Rust's crafting update gives the survival sim real-time food cooking and pies to rival Monster Hunter, but the tastiest treat is the ability to make and throw 'bee grenades'

Video gaming is currently in an arms race (or should that be 'farms race') to depict the most delectable virtual food possible. It’s a race variously led by the Yakuza series, Final Fantasy, and most recently, Monster Hunter: Wilds, which features a cheese naan so mouthwatering it caused a sales surge of dairy-filled bread products in Japan.

Now, brutal survival sim Rust is getting in on the culinary action, with its arguably misnamed 'Crafting update' placing a big emphasis on home cooking. Described by developer Facepunch as bringing a "feast of changes" to the game, it adds numerous features dedicated to the creation of haute cuisine.

First and foremost is the cooking workbench, a "new deployable that allows you to cook up some new food recipes". Items unlocked by the cooking workbench apparently offer stat and modifier bonuses, so there's a practical reason to don your chef whites (note, do not actually don anything white in Rust, unless you want to get shot).

The crafting update also makes substantial changes to the act of cooking itself, with all food items getting a visual model when placed on cooking deployables, while that food now "cooks in real time". You'll see steaks brown, chicken griddle, ribs crisp, and many other foods verb in an alluring manner. Likewise, food spoils over time too, so you need to make sure food is cooked or refrigerated to slow the decaying process.

New food items you can cook include bread, which comes bundled with the ability to grow and gather wheat, and an entire spectrum of pies, with each pie type providing different stat and modifier bonuses. Cooking a pie also rewards you with an animation of your character wafting the fresh pie smell toward their face, as you can see in the update's release trailer above.

Other new features include herbal teas you can make to warm up or cool down your character, a chicken coop for domesticating wild fowl, an engineering workbench, and a "hopper" that can be attached to storage items to suck up any nearby dropped items. This includes any creature that is killed in range of the hopper, which will be "harvested" Fargo style. That'll put you off your pie.

Anyway, now we've had the main course and dutifully eaten our vegetables, we can move onto dessert. Rust is getting bees. BEES. The official best insect will create hives on wild oak trees, which you can harvest for their delicious honeycomb (just make sure to wear a hazmat suit so you don't get stung to death). Bees can also be farmed by building beehives, providing access to what is clearly the greatest video game weapon ever devised—the bee grenade.

This is, really, just a jar full of bees, which you can lob at other players to make them *Eddie Izzard voice* COVERED IN BEES. Specifically, thrown swarms "will slowly create up to 3 smaller Swarms to attack players in a nearby radius". Bee swarms can be fought with fire and water, or by wearing a hazmat suit. Alternatively, Facepunch suggests you "run like the wind to get away".

You can read the full details of the update here. I haven't played Rust in a very long time, but I was sorely tempted to jump back in last month when Facepunch added siege weapons and swords in its primitive update. Now the studio's also added pies and bee grenades, that might just be enough to pull me back in.