What's New in Rust's "Devblog 136" Update

Devblog 136 shipped on November 17th, 2016, two weeks into the component era, and it was a classic stabilization patch: a long roll of balance changes, exploit closures, and performance wins. The Revolver finally became worth pulling, drinking water became an actual gameplay concern, and two long-running annoyances - deployable raid towers and the mysterious stutter near bases - were dealt with.

The Revolver, Un-Sucked

Helk diagnosed why the Revolver felt so bad: its slow rate of fire made rapid trigger pulls feel unresponsive and delayed. The fix raised its fire rate to match the Semi-Auto Pistol, tweaked the recoil effects for easier handling, lowered its cost, and - new trick - let it accept silencers. The trade-offs: a larger aim-cone and quicker damage falloff, positioning it firmly as a close-to-mid range weapon. Per the changelist, damage also came down very slightly.

Hydration Actually Matters Now

Big survival changes: food stopped being a free water source. Players had been spamming wolf meat and never thinking about hydration, so water-from-food was substantially nerfed across the board (beans and pumpkins still help). To compensate, finding and carrying water got easier:

• The Bota Bag holds nearly twice as much water and costs less cloth
• The Water Purifier runs twice as fast and is cheaper
• Salt water sources can no longer be drunk from - you get a warning instead
• Drinking from streams and lakes is more intuitive and obvious
• The Water Bottle gained a working viewmodel, so bottles found in the world can be kept and refilled with right click like a Bota Bag - though the model was admittedly "temporary and disgusting looking," with a promise of one day having "the best looking water bottle in all of the games industry"

Water Catchers also began collecting 5-10x as much water - filling mainly at night from fog - finally giving a reason to craft one until rain returns.

Economy Fixes: Recycler, Repairs, and Junk Piles

Cheeky players had discovered that feeding items into the Recycler in a certain order yielded more resources than intended, while a separate bug made multiple queued items yield less and less as recycling went on. Both were fixed - no more item loss, no more free profit. Repairs had the opposite problem: component costs were supposed to be ignored when repairing, but if you actually had the components on hand, they'd be consumed anyway. Fixed - with a heads-up that repair costs would eventually charge the components' constituent ingredients, "but for now enjoy the free ride."

Junk piles got smarter: the earlier fix stopping despawns near players hadn't accounted for sleepers, so a pile half-stuck inside a base could hog a population slot forever - now sleepers are ignored. The dreaded empty barrel/crate problem was made "impossible," and regular barrels stopped dropping crude, instead giving 3x the wood (100-150) or 10-15 metal fragments.

Costs came down in a batch, too: the Codelock shed its 400-wood price, the Crossbow requires far fewer components, and the Bota Bag, Water Purifier, and Revolver all got cheaper. Salvaged tools had their durability substantially increased, and the Mace - the only two-handed weapon needing no components - gained the largest attack radius in the game, making it "much more difficult to miss."

Raid Towers and Anti-Hack

Andre killed every known variant of the deployable raid tower - those stability-defying stacks of shelves and storage boxes everyone had seen looming over bases. Shelves can no longer be placed on deployables, pumpkins can no longer be stacked, and the exploit era was declared "finally a thing of the past." The projectile anti-hack also got significantly less forgiving, specifically to block hacks that used explosive ammunition to shred base cupboards in a few shots.

The Base Stutter, Mostly Solved

The weird stuttering near bases that had bothered players for weeks - and that most of the team couldn't even reproduce - was finally cornered through community reports and pattern-hunting. The culprit: a texture bandwidth bottleneck hitting certain hardware/driver combinations harder than others. Not necessarily fully solved, but a huge improvement, with gameplay "smooth again for most players, if not smoother." On top of that, the new low-overhead prefab pooling (working around Unity's internal allocations on object reactivation) was enabled for everyone - pool.mode defaulting to 2 - fixing the last systematic flaw in entity streaming. Two client-side coroutine memory leaks were plugged, and a profiling pass flagged CPU-bound scripts for optimization.

Art, Sound, and Small Wins

The Furnace got its light back, thanks to a low-cost solution that looks better than the old shadow-casting approach with no performance hit. Harbor art crossed the three-week mark with most large structures complete and focus shifting to medium and small assets. Clothing items got proper low-poly world models built from scratch (the shared-texture approach produced awful, un-LOD-able results), the Beretta M92 finished its high-poly model and textures, and third-person pistol animations became more "purposeful and combat ready." Component items also got real icons to replace the temp art, tuned for at-a-glance readability while looting.

Bullet flybys got clever: instead of triggering at a fixed distance - sometimes audibly "passing" 10m in front of you - the system now computes the exact point where a bullet passes you and plays the sound there, only after it has actually passed. Rifle flybys sound stronger than pistol ones. Occlusion quirks were fixed (eating while crouched under a staircase no longer muffles your own snacking), gear-movement recordings continued - including destroying a filing cabinet with a sledgehammer in pursuit of the perfect road sign armor rattle - and a few weapons stopped accidentally playing third-person reload sounds on deploy: "You don't have to worry about anyone hearing you whip your P250 out anymore."

Meanwhile the workshop skin pipeline kept humming along in the background - this mid-November window is where era pieces like the Charitable Rust 2016 Shirt and the Digital Camo MP5 date from. Devblog 136 didn't add much that was new, but it made almost everything already there work better - exactly what the component system needed two weeks in.