Hello, HWS Community.

First of all, thank you all for a great first season so far.
Overall, the feedback I have received has been quite good, and with your help, a lot of minor issues here and there have been improved. Please, keep it all coming! I truly appreciate it.

Rust Specialist Competition

Starting with the new season, a building competition will be running for a few days, until June 22, 2026, 19:00 GMT+2. The competition is quite simple, and I would encourage everyone to join. All you have to do is to build the most epic base on one of the HWS Rust servers as you possibly can.
The competition will be taking place on the normal servers, where others can still raid you. Around the time where the event ends, the base will be judged as-is, so you have to make sure to defend your base.

The judgement will be done by me, based on factors such as:

• The overall appearance of the base (does it look cool?).
• The practicality of the base (is it usable?).
• How much effort has gone into the build.

The rewards will be as follows:
1st place) 1 month of the Technician tier + 5000 HWS Chips.
2nd place) 1 month of the Colonist tier + 2500 HWS Chips.
3rd place) 1 month of the Scavenger tier + 1000 HWS Chips.

You can participate in the event by creating a ticket in Discord, in the #rust-help-ticket channel with a screenshot of your base and a screenshot of the location in the 'G' map. If you request it, we can share some cool pictures of your base publicly in Discord, so others can see the cool base you built. It's not a requirement to have such pictures shared in order to participate in the event.

If you'd like to build it together with your friends, that's also possible. Every person who actively participated in building the base (up to four people) will get the reward for the base. So if four people built the 1st place, they will each be given 1 month of the Technician tier and 5000 HWS Chips.
Every player can only be part of the submission for 1 base, and they must belong to the same clan.

HWS Skills

With the full wipe, I'll also be enabling a new feature. A new seasonal skill system will be added, meaning that as you mine, chop wood, or gather plants, you'll slowly level up and earn more resources with time. The progression is balanced around an entire season (14-21 days), and limited in how much of a global bonus it can give, to prevent creating too much inequality between players.

The amount you can level up each skill is dependent on your HWS Level. So the higher HWS Level, the higher your skill levels can also become.
With every full wipe, your skills will reset to keep the experience fair for everyone, but your HWS Level is permanent.

Initially, the feature will have four skills: Chopping, Mining, Gathering, and Building.