Howdy, Pioneers,
Right now, while you’re reading this, there are Pioneers out on the frontier.
Not in a trailer. Not in a mock-up. Real players are playing Red Rust Pioneers today, chopping wood, boiling water, building camps, getting into trouble, and dying in ways we absolutely did not design for.
That’s why it has been a little while since we last checked in.
Playtesting is underway, and these have been the busiest six weeks this game has ever had.
So pour yourself a coffee, settle in by the fire, and let’s get into it.
300 Tickets, 100+ Bugs, and One Very Suspicious Bucket
In the six weeks since our last update, we’ve closed more than 300 tickets.
Over a hundred of those were bugs, and our Trail Guides are the reason we found most of them.
That works out at around fifty tickets a week. Reports come in, they get read, they get triaged, and they get fixed, often within days. The build our playtesters are on today is a meaningfully different game from the one they started with, and it keeps moving forward every week.
That’s the thing about playtesting that no amount of internal testing can replace.
We know how the game is meant to be played.
You lot don’t.
And thank goodness for that, because you go and do things we’d never dream of. You log out and back in more times than any sensible person would. You die in inventive and unusual ways. You test the edges of every system. You pick up a bucket when you really shouldn’t.
Plenty of what turned up was serious.
Learned recipes weren’t always surviving a save and reload. Respawning at a bed could occasionally drop you clean through the world. Dying to fire in co-op could leave a player stuck at the respawn screen with nowhere to go.
Those are the kind of issues that quietly ruin an evening, and every one of them is now fixed.
Some of it was rather less serious.
Equipping a full bucket of water gave you dysentery. Not drinking it. Just holding it.
Male pioneers were screaming in a woman’s voice when they took damage. Very committed performances all round.
The building plan book had learned to clone itself every single time you logged out. A few Trail Guides ended up with quite a library.
Grilled fish flatly refused to stack in your inventory, while grilled meat stacked just fine.
One camp bloomery decided it was a tanning rack and stuck to that story.
Camas bulbs were simply vanishing from the world, which is not the harvestin’ experience we were going for.
That’s game development for you.
Equal parts progress, patience, and peculiar surprises.
It is also exactly why this stage of testing matters so much. Every odd bug, every broken quest step, every strange edge case, every “I don’t think this was meant to happen” moment helps us make Red Rust Pioneers stronger.
Word Is Getting Out
Something else has been happening while all this testing has been going on.
A few creators who have been playing have shared their first impressions with their own audiences, and watching folks encounter the frontier cold, with no briefing from us, has been one of the real pleasures of the last few weeks.
Seeing what people notice first, what they try, what confuses them, what makes them laugh, and what they choose to do when nobody from the team is standing over their shoulder tells us things a bug report never could.
We’re not linking anything here, because those are their videos to share, not ours to point at. But they are out there if you fancy going looking, and they will give you an honest look at where the game is right now.
To everyone who has picked up a camera, hit record, and shared what they found: thank you.
It means a great deal.
More Pioneers on the Trail
Here’s the part we’re most excited about.
Thanks to everything the Trail Guides have helped us find, Red Rust Pioneers is now in good enough shape for us to open the trail wider.
We’re getting ready to invite more of you in.
Thousands of you have already put your names forward for playtesting on Steam, and we want to say a proper thank you for that. It is a genuinely humbling number. When we open the next round, Steam selects groups of playtesters from everyone who has volunteered, so if your name is already in the hat, you are already in with a shot.
And if it isn’t, sign-ups are still open.
Head over to our Steam page, request access, and you will be in the pool for the rounds to come.
We are not putting a date on the next round just yet, because we would rather tell you once and be right than tell you twice and have to change it. But it is close, and we will be shouting about it the moment we are ready.
The first Trail Guides have already made a real difference to the game.
Now we are preparing for more boots in the dirt.
Come Join the Campfire
Everything in this update exists because Pioneers played the game and told us what they found.
That is not a nice line to put at the end of a dev update. It is genuinely how Red Rust Pioneers is being built. We are making this thing alongside y’all, and it is already a far better game for it.
This game is not a someday game.
It is being played today. It will be in more hands soon. And there is a team behind it going flat out to get it ready for the road ahead.
Discord is the best place to chat with the team, share what you have found, ask questions, and be first to hear the moment the next playtest round opens up.
And if you have not wishlisted Red Rust Pioneers yet, now is the time. It helps more folks find the game, and it means Steam will tell you the moment there is something to play.
To every Trail Guide who filed a report, recorded a clip, or just told us something felt off: thank you.
You have made this a better game.
Stay safe out there, Pioneers.
– Rusty and the Rusty Robot dev team
P.S. Don’t forget to boil your tea.