Rust update assigns skin color and face to players

In a recent Rust patch, players were assigned random skin tones and faces, meaning the mutiplayer survival game's servers are no longer filled with identical pale naked men running around hacking at trees, boulders, and each other.

Since a player's appearance is tied to their Steam ID, it remains persistent for all of their lives on every server. "Just like in real life, you are who you are – you can’t change your skin colour or your face," Garry Newman wrote on Rust's devblog on March 13.

"Right now your avatar is randomised via three things. Skin colour, head mesh and head material. We only have 2 face textures and 2 face materials, which means there’s 4 possible combinations. We will be adding more of these later on (at which point your face will probably change)." On March 19, Newman wrote that some polish had been added to faces in another update, but there are still currently only four.

I just started up Rust to see how my character looked, but as I appeared on a server sleeping, two players immediately rushed up and beat me to death with rocks. When I tried respawning, the game crashed. So, not everything has changed.

Thanks to pcgamesn.com.

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.