Rust

The Printed and Polished Rust Update (Blueprints, Uzi & Performance Changes Explained)

Chloe

6 November 2026

20 min read

The Printed and Polished Rust update is Rust’s November 2026 patch, headlined by a blueprint progression rework, the new Uzi 9mm, gamepad support, livestock improvements and a huge wave of performance optimisations. It also adds roaming scientist boats, bird flocks, new food and armour, building fixes, the Scrap King building skin and dozens of quality-of-life changes.

Rust updates are rarely small these days, but November’s Printed and Polished Rust update is especially stacked.

Facepunch released it on November 5, 2026. It changes how you progress through a wipe, adds a new SMG, lets you play with a controller, makes large bases less painful to load and gives you the extremely important ability to pet your cows and sheep.

Here’s what matters in the Rust Printed and Polished update.

#Facepunch Has Reworked Rust’s Blueprint System

Previously, scrap drove progress through the Workbench tech trees, and Basic and Advanced Blueprint Fragments gated the Workbenches themselves. Because of where basic fragments spawned, groups who couldn’t compete for them were locked out of Workbench Level 2 rather than slowed down.

Facepunch has rebuilt the loop around three blueprint currencies:

Blueprint Fragments: used for Workbench Level 1 progression.
Blueprint Pages: used for Workbench Level 2 progression.
Blueprint Books: used for Workbench Level 3 progression.

You no longer spend scrap on tech trees, Workbenches no longer need fragments to craft, and the old Basic and Advanced Blueprint Fragments have left the game.

If you're wondering how to get Rust blueprint fragments, we have the complete guide ready for you.

#You Still Need Scrap for Research

Scrap still has a job. You can research individual items with scrap at a Research Table, so finding the weapon or tool you want remains valuable, especially if a rival group already has something your team needs.

Trading matters again too. Instead of grinding scrap down the same tech tree as every other group, you have more reason to find items in the world, trade with neighbours or make slightly suspicious alliances that will almost certainly end in betrayal three hours later.

#Early-Wipe Progression Should Feel Less Restrictive

Blueprint Fragments can appear in common loot sources, including barrels and boxes, and you can upgrade lower-tier blueprints into the next tier. Puzzle rooms and more dangerous content remain the fastest routes for progression.

Workbench upgrades have changed too. The Salvage Workbench upgrade now has a 20% chance not to consume a blueprint, while the Prototype Workbench upgrade uses a flat 25% success rate without its previous doubling cost. Expect Facepunch to tune this in future patches.

#The Uzi 9mm Joins Rust’s Weapon Roster

Yes, Rust has an Uzi now.

The new Uzi 9mm Submachine Gun has two configurations, and changing the stock alters how it behaves.

With the stock folded, the Uzi:

Fires in fully automatic mode.
Can be used with shields.
Prioritises close-range firepower.

Unfold the stock and it:

Switches to semi-automatic fire.
Gains increased accuracy.
Suits more controlled engagements.

Hold the fire mode button to swap between them.

One catch: you can’t craft or research it. Community loot data shows the Uzi dropping from Hackable Locked Crates, Elite Crates and some underwater lab crates, so expect fights over it.

The Handmade SMG also received a slight damage buff, while the Nailgun has a new model, textures and animations after almost nine years in the game, and is this month’s Workshop skinnable item.

#Gamepad Support Arrives in Rust

Controller support has arrived via Steam Input and covers the core gameplay loop. The inventory and crafting menus use a stick-driven cursor by default, but a D-pad toggle in the new gamepad options screen is worth trying.

Not every feature has dedicated gamepad support yet, and Facepunch plans to expand coverage over time.

#Printed and Polished Is a Huge Rust Performance Update

Facepunch calls Printed and Polished its biggest optimisation-focused update yet, and admits the game isn’t where it should be on performance. Its staging data showed:

Around 10% higher median framerate across players.
About 1.6GB less overall memory usage.
Garbage collection around every 12 minutes instead of every six.
Reduced stuttering when firing weapons, loading large bases and running Cargo Ship.
Up to 25% less network traffic on a 500-player server.

#Large Bases Should Load More Smoothly

Walking into network range of an enormous compound loads thousands of entities at once, which used to cause nasty frame-time spikes. Printed and Polished moves industrial pipe mesh generation off the main thread, pools frequently used deployables and lets the LOD system spread expensive work across multiple frames.

Facepunch also overhauled building privilege checks. Instead of running an expensive physics query to work out which Tool Cupboard controls an area, Rust checks a grid of building blocks. In Facepunch’s large-base test, a check that took around 5.7ms dropped below 0.02ms on both client and server.

#Rust Is Using Less Memory

Deep Sea content now loads when you travel through the portal and unloads when you leave, saving around 260MB of RAM elsewhere. Audio compression saves around 470MB, Workshop skins no longer keep a spare copy of their textures in RAM, and terrain textures and animal animations shed a few hundred megabytes between them.

Gun effects are now prewarmed properly too, cutting the hitch you used to get the first time you fired after joining a server.

#Livestock Is Much Easier to Manage

Cows and sheep should now be much less annoying to manage. You own a cow as soon as you buy it or it eats at your trough, cows no longer die of old age, and a starving cow lies down at 1 HP rather than dying. The trough UI shows how long your food will last, and cows can eat anything a horse can.

