September 2025 Update

Hello everyone, here is another update on the state of Gold Rush as of September 2025.
The project is nearly ready for a release on Steam. Here’s what’s new since our last post:

We have switched to an achievement system for unlockable weapons

Enjoy the thrill of fighting to earn weapons like the Force-a-Nature again. Behind the scenes, devs and playtesters have found a surprising amount of joy in exploring and abusing achievement maps again for the first time in over 10 years.

The weapons you can expect to enjoy unlocking are:

  • Force-a-Nature, Bonk Atomic Punch, Sandman
  • Direct Hit, Buff Banner, Gunboats, Equalizer
  • Backburner, Flare Gun, Homewrecker, Axtinguisher
  • Loch N Load, Scottish Resistance, Ullapool Caber
  • Natascha, Sandvich, KGB
  • Frontier Justice, Wrangler
  • Blutsauger, Kritzkrieg, Ubersaw
  • Huntsman, Razorback, Jarate
  • Ambassador, Your Eternal Reward, Dead Ringer, Cloak & Dagger

We have finalized our cosmetic system (and probably the lineup, too)

Initially, we planned to have hats be unlocked via the achievement system just like weapons. Unfortunately, Valve has informed us that this is not allowed as it constitutes manipulation of the item economy. To cut to the chase, there are only a few hats in Gold Rush and the way you get them is by simply owning them in your regular TF2 inventory.

The hats available to you include:

  • Batter’s Helm, Baker Boy
  • Soldier’s Stash, Gentle Manne’s Service Medal
  • Brigade Helm
  • Demoman’s Fro, Glengarry Bonnet
  • Football Helmet, Officer’s Ushanka
  • Mining Light, Texas Ten Gallon, Engineer’s Cap
  • Prussian Pickelhaube, Otolaryngologist’s Mirror, Physician’s Procedure Mask
  • Trophy Belt
  • Fancy Fedora, Backbiter’s Billycock

If you ever forget what items are or aren’t in the mod, or what achievements unlocks them, you’ll be able to see that information at any time using the item catalog on the character info screen.

Securing Server Hosters

We hope to accommodate players all around the globe. We are currently working with some hosters to prepare a small set of servers hosted in Europe, North America, South America, Australia, and Asia–but we’ll take any additional help we can get.

If you’re someone with real experience hosting servers for TF2 or other source mods, please reach out to us! The more the merrier.

So… What’s The Hold-Up?

Mostly Valve. A build of our mod was manually approved a while ago, and we were hoping to launch the mod on October 10th to commemorate TF2’s 18th anniversary–but they have been very slow to approve the store page itself for some reason. There is literally nothing we can do about that, so we’re just continuing to work while we wait.

Other than that, there’s a few things we have been hoping we can fix before the mod is posted. For one, achievements and the process of unlocking items still seem a little finnicky; we’re not yet entirely sure how much we can do about this. There’s some other occasional glitches–such as weapon worldmodels sometimes disappearing in players’ hands–that are still evading us as well.

We promised thorough overhauls of weapon models, character models, and maps a long time ago–these are on the way, but they’re longer term goals. Right now we’re simply prioritizing having a classic, golden age TF2 experience in your hands (running through Steam!) as soon as possible.

Thank you for your continued patience. We’re very excited about this project and we hope you are too.