Can You Change Gender in Rust?

A friend of mine, upon being given a choice of character gender in a game, always chooses a female avatar. His explanation for this is if he has to spend the whole game looking at them, he prefers they’d be cute. If he were playing a game like Rust, though, where your characters are pre-generated, it wouldn’t really be up to him. For those of you who are unsatisfied with your characters, you’re probably wondering “can I change my character’s gender in Rust?”

The tricky thing about character generation in Rust is that your character is directly tied to your Steam account ID. You get one character, no do-overs. This caused a bit of a stink back in 2016 when Rust first introduced female player avatars and randomly selected half the game’s playerbase to switch over. Male players (who weren’t like my aforementioned friend) were not happy about spontaneously becoming women, which is why many of them started asking Facepunch about whether or not they could switch their gender back over.

Can You Change Gender in Rust?

Unfortunately, there is no in-game way to change your character’s gender. Heck, there’s not even any way to customize them, period. Apparently, this was a deliberate choice on Facepunch’s part, according to an interview between lead developer Gary Newman and Eurogamer.

“It’s the SteamID itself,” he explained. “It’s used as a random seed, then these attributes are pulled from that seed. This way it’s different for every SteamID – but it’s also consistent. It also has the effect of being totally balanced, so half of players will be female, half will be male etc.”

“We understand that you may now be a gender that you don’t identify with in real-life. We understand this causes you distress and makes you not want to play the game any more. Technically nothing has changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings. The only difference is that whether you feel like this is now decided by your SteamID instead of your real-life gender.”

Users have been tinkering in the game’s egg salad ever since then trying to find ways to circumvent the system. Some users have managed to decode Rust’s complex code system, though it’d take a little too long to explain here. Check the Guides page for Rust on Steam if you’re curious, but know that making this happen will probably take a little more time than it’s really worth.