Everyone in Rust is getting a new face
Rust, the popular survival game developed by Facepunch Studios, is receiving its most significant character model overhaul in nearly a decade. The update marks the first comprehensive redesign of player character models since the game’s early days.
The new player models feature substantially improved meshes and materials, with more realistic proportions based on a completely redesigned character rig. The update also introduces expanded customization options, including additional head and hair variants that are randomly generated for each player character.
Facepunch Studios explained that the old player models, while functional, had become visually outdated and were increasingly constraining the studio’s ability to develop new features and content. The overhaul was necessary not only for aesthetic reasons but also to remove technical limitations that had accumulated over the decade-long lifespan of the previous models.
Despite the visual modernization, Rust’s distinctive character generation system remains unchanged—players do not manually customize their character’s appearance. Instead, each player’s look continues to be randomly determined by a seed, ensuring each character is unique while maintaining the game’s original design philosophy.