Battle Sentient Sausages in ‘Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2,’ Available

Blog|Geplaatst door Phil Hornshaw|12 Nov 2026|

Ten years ago, developer RUST LTD. launched shooter Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades in early access. The sandbox game focused on hyper-accurate firearm simulations, allowing players to pick up and use different real-life guns on firing ranges and in scenes where they could blast away at sentient hot dogs called Sosigs.

After a decade of working on and expanding the original, Rust LTD. is taking its next big step forward with the sequel, Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2, or H3VR2 (Rated Teen). The game is much bigger, focusing on a new extraction shooter mode in which players make their way through a strange megastructure called the Facility, seeking out loot to expand their arsenals and battling heavily armed Sosigs. Expect some tactically complex, intense shootouts with a meaty army of enemies, as well as a mystery to uncover within the Facility as you explore. And undoubtedly, you’re going to get grilled by hot dog puns along the way.

The sandbox elements make a return too, giving players plenty of room to play, experiment, and plink away with their favorite guns to see how they feel. But what’s likely to excite fans of the original the most is the fine detail with which the developers have simulated the game’s guns. From the mechanical interactions of different parts and how you’ll interact with them, to the balance of gunpowder in its ammunition, Rust LTD. has gone to exacting and ridiculous detail in making its firearms look, feel, and shoot like the real thing.

There’s a whole lot of new stuff to see and shoot in H3VR2. In celebration of its release after years of development, we sat down with RUST LTD. Chief Technology Officer Anton Hand to talk about what players will find in the Facility, what it takes to get their guns just right, where hot dogs fall among handheld food categories, and how the team brought its massive game to Meta Quest.

How’d the whole idea for Hot Dogs, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades come about?

Anton Hand: H3VR evolved as a project very organically and improvisationally. The genesis of it was a set of virtual object experiments that I did after getting an HTC Vive Devkit, that I then made some YouTube videos for. The first several of these videos went very viral, to the point that folks who’d ordered HMDs were practically banging down our doors, asking if they could buy what we were making (that was basically a few testing scenes at the time), and we made the decision as a group to cobble together an Early Access sandbox game in a very short period of time. From that point forward the game evolved, week at a time, one update and one video a week, in response to what we found compelling, and what got the audience excited. We’d have never guessed at that time that the project would end up stretching across an entire decade!

How do you go about creating guns and making them feel realistic in VR? Where do you start with that process, and what does it take?

AH: Research is everything. We spend a tremendous amount of time researching the various guns we’re working on, understanding their mechanisms, the bodily experience of operating them, their quirks, their flaws, their minutiae. From there, it’s really about trying to think as much as possible about what a person’s hands are doing when operating the real world equivalent. What the posture is. How much force is involved in moving its various pieces. “Realism” in VR, to me, is about fulfilling a handshake. If people try to manipulate or pick up a thing they think they should be able to do, you have to ensure they can. Layers of surprising detail. Heft. Nuance. Productive friction. A frictionless over design may make for an accessible game, but it produces virtual objects that don’t feel real. We tend to run in the opposite direction.

Tell us about the progression system — what can players expect to find in the Facility and how will they upgrade themselves and their arsenal over time?

AH: H3VR2’s progression system will be very familiar to fans of the extraction genre. Long-form, you are dominantly collecting two things: blueprints for items, and upgrades. The blueprints are found from items in-game called CHIPS, which are acquired by tearing them out of the Item Spawners you find in-level, and surviving the security response that stealing them provokes. Upgrades are your primary out-of-level goals to collect resources for. Improvements to your economy, resource capacity. When we add cosmetic modification of your home base, it’ll be through this system as well.

It sounds like the megastructure at the center for H3VR2 might be more than it appears. Will players uncover a story as they’re fighting Sosigs in The Facility? Can you tell us much about it and this dog-eat-dog world you’ve created?

AH: Indeed. The Facility, for us, is an opportunity to tell a long-form, environment-driven story. H3VR2’s initial hook is very much in the tradition of sci-fi RPGs and im-sims of a player character waking up amidst a catastrophe and having to piece together who they are, where they are, and why. H3VR2, of course, lays another humorous layer on top of this, that the world appears to be solely populated by affable but oblivious hot dog creatures. We have plans to slowly drip-feed morsels of world-building to the player over time, as we expand and deepen the Facility over the coming year or more.

