What's New in Rust's "Devblog 141" Update
Devblog 141 was a light pre-Christmas housekeeping patch: small planters came back, picked-up and crafted items started landing in your belt bar, storage containers opened up to multiple players at once, and planter crops stopped dying in the cold.
Devblog 141 shipped on December 22nd, 2016 - the last patch before Christmas, and a deliberately light one. There were no big reveals this time around; instead the team wrapped up the year with a stack of quality-of-life improvements, follow-up fixes for the recently added planters, and some server-side tightening.
Quality of Life
The most noticeable changes were small but genuinely handy inventory tweaks: picked-up items and freshly crafted items now go straight into your belt bar when appropriate, instead of burying themselves in your main inventory. Storage also got friendlier for groups - multiple players can access the same storage container at the same time, ending the polite queue outside the loot room. On top of that, the server restart countdown became less spammy when a lot of time is left, and admins were freed to chat as much as they want.
Planter Follow-Ups
The Small Planter, which missed the initial planter release, was re-enabled - with its scale fixed along the way. Planters can now be placed close to walls, and in a meaningful buff for farmers in harsh biomes, plants in planters now survive the cold of the desert and arctic nights instead of just dying. Indoor farming became viable pretty much anywhere on the map.
Fixes and Under-the-Hood Work
The rest of the patch was cleanup and hardening:
- Entity lookup optimizations and a batch of NRE (null reference exception) fixes.
- A stricter, unified
RPC_Server.MaxDistancecheck, plus the minimum shadow distance pushed to 50 to close shadow-related exploits. - Fixed the reactive target not initializing its animator when streaming in while knocked down, and stopped it allocating an array and an enumerator on every network update.
- Fixed the Christmas bells always playing the moment you joined a server with the event enabled.
- Fixed a grass displacement clamping issue, and tweaked the candle hat's effect position.
And that was the year. With the holiday event still running, planters settling in, and the bigger projects - new AI, harbors, occlusion culling - all simmering in the background, Devblog 141 sent Rust into the 2016 holidays quietly, with the real action set to resume in the new year.