What's New in Rust's "25th February Update" Update
Late February 2014 brought one of Legacy Rust's most visible overhauls: a brand-new sky that boosted framerates and lit the night by moon cycle, much better water, the debut of item durability and the Repair Bench, plus proper OSX and Linux support.
The 25th February Update landed in February 2014 and was one of the most visually transformative patches of the Rust Legacy era. The sky was replaced wholesale, the water finally stopped looking terrible, and - in a change that shaped Rust's economy forever after - items started wearing out.
The New Sky
The biggest, most obvious change was the new sky. Why bother, with hundreds of other requests on the list? Because the old sky was, in the team's own words, a slow horrible FPS killer: it rendered using two cameras, which triggered a Unity bug that blocked refraction effects in-game. The replacement renders in a single camera, so everyone got a nice framerate boost and refraction effects became possible again. There was a gameplay side-effect too: depending on the moon cycle, night is no longer pitch black - a change the team considered a good thing. A few rendering issues remained, most notably distant trees appearing too bright (a long-battled Unity3D bug), with fixes promised as the tweaking continued.
New Water
As a happy consequence of the sky swap, the water got much better looking too. The team expected water to play a bigger role in the game going forward - "instead of the death plane that it currently is" - so making it presentable mattered. A new option in the options menu toggles reflections on and off for performance; with reflections off, the water still reflects the sky, which costs essentially nothing and keeps it from looking awful.
Item Durability
The update introduced item durability: items now become damaged through repeated use, and can be patched up at the new Repair Bench. You can keep repairing an item, but it eventually becomes so unreliable you'll want to throw it off a cliff. Armor also loses condition when you take damage - so, as the devblog cheerfully put it, you'll probably have to eventually throw your pants off a cliff too.
OSX and Linux Fixes
Facepunch had just hired the new sky's creator, Andre Straubmeier, the week before, and alongside the sky work he'd been getting Linux and OSX into proper shape: grass now renders correctly on both platforms, and users can join the game on high graphics settings - an issue apparently tied to 64-bit compilation that the team planned to investigate further. A short patch by modern standards, but between moonlit nights, durability and a future for water, this one punched well above its weight.