What's New in Rust's "Devblog 117" Update

Devblog 117, published June 30th, 2016, shipped no patch at all — every hand was on deck for the XP system launching with the forced wipe on July 7th. But the blog itself was anything but empty: Garry made close-range bullets effectively hitscan, Andre laid out a ground-up rework of hitboxes and damage under the banner "Make Gunplay Great Again", and the prerelease branch gained a quick craft menu, level-up fanfare and the finished throwable-weapon aiming system.

XP System: On Track for July 7th

Helk confirmed the merge was on schedule — with the honest caveat that launching didn't mean perfect, just "good enough to be part of the main game while we improve it." Notably, the existing version of Rust would be forked into a separate opt-in branch at merge time, preserved "as is" like Legacy: unmaintained, but there to revisit.

Item Ownership finally merged into prerelease, and after squashing a wave of bugs and crashes, Helk was expanding what it touched: XP for using up resources, for drinking water you "created", for others using your furnace or repair bench. He also had some genuinely fiddly problems to solve — like ownership when reviving downed players, and transferring ownership when looting a corpse (it was genuinely annoying to kill someone and then avoid using their tools because you didn't want to feed them XP).

Hitscan-Feel Bullets

Garry took on one of Rust's oldest gunplay complaints. Bullets had always traveled with speed, gravity and drag — slower than real life, even, to emphasize the effect — which worked at long range but "felt like shit" up close. Worse, a bullet didn't move until the frame after firing, making firefights dependent on client frame rate.

The fix: on firing, the bullet now immediately traveled a set number of meters (dependent on ammo type), then continued as a normal simulated projectile. Close-quarters gunplay became effectively hitscan while long range kept its gravity and travel time — the best of both worlds.

Make Gunplay Great Again

Andre and Helk sat down and agreed with the community consensus: gunplay felt random, unsatisfying and sluggish. The plan revolved around predictability, precision and feel — and Andre's week went after the randomness at its root:

• Hit areas instead of clothing meshes: hitboxes had used the exact player and clothing meshes as colliders, so hitting metal versus the tiny skin gaps between clothing items produced essentially random damage multipliers in hectic fights. The replacement: clothing declares which body parts it protects, and damage is reduced by body part hit — projectiles could never randomly bypass protective gear again. Bonus: gloves could now contribute to overall body protection instead of only protecting hands.
• Fixed-size hitboxes: clothing no longer changed hitbox size or shape. The bucket helmet and even the metal facemask had inflated the head hitbox so much they were essentially useless. Body-part detection now used a player collision mesh independent of clothing.
• Per-weapon damage multipliers by body part — support for boosting headshot multipliers on precise weapons like sniper rifles, or reducing them where headshots happen randomly, like shotguns.
• Best-fit hit detection for projectiles, like melee already had: a hand directly in front of a head should count as a headshot, since players can't control their exact animation state.

All of it was under active development, targeted at prerelease within a week or two, with "weapon feel" next on the list — likely Helk's department.

UI: Quick Craft and Level-Up Notices

With crafting moved to its own menu, the empty space beside the inventory got filled with a quick craft panel showing only items you could actually craft based on inventory and unlocks. Leveling up also finally got its song and dance: a new HUD notice system queued up a popup, played a sound (hilarious and placeholder, by Garry's own admission), and listed everything you'd just unlocked. The pie menu got performance work and a snappier close animation, scroll speeds were fixed across panels, and the crafting queue looked better with clearer click-to-cancel.

And in the week's best bit of trolling, Garry responded to the eternal "lone wolf" discourse by announcing that all wolves in the game now did 10 times more bite damage. "This doesn't affect bears."

Balance and Art Progress

The Auto Turret got a big accessibility buff: its recipe changed from 50 HQM plus an AK47 to just 75 HQM, aiming to get sentries used more and earlier. The throwable-weapon aiming system landed on prerelease for hands-on feedback along with balancing. The Airfield rework progressed well (built partly from a laptop between flights, fittingly), with most buildings falling into place. The Double-Barreled Shotgun art neared completion — the screwdriver handle really selling the makeshift look — and was confirmed to be customisable like the SMG, with a longer barrel, sights and stock variant to come. The heavy armour's lower half finished baking and looked suitably bulky, though its metal needed dulling. And the much-hated Bone Armor entered a rework as a light armor type mixing hide, leather and bone, with a shoutout to community concepts that inspired the new helmet.

Garry also burned a day and a half trying to parallelize Unity builds to cut the commit-to-Steam pipeline from just under an hour to 5-10 minutes — defeated by 400GB of mirrored project files, license losses and shader-compile port conflicts. "Fuck it for now." Meanwhile Alex R finished chopping the launch music into intensity layers (ditching one song that wasn't working), added per-clip fade controls, and prepped the whole system to go live — behind a convar — alongside the XP release. One quiet week on main; one very loud week everywhere else.