Rust's July 2026 force wipe landed on July 3, and the headline feature is a brand new monument: the Apartment Complex, a multi-story building where fresh spawns can rent a room for scrap, run their own shop in the ground-floor marketplace, or steal from their neighbours using the map's single master key. Alongside it, Facepunch shipped Softcore raid windows, a proper Clan Table with roles, new sprint animations, and, for server admins, the promotion of Jobs 3 to default with Jobs 2 heading for the chopping block in August.
Release Date
The Common Ground update went live on the first Thursday of July 2026, which is Rust's usual monthly release cadence: force wipe day, all servers wiped, everyone starts on equal footing. If you run a community server, that means today's the day to plan a fresh map, refresh your Oxide plugins for compatibility, and let your players know the Apartment Complex is a landing pad worth checking before they even start farming.
The Apartment Complex Monument
The centrepiece is a residential high-rise scattered around the map as a low-tier PVE-ish monument. You walk into the lobby, talk to the receptionist, and rent a room. Different room types come with different perks: the basement is cheap and cramped, the penthouse is expensive but has more storage, more furnaces, and better sightlines out of the windows.
Rent is paid in scrap. You feed it into a slot next to your door on an ongoing basis. Miss a rent cycle and you are evicted. Everything in the room is seized, and the door is opened up for the next tenant. It's an intentionally casual-friendly space for players who want a private stash without committing to a full base build in the first hour of a wipe.
There is a catch. Somewhere on the island, spawned each wipe, there is a master key that grants access to any occupied apartment for five minutes. Find it and you have a five-minute window to loot the whole building. There is also a guard hanging around the basement who hints at which rooms are worth robbing.
Rentable Shops
Ground floor of the same monument houses a small marketplace. Any player can walk up to a shop's contract sign and lease it. It costs a non-refundable upfront chunk of scrap plus per-hour rent (real-time hours, not game time), with a minimum 12-hour lease before you can open. Once you're in, the shop behaves exactly like a Vending Machine with a customisable sign above it: set your listings, restock, adjust prices. Drones cannot buy from you, which limits some automated exploits.
There is a takeover mechanic that keeps popular shop slots contested. After a shop has been open for six hours, anyone can walk up and take it over for double the upfront cost and per-hour rate. Take it over again after another six hours and it goes to 3x, then 4x, escalating until whoever holds it runs out of rent. When rent runs out or the shop is taken over, your unsold inventory is held for 24 hours and can be reclaimed by returning to the shop. If you don't collect within that window, it's gone.
And, yes, the master key opens the shops too. Keeping high-value items in your shop is a gamble.
Softcore: Raid Windows and 2x Gather
Softcore is where Facepunch is doing most of the experimentation for casual-friendly server rules this month. Two big changes:
2x gather multiplier. Resource nodes drop double ore, wood, cloth, meat, and animal loot. This is roughly what modded 2x community servers do, but it's now the vanilla Softcore experience.
Raid Windows. Raids can now only happen during a defined server-time window. By default, that window is 6 PM to 9 PM server local time, and yes, it's the same clock for every player regardless of their real timezone. Outside the window, Tool Cupboards project a raid-blocking bubble that prevents damage to building blocks and doors within the TC radius. Deployables and unprotected TCs are still fair game.
Two important server-admin nuances: a Tool Cupboard must be at least one hour old to project the block, and there is a full set of ConVars to tweak both the window times and the block radius. This is designed so that fresh TCs from a rush-in raid attempt can't lock things down instantly.
The Clan Table
Rust finally has a proper clan system in vanilla. Clans sit above the existing team system: more members, custom roles with permissions, a dedicated clan chat channel, an announcement/MoTD field, and clan names on player nameplates. Your allies also show as blue dots on the map when they are nearby.
Clans are created and managed at the new Clan Table, a workbench-like deployable. It's disabled on Hardcore servers, which will keep the paranoia intact for the audience that wants it. For Vanilla and Softcore, expect the switch from team-only to team+clan to change some plugin behaviours. Anything that gated permissions on team membership may now need to be aware of clans.
Animation and Cosmetic Additions
Two smaller quality-of-life items:
- Sprinting with rifles. The new animation system rolled out last month now covers two-handed projectile weapons. Your character pops the right arm up and lets the sprint carry the body. It looks less robotic and, more importantly, doesn't cover as much of the reticle when you drop into aim.
- One-handed melee sprinting. Same tech, applied to the vanilla Hatchet as a test bed. If it holds up in the wild it'll expand to other one-handed melee weapons over the next couple of patches.
A paid Glowing Wallpaper Pack DLC also arrived: 27 wall, floor, and ceiling wallpapers with a neon/glow-in-the-dark theme. Available in-game or via the Rust Steam item store.
What This Means for Your Server
If you're an owner or admin, here's the practical checklist for the first 48 hours of this wipe:
- Wipe day is today. Community server maps have reset. Make sure your seed rotation, world size, and Oxide plugin list are dialled in before players log in.
- Update plugins carefully. Facepunch rewrote how per-player server state is passed around this month, which forces server-mod authors to update. Test critical plugins on a staging server before pushing to prod. Anti-cheat, permission, and clan-related plugins are the most likely to break.
- Jobs 3 is now default. Jobs 2 will run under-the-hood as Jobs 3 for now, but the actual removal ships in August. Any custom launch flags forcing Jobs 2 should be reviewed. In practice this should mean a slight tickrate improvement, worth a benchmark if you were already CPU-bound.
- Softcore admins: tune the raid window ConVars for your community. 6 PM to 9 PM works for a US-centric or EU-centric server, but a global 24/7 community may want a longer or split window.
- Wipe post communication. The apartment complex is the story your players will search for tonight. Post an in-game MoTD or Discord update pointing to it, mention rent runs on scrap, and warn about the master key. This is the kind of first-hour info that keeps returning players engaged.
- Watch for master-key drama. New PVP hotspot: the lobby, the basement (guard NPC), and whichever room happens to hold the master key that wipe. Expect log-in spikes at the guard NPC.
Verdict: Worth Coming Back For?
The Apartment Complex is the most creative piece of monument design Facepunch has shipped in a long stretch of pretty utilitarian additions. Rentable shops give small groups and solo players a real economy loop that isn't tied to holding land, and the raid-window overhaul finally gives Softcore an identity of its own instead of "Vanilla with a fresh spawn". Clans are overdue. If you dropped Rust after the June wipe, tonight is the reason to reinstall.
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Wipe hits at the same time everywhere. Be ready before your players are.
