What's New in Rust's "Devblog 112" Update

Devblog 112 hit on May 26th, 2016 — a patch heavier on groundwork than headline features, but with plenty worth knowing about. New weapon attachments were previewed for the following week, the infamous damage-through-walls hack got its first real countermeasure, a serious entity leak tanking mid-map performance was fixed, and the art team teased everything from rotting corpses to a crafted double-barreled shotgun.

New Attachments: Muzzle Booster and Muzzle Brake

Helk, freshly jetlagged from vacation, started on two new weapon attachments with art support from the team. The Muzzle Booster would feed muzzle gasses back into the weapon to cycle it faster — a higher rate of fire at the expense of some muzzle velocity. The Muzzle Brake would lower felt recoil but increase the weapon's cone of fire: easier to keep your sights on target, but bullets wouldn't always land exactly where you aimed.

A sensible supporting change went in too: broken weapon attachments now fell off weapons instead of preventing them from firing. The new attachments themselves were slated to merge into main the following week, after which Helk planned to get back to the XP system.

Anti-Hack: Damage Through Walls

Probably the most notorious hack in circulation at the time let players shoot through walls. Building on the projectile line-of-sight tracking added in Devblog 111, Andre implemented a first version of server-side projectile line of sight verification. A rough first draft, by his own admission, but one that made the hack considerably less powerful. Supporting convars and logging came with it — including projectile_desync to cap allowed client desync, and extra entity info when the server ignored suspicious projectiles.

Admins also got a new toy: the F1 menu's tools tab was opened up to server admins, offering rendering toggles that make parts of the world invisible — extremely handy for investigating hacking or exploit accusations.

Entity Leaks and Resource Spawns

Andre tracked down some serious entity leaks where entities that should have been disabled were being networked to clients, causing huge performance drops around the center of the map — worst on long-running servers like the officials, and a hidden cause of long join times and regional network lag. With the fix in, several previously baffling issues suddenly made sense.

Another old mystery got solved on purpose: tool cupboards had been silently preventing resource spawns inside their area of influence, which is why entire forests seemed to vanish a few weeks into a wipe. Almost nobody knew the mechanic existed, and it made servers look barren, so it was removed — resources could now spawn inside cupboard radius again. The old behavior's one benefit, discouraging players from walling off resource spawns, wasn't seen as a real threat given other systems in place (and it never was a problem in Rust Legacy).

Throwable Weapons, Bow-Style

"Why don't you just make them like bows?" — everybody, apparently. The team heard it, and after Alex hit a wall mid-implementation (no weapon had ever had two conflicting attacks, melee and throw), Andre stepped in with supporting code. The result: holding right-mouse aims with a bit of zoom, releasing cancels, and tapping left mouse while aiming throws the weapon. It was designed to solve both accidental throws and poor aiming accuracy — but it still needed to be wired into every throwable, so players couldn't touch it quite yet.

Rendering: Caustics, Reverse-Z and Occlusion

Diogo shipped water caustics, a long-overdue touch that made shallow water pop and lifted the whole coastal aesthetic. The reverse-z depth precision work from the previous weeks was promoted to on-by-default, killing flicker between nearly co-planar distant surfaces and stopping see-through-base artifacts at wide resolutions (with graphics.revz 0 as an escape hatch). Large-scale occlusion progressed too, promising real depth for caves, building interiors and forests while taming unwanted reflections.

Art and Concepts: Corpses, Shotguns and Shipwrecks

Some fun looks at what was coming down the pipe:

• Corpse rot: building on the flies already buzzing around bodies, the team explored visibly rotting corpses and vultures circling major battle sites. Reading a corpse's age adds situational awareness — fresh bodies might just mean a recent airdrop, but a tower ringed by rotting corpses and circling vultures is no place for a naked to build a first base.
• A crafted double-barreled shotgun entered concepting — four grip and barrel-length variations, with a stubby sawn-off direction favored for less range but close-quarters punch, plus ideas for a distinctive sliding firing mechanism.
• The industrial dungeon art set entered its final stretch, with the water tower gaining a new accessible top floor where you can aim down through missing and broken panels. Tunnel and natural cave sets were still to come.
• The floating cargo ration box got modeled from Paul's concept, with individual ration pack items to follow — soon to be spotted bobbing in the water, mashed potato included. Its design as salvageable early-game survival rations was finalised.
• A barge shipwreck concept joined the recent harbor concept as a fun-but-hazardous loot spot for the same coastal area.

Audio and Animation

The first pass of physics sounds for world items merged in — server-triggered for now, so timing wasn't perfect, with a client-side implementation planned. Alex R also made new fish and meat cutting sounds out of some chicken breasts that expired in his fridge (waste not), and expanded item UI sounds so paper finally sounded like paper. On the animation side, third-person weapon animations landed for the M249, Bolt-Action Rifle, Semi-Auto Rifle, Pump Shotgun, Rocket Launcher, SMG and Thompson, complete with shell ejections and dropped mags on reload.

The changelist added fixes for water catchers (they'd been immune to explosions and nearly immune to melee), players colliding with farmed plants, an alt+enter crash, and a batch of reverse-z cleanup. Quiet on the surface, but Devblog 112 set up a lot of what June would deliver.