What's New in Rust's "Devblog 106" Update

Devblog 106 arrived in mid-April 2016 as a genuinely packed weekly patch: Rust got its first Flamethrower, the tools to fight fire with water, a first look at the XP tech tree, and progress on everything from powerplant art to musical instruments. A fun week to be playing.

The Flamethrower

Built in a session that ran until 6am so it could make the patch, the Flamethrower arrived somewhat rare and hungry — it eats Low Grade Fuel like candy — but devastating. It takes out wood building blocks no problem, damages stone ("for now") at a very high fuel cost, and is, in Facepunch's words, great at cooking other players. Balance changes and bug fixes were promised for the following week, along with new functionality like players actually catching fire and taking damage over time.

Water Bucket and Water Barrel

The counterplay shipped simultaneously. The Water Bucket — found commonly in barrels, sitting in the BP frag tier — gathers water from the world, hauls it from A to B, and splashes the area in front of you to put out flames. That matters when your base is under siege from Flamethrowers or incendiary rockets, and in the near future it would become central to gardening. Its sounds were recorded the honest way: playing about with a real metal bucket bought online.

Alongside it came the Water Barrel, a cheap deployable for banking water. It doesn't collect from the world like water catchers do, but it stores water for later, indoors or out — with placeholder art due for replacement soon.

XP Branch and the Tech Tree Puzzle

The XP branch kept grinding forward: working search, a scrolling skin selection box and craft queue, a functional cancel button, and logic ensuring you can only craft items whose parent is unlocked. Neatly, search shows all items including locked ones — so you can look up something you're dreaming of and see what level you'll need and what unlocks first. Prerelease players seemed to be enjoying the system, and Unity 5.4 was stabilising.

Visualising the tree proved harder. A timeline layout with levels on the X axis spread out too much and didn't scale; bunching everything together with level-locked icons blued out worked technically but read as visually noisy. The working plan: show only the tree containing a selected item, with more experimentation to come.

Performance and Graphics

Profiling turned up culprits for the framerate dip after the previous patch: thousands of ambient sounds updating constantly, and an extremely slow path for how water reflections accessed the main camera — both fixed, clawing back several milliseconds of CPU time from procgen-merge regressions. Entity streaming (the hitches when entities spawn in from the server) also got a round of fixes, with more to do.

Visually: the tree and mesh quality sliders in the options menu now go up to 200, unlocking previously hidden convar-only quality. Light scattering gained directional occlusion — no more fog glowing through mountains at sunrise and sunset — plus cloud fixes. Weather logic was cleaned up too: no more rain from cloudless skies, clouds properly hidden in extreme fog, and a new fog density equation that both looks nicer on terrain and makes it harder for snipers on towers to spot players on the ground in foggy weather.

A big animation overhaul got underway as well: instead of full walk/crouchwalk/run sets per weapon, a single locomotion set will combine with an upper-body layer showing the held weapon, with mecanim layers merged where possible — promising lower memory use and an FPS boost when several players are on screen.

Powerplant, Planters and Music

With the cooling tower art wrapped, the Powerplant dungeon took shape: one tower stands intact while the other has collapsed under what looks like rocket damage from helicopter patrols. The collapsed tower overlooks roughly half the dungeon — but is itself visible from the central building, deliberately making the central spot less overpowered. It was slated for the next wiping update.

Two planter types were modelled from concept art: a 3x3 metre planter sized to sit on a single foundation, and a single-row 3x1 metre version — nearly done bar the LODs, and clearly built with the coming farming push in mind. And in one of the more charming corners of the devblog, musical instruments progressed: the jerrycan guitar, the flute, and an almost-finished horn, inspired by a community Reddit post (thanks, Dresdom), with thoughts of using the bone resource for more.

Rounding things out: everyone got eyebrows (the eyebrow-less new player models looked a bit weird), the Asian male racial variation entered the engine — with face re-rolls to be synced to wipes rather than changing weekly — and the audio mix pass continued, beefing up explosions, adding punch and low end to gunshots, and recording new footsteps: barefoot and shoe variations, missing materials like gravel and wet ground, and rare accents like twigs snapping, wood floors creaking and armor jangling. Fire, water, farming groundwork and music in a single week — the XP era was clearly getting closer.