The Naval Update Finally Arrives: February Wipe Brings Buildable Boats, Deep Sea, and Ghost Ships
After being delayed twice, the Naval Update landed with the February 5 force wipe, giving Rust modular player-built boats, a whole new offshore Deep Sea biome, and revamped naval encounters.
Headline feature
This was the wipe everyone had circled on the calendar. After slipping from its original December slot to February, the Naval Update finally shipped, and it turned out to be one of the more ambitious content drops Rust has seen in a while. The centerpiece is a fully modular boat building system: players place a Boat Building Station in shallow water, insert a Boat Plan, and start snapping together hull sections, decks, sails, a steering wheel, ladders, ramps, cannons, and a compact Tier 2 engine on a floating build grid. Boats top out at 10 foundations long by 5 wide, with a height cap that stops people from turning them into vertical fortresses, and a weight to thrust system means an overloaded boat handles like exactly that, sluggish and slow to turn.
Deep Sea and new biome
Alongside the boats, Facepunch introduced the Deep Sea, a large offshore zone that sits beyond the southern edge of the map and is reached only by sailing out to it. It comes with its own storm conditions and a set of unique points of interest that do not exist anywhere else on the map. The twist is that the whole zone resets its terrain and loot on a timer, by default every three hours, so it behaves almost like its own mini event layered on top of the regular map rather than a static location you loot once and ignore.
Other additions
The update also added Floating Cities and Tropical Islands as new explorable naval content, brought back Ghost Ships in a revamped form, gave Oil Rig scientists updated AI behavior, and introduced a wave of new naval-themed missions for players chasing NPC contracts. Facepunch tied the launch to a Twitch Drops event called Home Brewed 4, running from February 5 through February 15, giving viewers a reason to tune into naval-focused streams during launch week.
What this means for the wipe
This is the wipe to actually engage with the ocean. Boat groups now have a genuine reason to invest time in naval bases and coastal control, since the Deep Sea offers loot that is not available on land and resets frequently enough to reward repeat trips. Expect coastal monuments and boat spawns to be far more contested than usual, and expect the first few days to be rough while everyone figures out boat armor and combat at sea.