The Rust Naval update is delayed into 2026 as Facepunch admits, "We bit off more than we could chew"

The Rust Naval update has been delayed into next year. "Today is not the update I wanted to ship," Facepunch Studios COO Alistair McFarlane writes at the top of a post titled, "We bit off more than we could chew." He explains that the colossal overhaul, which the developer has long been touting to arrive at the end of the year, adds a lot of new systems and touches many old ones. "The closer we got to patch release, the less confident and happy we were with the state of it," and so it's being moved into February, with some smaller pieces set to arrive later this month.

"We took on too much," McFarlane explains. "We could have pushed it out and crossed our fingers, hoping it behaved at scale, or we could pause, take a breath, and avoid shipping something that risks crippling servers during the busiest time of the year." Rust has remained the most-played survival game on Steam with relative consistency throughout large chunks of 2025, more than a decade on from its original early access launch, so the developer's caution is well warranted.

"We do not want to drop server populations by 100 to 200 players or spend the holiday period firefighting performance and bugs," McFarlane continues. "Rust is in a good state without the naval patch, we cannot justify risking stability for the sake of hitting a date. I feel like we have let you down by missing the update window we have never missed before, but we would feel worse shipping something half baked."

The Rust Naval update will now launch on Thursday, February 5, 2026. "We will keep pushing on performance and polish, we will tighten everything up, and we will make sure that when it lands, it is solid and fun," McFarlane says. The Thursday December 4 update is instead "a straightforward wipe only," while the Christmas update planned for Thursday December 18 will feature "some of the content and DLC originally planned for today."

The good news is that if you're really desperate to see what Facepunch has been cooking, you can access the Naval update via test servers on the Rust staging branch. "Just be aware it comes with bugs, performance issues, and all the rough edges we are still working through," McFarlane concludes. As for January's update, expect "some light changes and a review of 2025, and a preview of what we've got planned in 2026."