In an interview with PCGamesN (via PC Gamer), open-world sandbox Rust will soon be getting a major overhaul in the form of a new development branch. Fortunately, those who had previously purchased the Early Access title will be getting access to the reboot, creator Garry Newman confirmed.

"There's a lot of systems that are integral to Rust that are 3,000 lines long, that could be 100 lines long," Newman said. "So every time you go to change something you have to chase around finding how these five different systems that it doesn't really need work, then you change it and it breaks 4 different systems that you thought had nothing to do with it."

Due to there being so much of the game that needed to be changed, Newman and his studio Facepunch simply decided to start over from scratch. The aim of the new version is to simplify and speed up development, while also bringing changes to the interface, crafting and visual look plus improvements to performance. Currently this is all happening within an experimental branch, though Newman was quick to confirm that those owning the current version will be able to access the new version in the future.

"They get the new version," he told PC Gamer. "We're still developing the same game, we just switched tracks."