Other useful changes include:

Cows store up to three milk.
Overgrazing is gone, and a grassy pen halves how often cows eat from the trough.
Ownership, pregnancy and recessive gene information is clearer in the UI.
You can rename livestock and, at last, pet your cows and sheep.

There’s also a new Potential stat. It reflects how happy a captive-born animal was while growing up, locks in at adulthood and multiplies that animal’s rewards and sale price.

#Shears, Wool Armour and Crocodile Pie

The new Shears produce more wool and won’t damage your sheep if you accidentally hit the animal instead of its wool. They’re a default blueprint crafted at a Level 1 Workbench.

Wool also feeds a new Wool Armour Insert on the Workbench Level 1 tech tree, with a large boost to cold resistance alongside smaller melee and projectile protection bonuses.

Then there’s Crocodile Pie, cooked at the cooking workbench. Eat one and wolves, bears, boars, sharks and even bees keep their distance, while rams and bulls won’t flee but won’t charge either. A richer version doubles the duration.

#The Deep Sea, Scientist Boats and Wildlife Have Changed

The regular Deep Sea cycle now starts once the Lighthouse is repaired: the Deep Sea opens immediately, then continues through its normal cycle. Multiple Lighthouses share repair progress, so fixing one fixes them all, and maps without one start with the cycle active.

#Watch Out for Mainland Scientist Boats

Rare groups of scientist boats now patrol around the mainland. Up to two groups may enter the area and patrol for up to an hour before leaving. They have no map markers or notifications, and like the Patrol Helicopter they only engage geared players.

Scientist boat AI also gained better movement, targeting and PT boat turret behaviour. Kill the driver and another scientist swaps seats to take the wheel, so sniping the guy at the helm is no longer an instant solution.

#Crows and Seagulls Can Give Players Away

Crow flocks circle corpses inland, potentially giving away a recent fight. Explosions scare them off.

Seagull flocks swarm above coastal and water-based monuments when players are inside, and groups of resting seagulls startle and fly off when someone approaches. You can shoot those resting birds if you’d rather stay quiet.

#Building and Quality-of-Life Changes You Should Know About

The Rust update Printed and Polished also fixes or improves a ridiculous number of smaller systems.

Builders get mirrored L-shaped and U-shaped stairs, flipped with Shift + R while placing or with the hammer within 10 minutes. Facepunch also fixed several long-standing ramp and building-skin placement issues, and triangle frames no longer take explosive splash damage through walls.

Other highlights include:

Berries have an Extract option for getting seeds without eating them.
You can drag map markers with the middle mouse button.
Loot panels close automatically when you walk out of range.
The Diver Propulsion Vehicle uses less fuel, accelerates faster and no longer loses condition on pickup.
Apples and coconuts can appear on oak and palm trees. Harvest them before you chop the tree.
Random modular cars spawn with half their engine filled with low-quality parts, locked until the car goes on a lift for the first time.
Four new NPC phone lines offer a weather forecast, power grid status, the travelling vendor countdown and apartment availability.
Sprinting now increases hunger and thirst by 10%.

Softcore loses the deployable corpse system and clans and caps each player at six Tool Cupboards, and Intel-based Macs lose support in favour of Apple Silicon only.

#Scrap King, Rust Premium and Anti-Cheat

The Scrap King Building Skin is a new DLC for the Sheet Metal tier, and you can buy it in-game or from the Rust Steam item store.

Facepunch also confirmed that Rust Premium is coming soon as a paid monthly service offering exclusive skins, collectibles and non-gameplay perks. It is not a battle pass: there’s no gated progression or reward track.

On the anti-cheat front, Facepunch is banning more than 3,000 accounts linked to scripting providers as this wipe begins.

#What Printed and Polished Means for Rust Server Owners

Network batching groups packets before sending them, cutting the encryption overhead paid on every packet. Facepunch recorded up to 25% lower network traffic on a 500-population server. It’s on by default and can be toggled with the batchpackets convar.

A new Network LOD system cuts position updates for distant entities by about 30% in early testing, though Facepunch is trialling it on select official servers before a wider mid-month rollout.

UsePlayerUpdateJobs level 4 is now the stable default for player processing, and one community server reported around 30% better frame times at 1,000 players.

Restarts got attention too. On Facepunch’s highest-population servers, restart times reportedly dropped from around 10 minutes to two minutes. Procedural map generation is nearly twice as fast, and a new prefab flattening step stripped around 43% of the objects on a populated server, saving about 1.44GB of server memory.

Modded server owners have two deadlines to watch: the old method of forcing a map load on clients will be blocked in December in favour of the new CL_LoadMap RPC, and the legacy navmesh behind the -useOldNavmesh launch argument will be removed next patch.

If you’re planning your own community for the new wipe, reliable Rust dedicated server hosting gives you control over your map, configuration and player experience while Rust’s latest backend optimisations do more of the heavy lifting.

#Is the Printed and Polished Rust Update Worth Checking Out?

Yes, and for more than one reason.

The blueprint overhaul could reshape early and mid-wipe progression. The Uzi is a flexible new weapon. Livestock is less frustrating, the world has more going on, controller players can join in, and a long list of fixes removes everyday annoyances.

The performance work may be the real winner, though. Rust has grown so big that memory, networking and frame-time stability matter as much as new content.

Short version: progression has changed, Rust should run better, there’s a new Uzi to fight over, and cows are pettable.

That’s a productive monthly update.

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