What's New in Rust's "18th March Update" Update
March 2014's Legacy patch fixed airdrops to spawn daily around noon, stopped foundations self-destructing on placement, closed a broken-armor exploit, and handed players a toolbox of gfx convars to tune performance themselves.
The 18th March Update rolled out in March 2014, another of Rust Legacy's steady weekly-ish patches. No flashy new content this time - instead it was a solid round of bug fixes plus a surprisingly generous set of graphics controls handed straight to players via the console.
Gameplay Fixes
The headline fix: airdrops were repaired and now spawn around noon daily, restoring one of Legacy Rust's defining loot events to a reliable schedule. Builders got relief too - foundations were destroying themselves immediately upon placement in some cases, part of a wider problem of things decaying far too quickly, now fixed. And an armor exploit was closed: broken armor previously refused to unequip if your inventory was full, so now it simply drops to the ground if it can't fit.
Visual Fixes
- Fixed extreme shadow flickering inside buildings
- Fixed the smoke signal not being influenced by lighting
- Fixed the fade-from-black starting too late after respawn
- Fixed the floating grass bug
- Tweaked tree billboard colors to better match their mesh colors
- Improved cloud synchronization so clouds jump around less
- Fixed the first console command not working on OSX
Graphics Convars and Performance
The most interesting part of the patch was a new set of console convars giving players direct control over image effects: gfx.ssaa toggles screen space anti-aliasing, gfx.grain the radiation grain effect, gfx.shafts the sun shafts, and gfx.damage the damage indicators. A new render.frames convar lets you cap your maximum FPS, and render.distance (a 0-1 value, default 0.2) adjusts draw distance - at this stage only affecting the static rocks. Lower quality levels now automatically disable some image effects for better performance, while quality settings above 50% got anisotropic filtering enabled for terrain, road, rock and building textures.
The patch signed off with a tease: the team was working on "some bigger features" they hoped to complete soon. Given what 2014 held for Rust, that was putting it mildly.