What's New in Rust's "Devblog 118" Update

Devblog 118, published July 14th, 2016, was the cleanup crew for the XP system's messy launch week. A catastrophic bug had players gaining a level per minute, forcing an apologetic emergency wipe of XP and maps on official servers. But buried under the drama was arguably the bigger story: the complete gunplay reboot — new hitboxes, new damage model, new hit detection — went live for everyone.

The XP Bug and the Emergency Wipe

Helk didn't sugarcoat it: there was "a very, very bad bug" in the launch code. Every owner of an item earned 100% of its XP regardless of their ownership fraction — own less than 1% of a tool, still collect full XP. The result was players earning ridiculous amounts of experience, one level per minute in the worst cases, reaching level 50+ within hours and roaming servers fully kitted with C4 and AK47s. Andre patched it, but the damage was done.

Because regular and newly joining players couldn't fairly compete against that, and because the corrupted XP data made future balance tuning impossible to reason about, the team wiped both XP and maps on official servers — the map wipe specifically to remove the hoarded stacks of AK47s. Helk was emphatic that this was not standard practice, was never meant to happen at a frequency higher than blueprint wipes, and extended sincere apologies. Community server owners got an out, though: a documented procedure for backing up and restoring the XP database and savegame (renaming xp3.db to xp4.db, UserPersistence.db to user4.db, and relocating the save file) let them skip the wipe entirely, and a new xp.reseteverything command let owners reroll characters at will.

XP Earning Rebalanced

Alongside the bug fix came structural changes aimed squarely at group boosting:

• Maximum XP earnable from any single player capped at 6 XP.
• No more XP from the usage of resources.
• Crafting an item for the first time earned 0.5 XP.
• Diminishing returns: the more an action was repeated, the less XP it yielded.

Friends could still harvest for you all they wanted, but caps and diminishing returns made it inefficient — meeting new players paid better, since the first XP earned from each person came quickly. Looking ahead, Helk wanted per-player XP multipliers to enable double-XP weekends and catch-up bonuses for returning casuals, plus a Call of Duty-style prestige mode — forfeiting all XP for a worthwhile bonus — to further reduce the need for XP wipes.

The Gunplay Reboot Goes Live

The systems Andre detailed the week before shipped for real: a new hitbox system where clothing no longer affected hitboxes, a new weapon damage model with more predictable body-part multipliers, best-fit projectile hit detection for reliable results, and a new clothing and armor protection system with less random protective properties. Animals got detailed hitboxes with damage multipliers too. The goal was gunplay that felt precise and predictable — not perfect yet, but a huge step, with new tools in place for further tuning.

Server and Network Performance

The launch also exposed an infrastructure blind spot. Facepunch's staging server tested beautifully — because it had super fast hard drives. Real game servers mostly don't, and they stalled hard when saving XP data to disk. Garry shipped a round of optimizations that got things working well, and the team stood up additional staging servers on regular hardware to prevent a repeat. He also attacked bandwidth usage with new diagnostic tools and unit tests — good news for players on slow connections and for server owners' bills alike.

Exploit and Anti-Hack Fixes

Andre's weekly exploit hunt bagged some big ones: a base design exploit that made tower outer walls immune to rocket damage, yet another rock-base placement exploit, and a helicopter exploit using monument glass windows to shrug off the patrol chopper's machineguns. The ancient "building blocked everywhere until you die and respawn" bug — never reliably reproducible — was finally fixed. Two anti-hack false positives that rejected legitimate bullets were resolved, including the one behind the infamous "AntiHack!" chat message, which turned out to be legacy code that should have been deleted long ago. A new server.branch startup parameter also let servers enforce which Steam branch connecting clients must be on.

Graphics: New Anti-Aliasing Options

Rust's anti-aliasing went from a binary on/off to a proper menu. The existing subpixel morphological implementation stayed, joined by a low-end FXAA option and a mid-to-high-end TSSAA (temporal supersampling) option — making AA affordable for GPUs at any price range. TSSAA was a work in progress with some motion blur, and if a black sludge spread across your screen, the advice was: don't panic, just disable it. Diogo also began a top-to-bottom graphics performance campaign with a clear target: a solid 60 FPS at 1080p on an NVIDIA GTX 960 (or comparable), expected to span several weeks of optimizations and default-setting tweaks.

Art and Everything Else

The new Airfield got a polish pass, including hangar models redone from two-year-old assets that no longer met the quality bar, with a power sub-station planned for the empty brick-walled section to give procedural powerlines a proper end-of-line connection. The bone armour rework gained straps, ties and small bones for an authentic makeshift look. The crossbow's long-standing animation issues — broken deploy triggers, wrist shearing, reload clipping and an unsatisfying fire — were all fixed, pre-throw animations for rock and spears made incoming projectiles readable, and the Double-Barreled Shotgun's stock variant wrapped up alongside a delightfully absurd bicycle-seat SMG stock concept where springs reduce recoil. The music system, finally crash-free after a Unity update, was held one more cautious week — "since we cocked the game up last week already" — with a new music.info console command ready for player feedback when it landed. A rough launch honestly owned, and a better game on the other side of it.