the patch went live, so I'd hold off on sweeping balance pronouncements until the community has had a wipe to actually test it. What I'd be watching for as an admin: whether the Mortar starts being used as a soft counter to compound bases (lobbing shells over walls), and whether plugin authors release Mortar-aware anti-grief or no-deploy-zone configs over the next week or two.
If you run rule-restricted servers (PvE, build-only, RP), the Mortar belongs on your watch-list. Same conversation you had when rockets, then C4, then SAM sites changed how players occupied space.
Tin Can Alarm Refresh
The Tin Can Alarm got an "improvement" per Facepunch's own update notes – the headline phrasing is theirs, and the practical change centres on what the alarm can do when triggered. Beyond just making noise, certain items can now drop or trigger when the alarm fires, opening up some genuine trap-base possibilities.
I'd describe this as low-key meta-shifting rather than headline-grabbing. Trap bases were already a niche playstyle, but the new behaviour gives them a small toolkit upgrade.
Binoculars and Vending Machines
Both got a refresh in this patch. The binoculars interface picked up a few additions and the middle-mouse ping behaviour for marking teammates was fixed (it had been broken for some players). Bit of a cinematic feel to the new version – your players will notice the difference the first time they pull them out.
Vending machines got backend changes around recommended items and a few new asset categories (skin, ammo, genetics, durability) hooked into the system. From an admin standpoint, none of this needs config changes. If you run shop plugins that interact with vending machines, give them a smoke test after updating Oxide and watch for any deserialization warnings in the logs.
Other Changes Worth Knowing
- Model refreshes and remakes. A handful of older items got visual passes. No gameplay impact.
- Ocean balance pass. Loot from deep sea content was tuned. If your server's economy was leaning heavily on deep sea farming, expect player complaints – and look at whether your gather rate or loot plugin needs adjusting to compensate.
- New ocean-themed Steam achievements. Cosmetic from your perspective. Players will be running around hitting the new objectives for the first day or two.
- The usual stack of QoL improvements and bug fixes Facepunch ships every month. Skim the official patch notes for anything specific to plugins you run.
Oxide/uMod Plugin Notes
This is the part I include every month and will keep including every month, because it bites people every single wipe. Facepunch's update overwrites Oxide files. Every time. Your plugins will not load until you reinstall Oxide on top of the freshly-updated server.
The drill on wipe day:
- Run Steam Update from the panel sidebar and let it finish cleanly
- Reinstall Oxide (umod.org) or Carbon (carbonmod.gg) over the top
- Bring plugins back up one or two at a time, watching
oxide/logs/for hook errors - Restart once everything's clean
Specific things to test for this update:
- Plugins that interact with workbench crafting, batching, or refund logic – these are most likely to need updates because the upgrade system is genuinely new behaviour
- Plugins that hook vending machine asset handling
- Anything fishing-, gather-, or ocean-loot-adjacent
If a plugin breaks and the author hasn't pushed an update yet, the safest move is usually to disable it for the wipe rather than try to patch around it. Players will deal with one missing plugin for a week. They will not deal with random RPC errors and disconnects.
If you're not running Rust with us yet, our Rust hosting ships with Oxide-friendly tooling and the panel handles the Steam Update step. The getting started guide covers initial deploy, the server settings guide digs into ConVars, and our 2026 wipe schedule tracks when each force wipe lands. After this patch, the troubleshooting guide is where I'd point anyone seeing post-update RPC errors or world file mismatches.