What's New in Rust's "Devblog 131" Update

Devblog 131 arrived on October 13th, 2016, and gun lovers ate well: the MP5 entered the game, the neglected LR300 became craftable, and the silencer finally got buffs worth using. Meanwhile the natural caves - all nine of them - hit the prerelease branch for playtesting, and the component system crept another week closer.

The MP5 Arrives

The MP5 went live, craftable at level 25. Some slight tweaks were still owed to its reload animation and third-person positioning, and Helk was listening for balance feedback - with a warning attached: enjoy crafting it while you can, because once the component system fully lands, the parts for it "will not be easy to come by." Its dedicated sounds were also in progress that week.

LR300 Craftable and Silencer Buffs

The LR300, seriously underused as a rare-drop-only weapon, was made craftable with an unlock at level 30. And after hearing "some bitching" that the silencer sucks, Helk shipped two long-needed buffs:

• Weapons with a silencer attached now render their tracers invisible
• Silenced sound distance dropped from 100m to a maximum of 40m

Together those changes finally made the silencer viable for genuine stealth operations.

Caves Reach Prerelease

The natural caves merged into the prerelease branch that Wednesday - the first step toward live deployment. All nine caves from the previously outlined plan (small, medium, and large tiers) were in, though very much still being fixed: the branch might get wiped again, the caves were still flooded at time of writing (a fix expected within days), and ambient brightness underground was still due its pass toward the intended darker experience. Playtesters got a public thank-you.

Components March On

On prerelease, Helk went through the tech table and added more components for crafting recipes and recycler breakdown, with the following week earmarked for the big one: adjusting all recipes and loot tables to actually spawn them. "Should be fun!"

Networking Deep Dive

Andre spent the week in the guts of the networking layer chasing outstanding issues - strange behaviors, server traffic spikes, small entity leaks - all painful to debug because they only occur on standalone servers. New admin debugging tools shipped on both client and server (find_entity, find_id, find_group, find_parent). While hunting a random client-side entity leak involving parented weapons and attachments, he found and fixed a separate bug where certain entities sent a group-changed message before fully spawning - the cause of significant traffic spikes whenever waves of trees, ores, and collectables respawned. Held entities were also changed to destroy immediately rather than following pooled or destroyed parents.

Art and Audio Progress

The Hazmat Suit moved into low-poly and baking, with a smart structural decision: the hood became a separate object to support different headgear variants later - a fire-protection version was floated as an example. The Recycler model had its base textures baked and was nearly ready for texturing, just missing its "lick of paint." Shipping containers began a revamp into multiple higher-quality variations, some with usable interiors or damage, and an industrial panel prop was completed. The Bota Bag viewmodel got its animations and transitions cleaned up, and item placement sounds (campfires, doors, and friends) neared completion.

Sound occlusion finished its first pass, shipping disabled behind the audio.occlusion convar for a week of testing - with the plan to switch it on for everyone the following week if all went well.

The changelist rounded out with fixes for the pumpkin not showing on players after initial use, motion blur visible through walls, and the moon rendering black in reflection probes or darkening near the horizon. A compact patch, but between the MP5, the silencer rework, and caves in public testing, there was plenty to actually go play with.