What's New in Rust's "Devblog 105" Update

Devblog 105, released in April 2016, is one of the most famous entries in Rust's history: the update that added the new player models — including female models — with who you are decided entirely by your SteamID. It came with a full server and blueprint wipe, a mea culpa on armor balance, and a big procedural map upgrade.

New Player Models, Assigned by SteamID

The new player models merged in less painfully than expected, bringing female characters to the game for the first time. Facepunch met the inevitable controversy head-on, in trademark style: yes, you may now be a gender you don't identify with in real life — but technically nothing changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings. The only difference is that it's now decided by your SteamID instead of your real-life gender.

This was explicitly the first pass of an ongoing player model rework, with more variations promised over the coming weeks — so you weren't necessarily stuck with your new face forever. A synced workflow between Zbrush assets and in-game models opened up scope to add or change features without technical faffing. Nice details from the changelist: player models now blink, and their eyes move.

Armor: Oops, We Applied Protection Twice

Last week's armor changes, in Facepunch's own words, "kind of completely screwed with the game". The Metal Facemask was never meant to block all but 3-6 damage — it was supposed to stop about 80% of incoming damage. The math tells the story: an AK headshot should have been 40 damage × 2 headshot multiplier × (1 − 0.8) = 16 damage, but protection was accidentally applied twice, yielding 40 × 2 × 0.2 × 0.2 = 3.2 damage.

After fixing the double-application, the facemask still felt wrong, so its protection was reduced to 0.5 — effectively eliminating the headshot multiplier — with other helmet protections brought down in line. To compensate, metal armor durability went up so pieces can absorb 10-15 shots before breaking. The syringe nerf was also partially walked back: instead of last week's measly 5hp, it now heals 15 instantly (plus 20 over time, per the changelist) and stacks to 2, while the team rethinks medical items properly — the stated dream being healing that requires you to be out of combat, not "pumping your arm full of Low Grade Fuel on the run".

Grenades That Don't Suck

Remember when grenades in Rust were useless? A usability pass made them much snappier and quicker to throw — closer to other first-person shooters — with far more predictable landing positions. The Bean Can Grenade's dud chance was also tweaked down so it fails a lot less often.

World: Messier Grass, Smarter Ores, New Maps

The grass was looking "a bit fieldy" — too uniform and smooth — so it was made messy and scraggly, pushing the game further toward its STALKER inspirations, with physically based shading to boot.

Bigger news for gatherers: ore nodes now only spawn around rock formations. Previously ores were scattered randomly and hard to spot, making resource gathering mostly luck; now you spot a huge rock formation from afar, head over, and check it for resources — the template for how Facepunch wants all resource gathering to eventually work. Hemp plants and ore nodes also got bigger and easier to see.

The next version of the procedural maps went live too: new forests, a new terrain texturing algorithm, better cliff mesh placement with more variety, new clutter vegetation and rocks (also added to all handmade maps), more natural beaches, better river generation, slightly varying road widths, and mountains that allow objects to spawn around their lower slopes.

Graphics and Lighting

Environment reflections returned to the lighting model after a long absence — their lack had made metals, skin and cloth look "pretty horrific", but they'd never played nicely with indoor scenes. New shader knobs let artists simulate reflection occlusion by approximating self-shadowing, with screen-space reflections planned next and research underway on a world-space large-scale occlusion system to darken caves and building interiors convincingly. A fog bug that made semi-transparent decals ignore fog entirely was also fixed — this time across the entire standard shader set rather than shader-by-shader.

Design Notes: Door Weak Sides Are Gone for Good

Last week's removal of the melee weak side on doors was made permanent, with clear reasoning: unlike walls — where weak sides make griefing harder — the mechanic on doors only ever punished players who accidentally placed a door backwards, since both sides of most doors look identical. It existed purely to, in Facepunch's words, screw over people who didn't know about it. So it's gone.

Coming Soon: Water Buckets and the XP Wait

Teased for the next patch: a water bucket that transfers water around and throws it on objects. Unglamorous, but foundational — there's no buffing incendiary rockets, setting players on fire, spreading fires through wooden buildings, or adding fire arrows until fires can be put out, and no next-level farming without watering plants.

On the XP system: Unity crashes stalled the branch, and after weeks of GDC and XP work producing "weakish" main-branch patches, resources were split — a week of love for the live game before returning to XP. The message stayed consistent: it's taking longer than hoped, and it won't ship half-baked. Meanwhile dungeon art moved ahead, with cooling towers being built to replace the greybox models at the powerplant — including a collapsed one designed to be trickier to explore but easier to hide in during gunfights. The changelist rounds out with a 30-minute idle kick on full servers, third-person camera improvements (no more clipping through walls), keyboard entry for codelocks (masked as ****), refunded attachments when crafting with weapons, and a fix for rockets dealing only half damage to building parts.