What's New in Rust's "Devblog 108" Update

Devblog 108 rounded out April 2016 as a self-described "lite patch" — but the kind whose bugfixes players actually feel. The mystery of Rust slowing down over long play sessions got solved, tree rendering shed a costly Unity misfeature, and the groundwork continued on water infrastructure, randomized faces, and a proper fire system.

Performance: Hunting the Slow Leak

Facepunch set expectations bluntly: at this stage of development, no single change would suddenly improve performance by 50% — the wins would come from many smaller fixes adding up. That said, this week's haul was substantial:

• The gradual performance degradation over long sessions was tracked to two leaks — an old particle emission script leaking coroutines, and a sound emitter leak in the ambience manager. Both were fixed (partly via a weekend update), so the game no longer slows down after a couple of hours of play.
• Another cause of framerate drops when looking at or near players was fixed — with testing indicating all of those were finally caught.
• Tree culling turned out to be devouring frame time via Unity's SpeedTree wind callbacks. Removing the wind animation handlers yielded a solid 7% performance boost — though it meant stripping the last remaining SpeedTree feature, leaving trees roughly where Unity 4 had them "just with a bunch of time wasted". The plan going forward: write a custom wind solution into the tree shaders with zero CPU overhead.
• The generic UI variable display system — used heavily by metabolism and health readouts — was costing around 1ms per frame in unoptimized formatting code; that's now fixed without losing the convenience.
• Building block despawns were optimized further, reducing hitches while moving around.

Doors That Actually Close

A long-standing and infuriating bug — doors occasionally failing to fully close on some clients, letting those players shoot at things behind them — was finally run down. The hunt also uncovered a fairly significant entity slot networking issue that could have caused all sorts of strange behaviour later, making the painful debugging session worth it.

Graphics R&D: Occlusion and Depth

Two promising works-in-progress got detailed. The large-scale ambient occlusion experiment — computed over areas as big as 1km × 1km, camera-independent, cheap, and field-tested in other PC and console games — would darken building interiors, caves, tunnels and forests, finally allowing reflections to be cranked to realistic values. It supports dynamic surfaces, updating as structures are built. Hoped-for arrival: the following week.

Meanwhile, a logarithmic z-buffer experiment aimed at Rust's depth-precision artifacts: the intermittent flicker between ocean and terrain at distance, see-through walls at far range on very wide aspect ratios, and similar glitches — all consequences of pulling back the camera's near plane to prevent cheating. The logarithmic approach doesn't even need a near plane. The catch: it requires patching every shader in the game, with a week of heavy multi-platform staging tests planned before deployment.

Water, Metabolism and Fire

Following the big water overhaul, a Water Pump deployable was modelled — draw water for your collection via a working arm, so there's some honest manual labour involved. Bugfixes cleaned up last week's additions: water barrels now block building, the bucket no longer has "drink" stuck as an undeselectable default option, water can't be transferred into an unheld bucket, and the last 50ml in a bota bag is actually drinkable.

On metabolism, the harsher balance was judged well-received for a first pass, with one adjustment: starting calories increased from 75-100 to 100-125, buying new spawns an extra 10-15 minutes to find food. The stated direction: you should probably die quicker from thirst than from hunger.

And fire took a step toward being real. The existing system was just a "Fireball" entity bouncing around dealing radial damage — nothing actually catches fire. Work began on proper ignition, not yet ready for prime time, but pointing at fire arrows that ignite people and animals on impact — with the added benefit of pre-cooking the harvested meat.

Faces, Armor Ideas and Audio

The blendshape work spun off a clever prototype: randomized faces where each player's head takes influence from a random selection of handmade blendshapes, keeping generated faces within the constraints of real human structure instead of algorithmic mush — already producing recognizable faces from a small set of variations. The player preview's idle pose was updated too, with a floated idea of making the preview reflect your current state (cold, hungry, hurt) — complete with a demonstration line of cold naked people. Work also started on female clothing concepts, and two armor ideas were sketched: a crafted heavy steel armor set turning the wearer into a Ned Kelly-style juggernaut at the cost of mobility, and cardboard armor made from trash offering no real defense — but you can draw on it.

Audio kept pace with the survival changes: new eat and drink sounds (recorded chips and water-swallowing — after a failed experiment with a contact mic on the throat, since skin is "a bit too floppy" to conduct vibration), finished flamethrower sounds, fresh barefoot footsteps on concrete, dirt, sand, grass and wood, and de-hissed tree and bush ambience. The full audio mix merge slipped a week for final tweaks — with the water pump, ignition system and occlusion tech all queued up right behind it.