Pre-order Beta has come to an end, but the journey is just beginning.
As the pre-order beta comes to an end, we would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who participated in the betas and shared all of your feedback, helping us to improve the game immensely. The development team has learned a lot during the past few months, testing things that would not be possible to test internally. Double Eleven will take the next four days before the early access to polish the game even further with the day one patch. Right now our focus is on improving the performance and stability. Once that’s out of the way we can start adding additional content to the game. A roadmap is close to completion, and we believe now is a good time to share some of it with you.
Our first post launch update aims to bring the highly requested Tech Tree, a great update to the game play, as well as Gestures that will improve the way you communicate in game. Other minor features like new Building Blocks will also be added. Some of the monuments that were present in the pre-order beta like the Train Yard, the Water Treatment Plant and the Supermarket need further polish, so for now we will work on improving them, and add them back with this update set to release in approximately 6 to 8 weeks.
We know that you want to see some of the most popular monuments like the Oil Rig and the Cargo Ship in game, as well as new methods of transportation like the horse, for example. Rest assured, some of those features are already being tested internally and we plan to release them in future content updates.
Outside of the minor updates we will also have major updates where we will release significant amounts of new content to make sure the experience remains fresh for everyone invested in Rust Console Edition. Each update will have a central theme, making them feel more like game expansions than regular content updates. Major updates will release around 8 to 10 weeks apart from one another and they will not follow the same timeline in terms of content as Facepunch’s version of Rust. We will try to prioritize highly requested features first, but some of them might not make it to the game anytime soon due to the hardware limitations.
The first major update will be called Power Surge, bringing new features like the electricity system and new in-game monuments like the Powerlines. A lot more is expected to come with this update, once we approach the month of release we will be revealing more details on what’s going to be included.
Following each major update we will release one or two minor ones soon after. They will not bring as much content to the game but we will work to keep them as relevant as possible. The goal for patches like this will be to bring more stability after large amounts of assets have been added to the game, as well as doing some minor improvements based on community feedback.
The major updates will be live some weeks prior in our staging branch server, and the team will need your help testing out the new content that is going to be added to this version of the game. To make things more interesting, we are considering adding some surprises for the ones who participate. For now the staging branch will remain open to Deluxe and Ultimate edition owners only, but in the future we will open it up to more players as the need for a higher number of concurrent players in the staging branch increases. The staging branch will not be available on release but it will be added soon after, once the first major update is ready to be tested.
Also we expanded the number of skins you get for participating in the beta. This set of skins will be available in the future for everyone who helped us during the closed beta or pre-order beta periods. We will also have one extra mystery skin that you can only get during the first week of the game. This skin will be available for free directly in the Skin Store. It will also be exclusive to the ones that claim it during this period.
We still have some questions to address like the Twitch Drops and the server rentals. These are all features the team is either planning or currently working on. For the community servers our aim was to have them ready on release but we want to make sure players get a fair deal as well as the best possible quality for the service, for this reason we are still considering all of our available options and we should have more information to share about it in the following weeks/months.
The journey for Rust Console Edition is just beginning and we hope you will enjoy your time with the game as much as we enjoy creating it. Thank you so much for supporting the project and helping us shape the future for the game. We can not wait to see you all on the island!
Edit: the original post said we were adding monuments to the minor update - related to the first post launch roadmap update. We meant the changes to the monuments would be minor not the update as a whole. Those monuments will see fixes and performance related changes as we get them release ready but this “tech tree + gestures” update isn’t a minor update. :)
