Rust: The Tool Cupboard Has Been Taxing Your Group Since Breach and Clear — +20% Upkeep at 12 Players, and Guest Access to the Code Lock Counts

Facepunch released Breach and Clear, the monthly Rust update, on Thursday, September 3, 2026. The official changelog carries this date, and the Steam announcement is timestamped at 17:26 UTC, that is 7:26 pm in Paris — this is our conversion, the studio does not publish any French time. The same day fell on the monthly force wipe, whose date had been given a month earlier in the Power Trip devblog.

Amid the monument blockers and the new High Quality Metal node, one line in the Features section concerns all official servers: "Group size TC upkeep increase". The Tool Cupboard now applies an upkeep surtax — the maintenance cost drawn from the cupboard — indexed to the number of people orbiting your base.

The mechanic can be stated in three lines and missed in one second, because the count does not stop at players you have authorized: a Code Lock opened to a neighbor carries the same weight as a proper authorization.

The four criteria that make the counter grow

Facepunch's text, signed Jarryd Campi, lays out the principle: "Starting this month Tool Cupboards will now apply an additional upkeep tax based on the number of players that are in a base." Four situations feed into this count:

• any player directly authorized on the Tool Cupboard;
• any player who was deauthorized within the past 24 hours;
• any player authorized on a Code Lock at the base — "including guest code access", so guest access included;
• any player deauthorized from a Code Lock within the past 24 hours.

The two 24-hour criteria are the real trap: purging the cupboard because the bill climbs produces no immediate effect, as those removed remain counted for a full day. The cleanup must precede the problem, not follow it.

The Code Lock criterion is the second one. A trading airlock, a shared storage room, a door left on a guest code for a passing ally: each of these conveniences adds a head to the counter, without ever needing to have touched the Tool Cupboard to be included.

One caveat, finally: Facepunch never writes at any point what should be understood by "in the base". The French in-game description of the cupboard, taken from the client, speaks of a "50-meter radius", but the devblog does not repeat this figure to delimit the perimeter of the tax. We flag this rather than infer it.

The scale: free up to four, then two tiers

The devblog publishes three rules, and nothing else: "First 4 players incur no tax", "Next 6 players incur 2% tax per player", "Subsequent players incur 4% tax per player". Two worked examples follow — "a TC with 6 players authed will have +4% upkeep, a TC with 12 players will have +20% upkeep" — and a cap: "There is a maximum tax amount of 300%."

The two examples let us verify the scale rather than assume it. At twelve people: four free, six at 2% and two at 4%, that is 12 + 8 = 20%. The math checks out, so the rule can be extrapolated beyond that.

Only two lines actually come from Facepunch, the ones for 6 and 12; the rest is the arithmetic unfolding of the published scale, not data from the studio. The right-hand column, meanwhile, translates "additional upkeep tax" as a markup on the existing bill: that's the reading supported by the devblog's sentence about the in-game display, but the studio never writes out the exact formula anywhere.

Two thresholds are worth remembering. First, the jump from 4 to 5: at four you pay nothing extra, and the fifth name triggers the mechanic. Then the jump from 10 to 11, where the price of each new head doubles, from 2% to 4%. As for the 300% cap, it requires 82 people counted: a theoretical figure if you go by direct authorization alone, much less absurd if your base is handing out guest codes on an assembly line.

Where to read the applied rate, and on which servers

Facepunch gives a single in-game method for checking: "You can see the current tax rate being applied by hovering over the upkeep cost while the TC is open." Open the cabinet, hover over the displayed cost, the current rate appears. That's also the only way to know how many people the server actually counts you as — the game doesn't publish the list.

That said, the rule isn't universal: "Server owners will find a set of ConVars in the Decay class that can be used to modify these behaviours, including disabling it entirely." The studio doesn't name any of these variables. On a community server, the question to ask staff is therefore binary even before talking numbers: is the group tax active, and at what setting?

It stacks with the August 6th bill

This surcharge doesn't replace anything, it adds on. Since Power Trip, tall external walls and large gates have weighed on the cupboard's upkeep, at a rate the August devblog placed in the middle of the building blocks' range, "10% -> 33%". We detailed this addition on August 11th: it becomes the base calculation on which the group tax is applied.

The order of magnitude is easy to work out. A cupboard set at 10,000 Stone per day will demand 12,000 with twelve people counted, and 19,200 if the server counts thirty around the same base. The 10,000 figure is illustrative: Facepunch publishes a rate, never a resource scale.

The consequence is structural. A clan that fielded a large perimeter by relying on the number of hands available for farming now sees that number of hands itself become a burden. This is the stated intent: "Large player groups are a tricky game balance problem to tackle as they essentially bypass most difficulty mechanics in the game via sheer numbers," writes the studio, which says it wants to give these groups a problem to solve without making clan play "unviable".

What the devblog leaves unresolved

Three grey areas remain, and none of them is trivial for anyone running a large base.

The first: is a player who is authorized on both the Tool Cupboard and a Code Lock counted once or twice? The text lists four criteria without saying whether it's a sum or a list of distinct people, and the example of the six players, which only covers direct authorization, doesn't settle the matter.

The second: is the 24-hour window a rolling window or aligned to a server cycle? The devblog says "in the last 24 hours", which suggests a rolling window without confirming it.

The third concerns communication. Facepunch has published nothing in French: rust.facepunch.com/fr returns a 404 error, and the Steam announcement requested in French serves up the English text. The game itself is localized — the Steam page lists "French*", asterisk included, meaning with voice-over. The French labels quoted here come from the strings extracted from the client, not from the publisher — and two words remain without a verified French equivalent, upkeep and decay, which we therefore keep in English.

In practice

Four reflexes, in this order:

1. Count the Code Locks before the authorizations. This is the pool of names nobody thinks about, guest access included.
2. Clean up in advance. A deauthorization only takes effect after 24 hours: it should be planned at the end of a session, not when the cupboard empties out.
3. Keep an eye on the upkeep cost with the cupboard open after every change in headcount: it's the only reliable source.
4. Check the server setting if you're not playing on official servers: the mechanic can be disabled on the host side.

For groups of four or fewer, nothing changes as long as the base stays closed. Beyond that, the question is no longer how many of you are actually playing, but how many the server thinks you are — since September 3, 2026, these two numbers are no longer the same.