What's New in Rust's "Devblog 100" Update

Devblog 100 arrived in July 2016 and marked one of the biggest resets in Rust's history: the blueprint system was gone, and the XP system took its place. "Time to start over" was the official summary, and it wasn't kidding — blueprints, blueprint fragments and the Research Bench were all removed in one stroke, with player progression rebuilt from the ground up around levelling and unlocks.

The XP System

Progression now ran on experience points and a level-based unlock tree. Facepunch was upfront that the balance had been tested a lot but still needed work, asking players to report problems and exploits and to expect a bunch of patches over the following week. (Community member Phaedo82 got a shout-out for a video explaining the system better than a wall of text could.)

The list of things that earned XP at launch: fishing, chopping trees and mining rocks, crafting items, finding crates, smashing barrels, hunting, feeding people, foraging, destroying helicopters, and gutting fish — with more planned over time.

The clever bit was Ownership, a system tracking your influence in the world. Your actions leave a mark on items, and when those items later generate XP, you get a share. Make a Fish Trap that someone else uses? You get XP. Cook food, hand it to another player, they eat it? XP. Harvest resources someone crafts into a hatchet? XP when it's crafted — and again when that hatchet gets used. The more you interact with people, the more "streams" of XP flow your way. Facepunch acknowledged Reddit's concerns about groups farming shared XP head-on: the system was functional and fun but incomplete, and they didn't want 20-person zergs unlocking an AK47 on day one while everyone else swung hatchets.

Early Game Buffs

To soften the fresh-spawn experience under the new tree, melee weapons unlock early and their costs were significantly reduced. The patrol helicopter no longer targets players holding a bow — ending the ritual slaughter of endless newbies — and the Eoka pistol got a substantial buff: 25% more damage and more reliable firing. The changelist adds cheaper Machetes and salvaged swords, a buffed stone spear, and most craft times reduced and made sensible.

Dungeons, Doors and Cover

A month of dungeon work merged in with this patch, headlined by a first look at the new Airfield. Dungeons gained doors and barricaded doors, plus cover placed to stimulate gunfights in high-tension areas. Both barricades and cover can be broken and — for now — don't respawn; the plan was to tie barricade respawns to the loot they protect and give cover a respawn timer. Dungeon crates also shifted to a vast majority of military crates, though until loot tables got revisited you might still find the odd torch in them.

Building and Gunplay

The wipe brought stability balancing: pillars and roofs contribute less stability, making raid towers less effective and building height more of a real constraint — a deliberate line walked between creativity and exploit prevention, with more tweaking expected. Meanwhile the gunplay reboot hit the prerelease branch for testing, due on staging the following week and targeted for release with the next update, pending armor balancing.

Throwable weapons got a responsiveness pass too: firing before entering the aim state now registers, you can throw before the intro animation finishes, and — since there was no gameplay reason not to — you can now aim throws while sprinting. Projectiles even gained a tumble feature, delivering the spinning hatchets everyone always wanted. Third-person animations were polished alongside: misplaced AK47 support hands, a feeble-looking firing animation, a Bolt-Action Rifle that pointed away from where it aimed, and proper hold-up and throw animations for one- and two-handed throwables. The stubborn sleeper bug — players shown standing until you approach and they pop into a sleeping pose — got re-fixed as well.

Notes, Nostalgia and the Launcher

A few smaller touches with long legacies: notes — long a useless item — became writable, so you can leave messages for other players to find (with pinning-to-walls floated as a someday feature). For anyone already missing the old days, the July 2016 branch appeared on Steam and dedicated servers: Rust exactly as it was one day earlier, blueprints and all. And the launcher gained a progress bar for Easy Anti-Cheat's invisible background updates, ending the mystery five-minute startup hang.

Art, Audio and What's Next

On the art side, work started on the updated bone armour (blockout stage, with a deer-skull helmet variant deemed too badass not to make the game) plus a matching skull refresh, and the double-barreled shotgun got its LODs plus a paint-and-fingerprints material pass, with a stock and extended barrel in progress. New XP notification sounds were built from home-recorded whooshes (a metal strainer, a straw, a milk carton) and a disassembled doorknob, covering XP gain, the big exciting level-up, item unlocks and notification dismissals. The music system's launch slipped a week thanks to a Unity build-server crash during wav-to-ogg conversion.

The devblog closed with a notable statement of intent: Rust had plenty of content that was unbalanced, broken and unpolished, and performance was, in Facepunch's own words, terrible relative to every other game in the world. New features like horse riding, electricity and caretakers would wait while the team fixed and polished what existed — with the reminder that artists working on shotguns and monuments aren't the people who'd otherwise be fixing DirectX crashes. Alongside the XP system itself, the changelist added a crafting search, Quick Craft, tooltips, motion blur, and a new "Barren" map — a milestone hundredth devblog by any measure.