Map and base
Legacy: one island everyone memorised. No Launch Site-scale monuments, no underwater, no electricity, no cameras. Bases are boxes and stairs, not turret bunkers.
New Rust: 4000+ procedural maps, cupboard, upkeep, authorised turrets, Rust+ alarms. Facepunch teams show map dots and pings. On Legacy you jump-checked teammates.
Craft and raid
On Legacy, C4 and the M4 are the end of a tree, not a monument crate. Sulfur is mined, powder cooked, explosives crafted. An x1 wipe lasts because explosives take days.
New Rust gates progress with components, scrap, and raid costs Facepunch retunes yearly. “Vanilla x1” in 2026 is a different economy.
Groups
Current Rust has Teams: teammate HP, map, pings, Rust+. Vanilla has no clan tags, banks, or levels — those are plugins. Legacy 2015 has neither Teams nor pings; a clan is a plugin (tag, chat, FF).
Cheats
Facepunch anti-cheat on Legacy stopped in 2016. Live shards survive on custom clients (RustBuster and the like) and bans. That is not current EAC. Standing up a naked dedicated box is a cheat lobby.