What's New in Rust's "Devblog 119" Update

Devblog 119 landed on July 21st, 2016, a week after the XP system's rocky launch — and this time the tuning came straight from the top, with Helk playing "the hell out of Rust" and patching what annoyed him as he went. Barrel sniping died, the crossbow got knocked down a peg, arrows stopped damaging buildings entirely, projectile damage became fully deterministic, and after months of teasing, the dynamic music system finally shipped.

XP Tuning From the Trenches

Helk's playtest diary translated directly into changes:

• Barrel sniping — long-range players stealing XP and wasting loot for new spawns — was killed: XP from a destroyed barrel now only awarded if the destroyer was nearby (i.e. melee it).
• Giving tools to new players paid off too slowly because they tended to die fast, so the diminishing-XP value was lowered to speed up early gains from each person (the per-player max stayed put). Weapon owners now also got an XP share when their weapon killed an animal — one more reason to hand newmans a spear along with that stone hatchet. The resource-provider ownership share also jumped from 20% to 50%.
• Leveling past 25 was mathematically too punishing — diminishing XP and rising level costs formed a double negative — so the max XP from smashing barrels and finding loot crates was doubled and the gathering max raised 50%. Not double earnings, Helk stressed: just more earning before the slowdown kicks in.
• Exploits got squashed: players were re-stuffing trash piles with their own food to poison the XP well, and filling airdrops with garbage so they'd never despawn. Loot crates became output-only, killing both birds with one stone. Trash piles also refreshed their contents (and XP) more often.
• The Sentry Gun moved from level 24 to level 18 in the tech tree — groundwork, Helk hinted, for upcoming raid changes.

Item Cost Sanity Pass

Playing the game also exposed some absurd prices. Many mid and late game melee weapons got cheaper ("250 metal frags wtf?"), ceiling lights were drastically reduced in cost while using less fuel and casting more light, lanterns sipped fuel too, the small stash dropped to a mere 10 cloth, and roadsign armor got more expensive in resources. Wood doors also became much more vulnerable to explosives, and high-end weapons like the bolt and AK turned up slightly less often in radtowns.

Crossbow Nerfs

The crossbow was punching above its weight, so it collected three nerfs: no sprinting while reloading (mostly hurting aggressive pushes rather than strafing defense), a longer deploy time to kill the pipe-shotgun-style hotbar-stacking trick, and a fix for a regression that had arrows dealing 2x headshot damage again. Its headshot multiplier was also brought down to match the bow's.

Gunplay: Predictability Achieved

Andre's gunplay reboot continued with two significant changes. First, arrows got their own damage type, letting clothing and buildings define separate protection against them — and buildings now took zero damage from arrows, ending arrow raiding of low building tiers. The backlash was acknowledged; the plan was to fill the early-game raiding gap with alternatives like beancan grenades, tweaked as needed.

Second, the widely hated randomised projectile damage was removed completely. Its cause was slight randomisation of projectile velocity, which both randomised damage and made leading targets luck-based. Now velocity was always identical at the barrel with drag-driven falloff, damage was maxed for the first stretch of travel and fell off linearly after, and every shot's damage was 100% predictable. Buckshot got a reduced headshot multiplier (players can't control pellet spread — slugs unaffected), and a hitbox balancing pass with Maurino meant neck hits no longer counted as headshots and thigh hits correctly used the leg multiplier.

Graphics Performance, Part 1

Diogo's optimization campaign posted its first numbers: roughly 0.5ms shaved on minimum settings and 1.0ms on defaults, measured on a GTX 960, while keeping visuals close to unchanged. The itemized wins: reduced surface and water shader complexity, a new faster reflections option (now the default), bloom about 30% faster, climate color-grade LUT blending 5x faster (and skipped entirely when color grading is off), eye adaptation 2x faster, and default water quality set to 1. A separate water reflections option also decoupled reflections from overall water quality.

He also delivered a reality check for players confused why their high-end GPU wasn't beating a friend's budget card: Rust was frequently CPU-bound. In a side-by-side test on the same server spot, his GTX 960 outran Maurino's GTX 780 by ~20% FPS purely because of a faster CPU (i7-6700K @ 4GHz vs i7-4930K @ 3.4GHz). CPU and memory work was ongoing — partly waiting on Unity to improve their end.

Music Is In

After months of devblog progress reports, the dynamic music system shipped — disabled by default pending a live full-server test, but available immediately via music.enabled 1, with music.info printing the current song, section and intensity for feedback. Default-on was planned for the following week.

Fixes and Art Progress

Melee weapons struck the centre of the screen again, and in an all-time classic fix, the viewmodel pickaxe was finally turned the right way round — it had been striking with the chisel instead of the pick. The stubborn sleeper bug (players appearing to stand until approached closely) got a more thorough fix, the stuck pre-throw pose from weapon-switching mid-aim was resolved, and patrol helicopter guns damaged building blocks again while its loot crates stopped occasionally spawning empty. Power substation art was completed for the ends of big and small powerlines, the bone armour sculpt neared completion with the low-poly underway, Tom's double-barrel shotgun model went into rigging for first-person animations, and the bicycle seat stock wrapped up — with a larger-capacity magazine attachment already in high-poly. Cupboards also stopped requiring huge wall clearance on placement and could no longer be placed on foundation stairs, closing an exploit. A proper balance-heavy week, and the XP era's roughest edges were visibly smoothing out.