I used to follow Rust's roadmap religiously back in the day when it was hosted on Nolt (at https://rust.nolt.io/roadmap). But then a couple years ago they shut it down, and I lost track of their future plans.
Turns out sometime in the past few months(/year?) they relaunched their roadmap on their own site: https://rust.facepunch.com/roadmap
It's a very different format, far more formalized. Before, they would simply accept people's suggestions and rank them as "under consideration", "in development", "rejected", etc. But now they have a definite and detailed plan FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR. It's very exciting to be able to look that far ahead, especially because of the sheer amount of stuff that's planned, easily 2x or 3x more than in the old days. Moreover, as exciting as the main additions are, even more exciting are the "Stretch Goals" at the bottom. Just look at this stuff: pet dogs, computer, dot matrix screens, programmable robot, bridges, railway handcar, bounty system, and more, every single one of which, when incorporated, will interact with every other system and item, blowing up the game's possibility space even more.
For Q4 they have "terrain deformation" coming, which sounds like Life is Feudal's terraforming! Even if it doesn't end up that hardcore, it will certainly be an improvement over what we have right now, where a fucking rock on the ground can blow up your entire base design plan.
Player customization meanwhile means we'll finally stop playing as africans or asian women, though tbh that never really bothered me as it's a strict first-person game, and moreover once you're geared you can barely tell who's underneath. Still, it will be nice to be able to design a cool crew and take some pictures with the large variety of regular clothing the game offers. It's not Star Citizen in this regard, but when you add the skins on top of it, you can create some pretty cool looks.
The bridges mean that uberbases in the future will also require a river running through them so we can use them, which will be challenging. I welcome this challenge, as always.
The railway handcar will mean we'll be able to take over a section of train track from the early- or at least midgame. I wonder what collisions will look like.
The pet dogs will probably be tied with farming so forcing everyone to tech up farming, which is great. Solo scavenging with a dog will become far cooler, and imagine a fireteam with four dogs?
And finally I won't even speculate on what the computer + dot matrix screens + switchboard/circuitboard + programmable robot are all about. It sounds like a whole new level of endgame, and I'll be there for it.
So I'll be keeping a close eye on the roadmap from now on! It's just pure cutting-edge 21st-century gaming.
