What's New in Rust's "Devblog 140" Update

Devblog 140 arrived in mid-December 2016 with a cheerful pitch: "Planters, Santa, and more." It was the patch that gave Rust farmers their first proper Planter Boxes, flipped the switch on the annual Christmas event, and kept chipping away at two of the game's oldest complaints - poor performance and weapon exploits.

Farming 1.5: Planter Boxes

Helk redid several aspects of farming, starting with the addition of Planter Boxes. They were planned in small and large varieties, though only the Large Planter made it into this patch. Planters can be placed on the ground or inside buildings, come with easy placement guides so you can sow seeds at their optimal spacing, and - the headline number - make plants grow 3x faster than plants placed on outdoor ground. All plants now also have to be placed at least half a metre apart, killing the old seed-spam meta for good, and seeds got a small sapling guide to help you visualize where plants will grow. Helk's roadmap for the next patch: bonuses for watering plants and an even bigger bonus for putting ceiling lights above them.

Holiday Content Enabled

The Christmas event returned. Every in-game day you'll hear jingling bells, and a Gift Box or two appears near your position - run outside and smash them to retrieve presents. Presents can be unwrapped immediately for something small, or collected and upgraded into larger ones for a chance at a better gift. The lucky ones find a stocking: hang it by a campfire and it gets stuffed with goodies the next time the bells ring. New for this year, stockings only refill when empty, and each refill costs the stocking 10% of its health until it's destroyed - so the free-loot fountain now has a lifespan. Taylor Reynolds also replaced the old Santa hat, which he described as "really terrible," with a new model - as he put it, so you can spread festive cheer in style, "or murder people wearing it, whatever." A related fix stopped the pumpkin and Santa hat from being invisible.

Performance: Culling and Rendering Work

Diogo Teixeira tackled a long-known weakness - Rust's poor visibility culling. Unity's own occlusion system can't be used because Rust's maps are procedurally generated, so he began implementing a dynamic occlusion culling system that recognizes occluders like terrain and supports fully dynamic occludees. The first version landed on the Prerelease branch behind the console command culling.enabled 1 - at that stage still being validated rather than delivering gains, but improvements were promised over the following days. Elsewhere on the rendering front, Unity's built-in dynamic batching was re-enabled and deferred mesh decal visibility culling was optimized. The virtual texturing option was removed entirely: months of terrain shader optimizations had made the regular shader efficient enough that virtual texturing was no longer worth the runtime cost or maintenance time. Andre also added culling scripts to the static projected decals in caves, which hadn't been culled with the rest of the cave geometry and were dragging down performance on bigger maps - that fix had already shipped in a small update after the previous devblog.

Exploit and Hack Fixes

Andre continued his push toward server-side checks for all weapon functionality before the holidays. This week's haul:

• Fixed minor outstanding issues with server-side line-of-sight verification.
• Added verified periodic position updates for projectiles.
• Addressed projectile ricochet verification issues.
• Tracked down a building exploit that let people build inside natural cave walls.

Art and Audio Progress

Taylor started reworking Rust's animals in preparation for the updated AI, beginning with a bear blockout - the plan being to lock down rig adjustments before a whole new load of animations get made, with detailing focused on the face and paws since fur will cover most of the body. The military truck from the previous devblog gained a simple interior and moved on to low-poly and baking prep. Vincent pushed on with harbor level design: Harbor_1 was almost ready while Harbor_2 still needed work to catch up. Alex Webster set up specific drop and attach animations for the F1 Grenade and Beancan Grenade viewmodels (awaiting code support to show in game), and Alex Ramsey continued his second pass over animal sounds, dipping into music when he needed a break.

Smaller Fixes

The changelist rounded things out with clothing world models, a networking MTU reduction from 1430 to 1400, and fixes for water occasionally not being visible when exiting caves, partially harvested ore nodes showing up as fully intact, parts of the bear corpse not being harvestable, an endless viewmodel bandage bug, and a flickering hand on the flamethrower viewmodel. With the holiday event live, planter upgrades queued for the next patch, and the new AI groundwork underway, Devblog 140 closed out 2016's updates on a distinctly festive note.