It looks like H3VR2 is a significant step forward from H3VR. What advancements have you made between the two games?

AH: Nearly everything, heh. The interaction system is built around obsessively posed and sequenced hand interactions. Our ballistics system is truly over-the-top detailed. Everything performance-critical is running through ECS or Burst for the Unity engine. Our levels are procedurally generated with a hybrid offline and runtime lightmapping system. Our Sosigs are smarter, more sophisticated, more complexly rendered, all while being more performant (somehow). We’ve done the most detailed authentic foley recording of firearm operation and mechanics that’s ever been done. All running on a Quest. The game is a technical marvel.

H3VR was a huge game with a lot of play options, and H3VR2 looks similarly enormous. What were the challenges you faced in making a juicy hot dog experience on Meta Quest?

AH: Well you’re on Standalone, and you have to pass certification. So you have three huge obstacles. The memory ceiling, how much you can have loaded at once, and how you’re managing memory, especially unloading. You have just the CPU overhead overall, draw overhead, physics, skinning. And then, of course, avoiding single-frame hitches, which is most commonly caused by loading things, or by nearly everything related to the user interface. Without the absurdly talented engineering team we have, I don’t see how we’d have managed this all.

You’ve mentioned before that the sandbox experience is still a big part of H3VR2. What can players expect from that side of the game?

AH: Sandbox is very much the side, not the main course this time around. Our focus is first and foremost on the Extraction Roguelike at the center, and the way in which its progression systems connect with the other aspects of the game. Don’t get me wrong, plenty of folk will end up grabbing H3VR2, having an incredible time just plinking at the range, using the Sosig spawner to set up messy fights, or just blowing a crowd of them up with a grenade. But in doing this sequel, we mean to show how sophisticated physics, detailed interactive objects, and a simulation-first design philosophy in VR can take the shooter genre to unprecedented places in VR.

What are some new features that fans of the original might not know about or expect?

AH: The most subtle feature that one would be unlikely to know about without watching our featurettes is our cartridge pressure system. Cartridges (or bullets, colloquially) in H3VR2 are simulated down to the masses of casing, propellant, and projectile, along with a precomputed pressure curve for the specific mixture of smokeless powders that cartridge holds. This pressure is fed into the mass-spring system that cycles in our autoloading firearms, that not just drives appropriate recoil and bolt movement, but allows for simulating weapon failure. A combination of weak propellant and inconsistent propellant fill (mirroring real-life manufacturing tolerances) generates situations where, in a bottom-up, data-driven way, a firearm may fail to fully cycle while firing, requiring the player to intervene manually to reset the weapon. It’s an experience roughly everyone who has fired real-life firearms has dealt with, and thanks to many layers of deeply researched and carefully designed simulation, it’s an experience that the player can have emergently in our game.

How did seeing how players interacted with the original H3VR shape your approach to the sequel?

AH: Well, I think the most prominent thing is that we have many different user stories with H3. Some folk come to plink and chill. Others come to train. Others come just to try out every single gun in the game. Others come for physics hijinks. Still others come for a highly technical, demanding competitive experience. And so really, we just wanted to acknowledge, respect, and build for that broad range and give each player segment more of what they love.

H3VR continued to grow over the years after its initial release — so what are your plans for the future of H3VR2?

AH: I’ve joked in the past that our game is “‘live service, without the tricks.” Meaning that we have a long-form content plan of regular updates, but it's not wrapped around traditional monetization models of battle passes, and limited-time this or that, FOMO (fear of missing out) tactics, and such. We have a long-form story we want to tell with Facility. We have many more types, patterns, and eras of firearms we want to get in. We have expansion plans for the Challenge and Certification ranges. We’re pursuing some licensed collaborations as well, for bringing in iconic firearms and such from other intellectual properties. It’ll be quite the busy next year or so at least.

Why hot dogs?

AH: Why not?

Is there anything you want to bring up or add that we didn’t ask?

AH: A Hot Dog is not a Sandwich. It is a Taco.

You can grab a gun, head into the Facility, and start boiling some Sosigs right now — Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2 is available today for $39.99 USD on the Store.