What's New in Rust's "Devblog 126" Update

Devblog 126 arrived on September 8th, 2016, during a quiet week with part of the team off on well-earned vacation. What did ship was almost entirely about making guns feel better - smaller muzzle flashes, snappier viewmodels, visible tracers - alongside a handful of sensible balance buffs and a genuinely exciting design writeup on the natural cave systems being built for the procedural map.

Gunplay Feel: Muzzle Flashes, FoV, Sway, and Tracers

Helk spent the week attacking everything that made Rust's shooting feel mushy:

• Muzzle flashes - previously "like artillery" - had their bloom lowered, their size reduced by about 60%, and the smoke effect removed while aiming down sights, making it far easier to track your target
• Viewmodel FoV was lowered so guns look stubbier and more solid instead of elongated and strange
• Viewmodel sway was inverted to aim slightly ahead of your view angle changes rather than lagging behind, making everything feel snappier
• First-person tracers returned - a Unity Trail Renderer change had made them nearly invisible in first person, so a small 3D object now renders that shows up from any angle
• Aiming down sights also lowers the near clip plane, reducing viewmodel clipping

Animations backed this up: the SMG, AK47, Thompson, and Semi-Auto Rifle all had their exaggerated, "floaty" movements toned down, and more viewmodels had their unnaturally protruding left elbows tucked in.

Balance Changes

A tidy batch of buffs, all pulling in the player-friendly direction:

• The Semi-Auto Rifle - previously near-impossible to hit anything with - had its horizontal recoil reduced to match the LR300
• Bone Armor got +10% protection against all melee types, with more adjustments promised based on feedback ("Bone Armor may still suck," Helk admitted)
• Candle Hats and Miner Hats now burn half as much fuel, making them a more attractive lighting option
• Diminishing XP from finding loot crates and harvesting was reduced, so higher levels no longer slowed to a painful crawl

Natural Caves: The Plan

The most substantial read of the devblog was a design breakdown of the natural caves replacing the single cave the map currently spawned. The new caves were designed to demand preparation: enter without health packs or at less than full health and you'd struggle - and most likely die. Some caves would have no way of turning back, forcing you deeper, and some entrances would be one-way too, with a few exit-only paths out of a network.

The really interesting part was base building. Certain rooms deep underground would allow building, with pocket sizes supporting bases from 2x2x2 up to 4x4x3 - the larger the pocket, the more walls exposed to raiders and the harder it is to defend. Each building room would have its own exit path ownable by the base owner, leading to a mechanical lift up a one-way shaft; raiders jumping down the shaft would most likely die, unless they cleverly camped the top waiting for you to ride up. Jumping puzzles of varying difficulty would guard most building pockets, and some caves would host several pockets - meaning underground neighbors to deal with. The pitch: a more balanced take on underground bases, still relatively safe behind puzzles and death pits, but more fun and more deadly.

Works in Progress

The Lighthouse interior layout was finalized - more complex and more interesting to explore - but the team held it back from being accessible until it was polished and bug-free, with something more solid promised the next week. The Vending Machine finished its re-UV, texturing, and LODs, again shown slotting into a doorframe deployable. The Flameflower Turret design was finalized before Paul left on holiday, with the high-poly model underway. And a cloth sash was baked and awaiting texturing - pitched half as a Miss Rust 2016 pageant piece, half as a serious way to visually flag when a player is carrying more than a rock and a torch.

Sound Work

Explosion audio got a differentiation pass: Bean Cans and Landmines would no longer sound so massive and boomy at distance, C4 and rockets were getting variations for rapid back-to-back detonations, and a trove of raw recordings captured on the 4th of July was being cleaned up to make distant explosions sound more real. A unique Satchel Charge sound was in progress, due early the following week, alongside higher-intensity layers for the ambient music tracks.

No new content, no wipe - just a patch that made the moment-to-moment shooting feel dramatically better, with the caves writeup offering a strong hint of where Rust's underground was headed next.