What's New in Rust's "Devblog 103" Update

Devblog 103 landed in late March 2016, with the team freshly back from GDC and, by their own admission, easing in slowly through the jet-lag. Rather than big features, this week delivered much-requested bug fixes and quality-of-life changes, the first pass of an armour condition system, and a look at what was cooking — including an honest update on the XP system's timeline. Garry also noted he'd be off on paternity leave soon (due date May 2nd), with Helk set to take charge in the meantime.

Quality of Life

• Right-click wear: right-clicking clothes in your main inventory now wears them, and doing it with the loot window open copies them to or from the loot instead.
• More inventory UI sounds arrived — a Unity multi-select bug that had broken weapon attachment points (and kept the first batch out) was fixed, the earlier sounds were re-added, and a bunch of new item pickup and placement sounds recorded. Still on the wishlist: bone item sounds, thin hollow metal for the bucket and coffee-can helmets, and unique sounds for special items like guns and C4.
• From the changelist: reduced craft times for wooden, barbed and metal barricades, a fix for syringes needing redeployment on modded servers, a clamp on client.lookatradius to kill an exploit, and a fun new loop — eating canned food now produces empty cans you can smelt in a campfire. Crude oil also got a jerry can world model.

Armour Condition

A very basic armour condition system went in: armour no longer lasts forever. Instead of simply reducing incoming damage, armour now absorbs it and loses condition, which lowers its protection until it breaks and needs repairing to work again. At this stage it only applied to metal helmets — the bucket helmet should save you from one headshot before needing repair, while the metal facemask has much higher condition and should survive several. Facepunch called it "super rough", with the kinks expected to be ironed out by the next patch.

XP System Reality Check

With the plumbing done, actual design of the XP tree began this week. Using gathered data on average XP earned, costs and unlocks were balanced up to level 8 — roughly the first 4 hours of play — with full start-to-finish balancing hoped for within the week. The plan was to push it to main only when feature complete, keeping the main branch stable, and with Unity 5.4 also needing to stabilise, the release was ruled unlikely for the April 7th wipe — more realistically near the start of May.

World Generation and Art

Two world-gen workstreams made progress: resource and vegetation clusters — ore nodes and smaller trees spawning around rock formations as clear gathering landmarks, bushes cluttering naturally around forests, rocks, rivers and roads — and a rework of river and road generation, covering riverside decor placement and terrain blending. Both were slated to start landing with the next wiping update.

On the art side, another racial variation joined the female player model set, and the long-standing ugly player model seams were finally fixed — a fiddly job involving snapping verts between head and body meshes, manually averaging split vertex normals, and baking an extra blend layer into the normal maps. In the artist's own summary: "I fixed the seams."

Also teased: arrow heads. The concept was to model different tips that sit on top of the basic wooden arrow — a stone flint head, serrated edges causing longer bleeding, poison tips, fire arrows, and room for modern manufactured arrows beyond the caveman aesthetic. Plenty of potential, though at this stage just a 3D viewer preview.

Behind the Scenes

Audio work focused on the mix — how all of Rust's sounds fit together in tone and volume. All in-game audio was pulled into a single master project with batch exporting straight into the game's file layout, so sweeping mix changes no longer meant digging through 50 files and manually exporting hundreds of sounds. Just prep work for now, but it set the stage for balancing Rust's soundscape as a whole — with the XP system's early-May target the big thing to watch next.