What's New in Rust's "Devblog 115" Update

Devblog 115 landed on June 16th, 2016, and it was as much about announcements as patch notes. Garry came back from paternity leave, the XP system finally got a public release date, a stripped-down "Barren" map type appeared on prerelease, and Facepunch declared a controversial new war policy on cheaters: get caught once, lose every account you own. Meanwhile the live game got a decay rebalance, repairable deployables, flowing rivers and the return of radiation.

Garry's Back — and Helk Stays Lead

Garry returned from paternity leave but made a point of clarifying the org chart: Helk would remain project lead. Garry had only taken over to keep the project alive while Helk dealt with family matters — "I'm good at getting shit done, but Helk is much better at gameplay and balancing." Rust had always been Helk's project, and Garry's closing request to the community was simple: stop blaming him for things on reddit.

Barren Maps

Ever wish there was a map without grass, rocks, bushes and all the visual noise, so you could play at a decent quality setting with a decent frame rate? Garry built it. Barren was a fully procedural map — generated and seeded just like the regular one, with monuments, loot, ores and trees — just none of the purely visual stuff. It was live on the prerelease branch for anyone to try.

All-Accounts Cheat Bans

Garry was blunt: the previous anticheat strategy wasn't working, and cheaters and cheat makers had learned to coexist with the routine. Many persistent cheaters ran a clean main account alongside a string of throwaway cheating accounts they fully expected to lose. Facepunch could see those account networks and how the main accounts benefited — so the policy changed: from now on, getting caught cheating meant all of your accounts got banned, not just the one caught cheating. Judging by the community reaction, this one hit a nerve.

XP System: July 7th

Despite a health scare (he was fine), Helk had big news: the prerelease branch would merge into main and the XP system would launch with the next forced wipe on July 7th. He made the date public deliberately — "so you can all call us shitty game developers if we fail, but we're totally not going to." The tradeoff: no new content on main in the meantime, with all hands on deck for prerelease. Players were urged to opt in on Steam and post feedback on reddit.

Decay Rebalanced, Deployables Repairable

The deployable decay added in recent weeks had taken a beating on reddit, and Andre read it all. The result was a balancing pass: most deployables now had a 2-day decay delay followed by a 2-day decay duration, while storage boxes and furnaces got a gentler 2-day delay and 4-day duration — giving raiders more time to hit abandoned bases. The default decay tick interval moved to 10 minutes, and server owners on non-standard wipe schedules could scale everything via the decay.tick convar.

Pairing nicely with that: nearly all deployables could now be repaired after placement, fixing a long-standing post-raid frustration. The notable exceptions were traps and barricades. There'd never been a good reason for the restriction beyond repair costs being unbalanced — and those had been fixed weeks earlier.

Radiation Returns

After a long absence, radiation came back to Rust's dungeons — off by default, with server owners able to enable it from the next wipe cycle. The new design was smarter about placement: loot inside or on top of larger buildings was more likely to sit in an irradiated zone, while ground floors and small outbuildings stayed clean. Top floors and camping-friendly vantage points? Irradiated. The intent was to improve pacing and traversal of monuments and add a real challenge to clearing out a whole town's loot.

Anti-Hack: Movement Curves and Flood Protection

Two meaningful server-side hardening changes went in:

• Tick flooding protection: players sending too many position ticks in a short window were now auto-kicked, with the threshold adjustable via the maxflood convar.
• Movement curve verification: instead of simplifying same-frame position updates into a straight line (which broke down on extremely populated servers or flaky connections), the server now built a curve from all received ticks and verified movement along it. Available as mode 3 of noclip_protection with noclip_stepsize and noclip_maxsteps tuning knobs — and confident enough to be enabled by default on all servers.

Fly and speed hack detection strictness was also increased.

Rivers That Actually Flow

Diogo finally granted a request Helk had been making every couple of months: river flow. Beyond looking right, it carried real gameplay information — following the current tells you which way the coast is, without relying on terrain slope alone. River foam came along for the ride, bringing river-to-ocean transitions close to seamless, with a couple of known estuary rendering issues left to fix. On the performance side, tone mapping and color grading were combined into a single pass and ambient occlusion got faster, with lower-end hardware benefiting most.

Everything Else

The dynamic music system just missed its in-game debut — Unity editor crashes (suspected fallout from an OSX Steam update) and the slow craft of chopping songs into intensity layers pushed it to the next update. It was nearly all hooked up though, with intensity ramping as you approach a supply drop and support for override themes like a helicopter song. The double-barreled shotgun model progressed with a screwdriver-handle grip that sold its crafted-from-junk character, throwable-weapon aiming reached the two-handed tools (pickaxe, salvaged icepick, axe, hammer), and clothing skinning got a cleanup pass around shoulders and elbows. A short changelist week beyond the headline items — but with July 7th now circled on every calendar, the countdown to Rust's biggest systems change was officially on.