A separate game, not a playlist
Current Rust cannot switch to Legacy. Different engine (Unity 4), map, crafting, models. You cannot download Legacy from Steam; the branch is gone. What remains is fan-preserved clients and third-party servers.
Experimental became the default client in 2015. Legacy stayed on the old exe with no patches. In December 2016 Facepunch pulled it from the library.
Inside the 2015 client
One familiar island: Resource Road, Hacker Valley, radtown, hangar, small towns. No tool cupboard as in new Rust — a base is wood, stone, metal, and whoever is online.
Crafting is a straight line: wood → stone → metal → guns and C4. No components, no scrap. Sulfur, gunpowder, explosives are time, not a tier-3 loot table.
The build the scene still runs: v1069 (March 2015). Period mods are Oxide 2 for Legacy or Fougerite — not Carbon, not uMod for current Rust.
The peak was not 2015
Legacy’s global Steam peak was February 2014: about 35k average and ~59k peak, not 2015. By 2015 Facepunch was already pushing Experimental. Russia bought more Rust copies than the US that year (~198k vs ~187k) — CIS nostalgia for the old client is not a meme invented in 2026.