Now you can trigger your real home's alarm when your Rust base is raided

(Image credit: Facepunch Studios)

We're in a new month, which means a new Rust update. There's some pretty interesting stuff going on with Rust's June update, but maybe the weirdest is the Rust+ app now supports IFTTT—which means you can essentially wire up the brutal survival game to some real-life services, apps, and smart home devices.

IFTTT (If This, Then That) is a software platform that connects different apps, devices, and systems to one another. For instance, an IFTTT applet might let you automatically add a song to your Spotify playlist whenever you give a thumbs-up to a song on YouTube. Or, you can use it to send you a text when your weather app notices it's going to rain. Shit like that. If there are two things that both support IFTTT, they can be connected to each other to perform some bit of automation.

With the Rust+ app you can already keep tabs on your Rust server when you're not actually playing, but now that it supports IFTTT you can integrate the app with other apps and devices. Want an alarm to go off or your lights at home to blink when someone is raiding your base? Want to automatically send a tweet when you've been killed in Rust so your followers know who did it? Want to order something vaguely resembling pizza from Dominos by pushing a button in the game? You can now do all those fairly ridiculous things, provided everything involved supports IFTTT.

For the average Rust player, however, there are some more grounded changes in the June update. A new contact list system will help you keep better track of the other players you encounter, let you flag them as friendly or unfriendly, and even place a mark above their heads (while looking at them through binoculars) that shows if they've previously been mean to you. It's part of a "rudimentary reputation system" that's being worked on, to make it easier for friendly players to spot the players who tend to indiscriminately kill on sight.

"As for the majority of hardcore rust players who kill everyone on sight anyway, you may as well pretend this system does not exist as it will not affect you," reads the devblog post. "However, for those less inclined to destroy and kill every living thing that passes in front of them, this system might help you find some like-minded players to team up with!"

Yeah, maybe. The June update also gives animals a nice makeover, with new models, nicer fur, and removes some animals' "redundant bones" for less of a performance hit. I feel bad they lost bones, but the animals definitely do look a lot nicer now. Just look at that big ol' bear!

What else? If you like making cinematic videos of your Rust exploits, some more advanced features have been added to the demo system, including a scrubbable timeline and a shot manager. "You can now create and manage 'shots' within demos, which are individual recordings of camera motion as well as properties such as FOV and DOF. These shots can then be played back in-sync with the demo scene."

There are some quality of life improvements too, like the ability to color code your wires and hoses, an AI overhaul to go along with the fancy new animals, procedural generation tweaks, and a few other odds and ends. No new Twitch drops this month, however, though they'll resume in July.

Here are the full patch notes, and a jump to the lovely new animals.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.