What's New in Rust's "6th Feb Update" Update

The 6th Feb Update from February 2014 is one of the most historically significant patches Rust ever shipped - it's the one where the zombies died for good. A Legacy-era patch small in size but huge in identity: this is the moment Rust stopped being a zombie survival game.

Zombies Were Removed

"Yep. We did it." The team decided they couldn't hold off any longer - the longer zombies stayed in, the more complaints their removal would eventually cause, so Facepunch forced themselves to deal with it. Zombies were replaced with red bears and wolves, which the devblog freely admitted players would hate: "They're just plugging a gap for now. All will be revvvealed." That teased replacement eventually became Rust's scientists and NPC ecosystem, but in February 2014 all you got was a very angry red bear.

Wildlife Improvements

Fittingly for a patch that put animals at the top of the food chain, wildlife AI got a round of fixes:

• No longer exploitable by walking backwards
• Fears - hostile wildlife reacts to gunshots
• Hostile wildlife retreats if it can't find a path to you
• Wildlife should no longer jump up and snap to random angles
• The white wolf was removed

The known-issues list also confessed that one area of the map "used to have about 200 wolves" - fixed, thankfully.

Locked Backpacks and Lockpicks

An interesting experiment shipped off-by-default: locked backpacks. When you die, your backpack is locked to everyone but you for a period of time, and other players can use a lockpick tool - a default blueprint - to bypass the timer. Lockpicks don't work on doors. The lock duration is per-server via player.backpackLockTime (in seconds), and setting it to 0 turns the system off entirely.

Other Changes

• Workbenches now make you craft faster when standing next to them
• The oil tank area was modified with added cover
• New player animations and improved melee attack animations
• Wood and stone resources got new models that change to indicate remaining quantity, plus a new stone node containing mostly stone
• Footstep sounds never repeat the same sound twice in a row
• Improved grass textures and fixes for level bugs like rocks intersecting buildings

Known issues at ship time included a few invisible walls and one or two rocks without collision - par for the course in early 2014. But nobody remembers this patch for the rocks; they remember it as the day Rust stopped being a zombie game and started becoming Rust.