The Common Ground update is live in Rust, and it drops two brand new monuments, a full Clan System, and a Softcore rework into the same patch. The centerpiece is the Apartment Complex, a safe-zone city block where you can rent a room, run a shop, or try to break into someone else’s stash if you can afford the right key.
Quick answer: Head to the new Apartment Complex monument to rent a room or shop with Scrap, build a Clan Table (or use the ones at Outpost and Bandit Camp) to create a clan, and remember that on Softcore servers raiding is only allowed between 6 and 9 PM local server time.
Renting a room at the Apartment Complex
The Apartment Complex is built like a small city block, with apartment towers, shop fronts, streets, elevators, roof access, turrets, vehicles, a train station, and a playground. The whole monument is a safe zone patrolled by peacekeepers, which gives you a reason to come back throughout a wipe instead of clearing it once and leaving.
Rooms work on a daily rental model. You start at the Check-In Desk in the main foyer, pay a Scrap deposit, and then pay Scrap per real-world day to keep the room. Every tier comes with a Telephone, a water source, a toilet for comfort, and a Level 1 Work Bench. The difference between tiers is storage, extra rooms, and amenities.
| Room tier | Deposit | Daily upkeep | Storage slots | Units available |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basement | 100 Scrap | 25 Scrap | 134 | 15 |
| Standard | 200 Scrap | 50 Scrap | 282 | 39 |
| Penthouse | 400 Scrap | 100 Scrap | 391 | 6 |
The Basement is the bare-bones option, with a two-slot stove, a single-slot locker, and no furnace or fridge. The Standard room steps up to a three-slot stove, a small furnace, a full-sized locker, a refrigerator, and a window view. The Penthouse is the top tier, adding a four-slot stove, a large furnace, a better view, a Chippy machine, and a radio.
The master key and Combat Zones
Renting a room is convenient, but it is not a sealed vault. A master key can be bought at Bandit Camp for a steep price, and it lets you unlock other players’ apartments and shops. To make scouting fair, an NPC at the Apartment Complex will sell you information about how valuable a rented room is, so you can decide whether the expensive key is worth spending on a break-in.
Because the monument itself is a safe zone, each interior is flagged as a Combat Zone. The moment you cross the threshold into a room, normal safe-zone protection drops and you become fair game, which is what lets renters defend their space against burglars. These zones behave like any area outside a safe zone.
Rentable Shops for player trading
The second new monument centers on Rentable Shops, which give you a proper storefront instead of a vending machine bolted to your base. There are 14 shop stalls to rent. By default a shop costs 100 Scrap upfront and 10 Scrap per real-world hour as upkeep. When a stall sits empty, a Rent Lease Agreement appears on the front that other players can interact with.
Once rented, a shop runs just like a vending machine. You stock inventory, set sell orders and prices, and use the same wheel menu, plus options to open, close, and paint the shop sign for local advertising. Because the shops sit in a central safe zone, they solve the old problem of vending machines advertising exactly where you keep your loot.
The Clan System and Clan Table
Clans are now enabled, and they act as a more advanced version of teams. You can add more members, assign roles and permissions, use a dedicated clan chat channel, and post an announcement or message of the day. When you open the map, you can also see nearby clan members’ locations. Facepunch describes the feature plainly in the Common Ground patch notes.
The system revolves around the Clan Table, which works as the clan’s version of a Tool Cupboard, complete with its own status marker and range. You need access to one to name and create a clan. Tables are craftable after you research them at a Level 1 Work Bench, and Facepunch has also placed one at Outpost (in the barbed wire fence area near the Research Table) and at Bandit Camp (beside the staircase to the gambling wheel) for early-game setup. The system is not available in hardcore mode.
Alongside the core system, the update adds clan logs, a score section, announcements, logo painting, streamer-mode avatars, keybinds, and interface fixes.
Softcore raid windows and 2x gather
Softcore mode gets its biggest shakeup yet. Raiding is now restricted to a set window between 6 and 9 PM local server time, so the exact hours shift depending on where the server is hosted. Inside that window, standard vanilla Rust raid rules apply. Outside of it, most of your base is protected, with a few important exceptions.
| Softcore change | Detail |
|---|---|
| Raid window | Raiding allowed only 6–9 PM local server time |
| Gather rate | 2x on trees, ore, corpses, and ground collectibles (not player-grown crops) |
| Outside the window | MLRS disabled; explosive and projectile damage blocked on core building parts |
| Still vulnerable | Twig, deployables, high external walls and gates, and melee damage |
| Protection timing | Structures become immune one hour after the Tool Cupboard is placed |
Note: furnaces and small oil refineries connected to a Tool Cupboard remain raidable outside the window, and the multiplier does not touch player-planted growables. To keep the protection active, make sure your build sits inside a Tool Cupboard’s radius.
Skins, settings, and audio changes
Common Ground also carries a batch of cosmetic and technical adjustments worth knowing about before your next wipe.
- The Metal Shopfront is now skinnable through the workshop.
- Running cadence and footstep audio have been tuned to sound closer to how they did before the June player-model change.
- A new inventory player model quality setting lets you lower the visual load of your character on the inventory screen.
- An experimental Shadow Caching setting adds contact shadows and targets shadow performance, though it may still show visual issues.
- Sprinting animations for rifles and one-handed melee weapons have been updated.
- 27 new wallpapers are available to decorate your base.
You will know the update installed correctly when the Apartment Complex appears on the map, the Clan Table shows up in your craft menu after research, and Softcore servers display the new raid-window timing. Common Ground is live now, so the fastest way to see the changes is to load in and check the monument grid for the new city block.
