Rust is (probably) getting pets

As always when it comes to keeping up with survival game Rust, you can wait for announcements from the Facepunch development team or you can go to Shadowfrax on YouTube, the charming and shockingly well-informed Rust guru who can tell you what’s what a good month in advance of the official newswire.

In a new video today (you can watch it below) Shadowfrax reveals that Rust is—most likely—getting pets at some point in the future. Pets!

The clue originated from the Facepunch commits log where a new “pets” branch appeared the other day. That’s admittedly not much to go on but Shadowfrax seems confident that it’s “exactly what it sounds like” and says it will probably be based in part on the system from Halloween that lets players build and control a Frankenstein’s monster.

What kind of pets? We don’t know yet, though hopefully something more cuddly than a reanimated corpse. There are plenty of animals in Rust like horses, wolves, boars, chickens, and more recently, sharks and polar bears, but it remains to be seen if Rust will add taming systems for an existing animal or introduce an entirely new one. I would personally suggest not getting too attached to your pet, just based on my experience trying to keep a horse fed and healthy for several days and then logging in to find nothing but a pile of poop left in the stable. I miss you, Pony Soprano.

Shadowfrax also noticed a commit branch testing a new rail network, though the log entry is accompanied by a comment from the developer stating “don’t get too excited, this is never going to work.” Adding a rail system to a procedurally generated map does sound pretty tricky, which is probably why the current rail system is underground where it won’t interfere with anything topside. But a surface train sounds like it’d be a lot of fun, especially if it’s another moving monument like the cargo ship, packed with good loot and lots of enemies. Who wouldn’t want to jump on a horse and hijack a locomotive as it choo-choos around the map? See, I was warned not to get excited and I still got excited.

There’s also an incoming fix to an exploit involving the new spray cans, which players can use to quickly change the skins of their furniture and other building items, like doors. The issue is, players can raid another player’s base and, provided they’re able to get tool cupboard control, they could then change the base’s door skins from “solid door” to “door with a window”. So they could peek inside different rooms and see if they were worth breaking into before breaking into them. That is, frankly, hilarious. The exploit is being fixed, however, so in the future it won’t work on locked doors unless you open them with a code first. 

That’s the big Rust news, though you can also expect some tweaks to the new snowmobiles, the addition of an “always sprint” option, and a handful of new achievements coming in the future. And hey, subscribe to Shadowfrax if you haven’t already.