What's New in Rust's "Devblog 145" Update

Devblog 145 closed out January 2017 with "the first signs of overgrowth, our remake of the old intro music, crafting time reductions, and more." It was mostly Helk's week: a stack of balance changes touched farming yields, crafting times, grenades and shotguns - while Garry firefought a skins outage that had left paying customers unable to use what they'd bought.

The Skins Outage

Skins had been broken for about a week, and Garry didn't sugarcoat it: "you guys paid for those skins and you can't use them. That's terrible and we're sorry." The timing pointed at the previous patch, so he initially assumed it was self-inflicted - but rumors that other games had the same problem shifted suspicion to Steam, which had apparently changed something backwards-incompatible on its end. Updating to the latest Steam SDK didn't help either, so Garry shipped a workaround to get skins functioning again, with the real fix still pending and a promise to take the episode as a lesson.

Farming 1.8: Yields That Reward Care

The farming project neared completion. Distressed plants now show it in their color, so you can see when they need watering, and yield is calculated from how much water a plant absorbed across its growth cycle - each crop with its own requirements:

• Pumpkins: 1 pumpkin unwatered, up to 3 when properly tended.
• Corn: 2 ears baseline, up to 6.
• Hemp: nerfed to 10 cloth unwatered - but up to 40 when cared for.

Corn and pumpkins also had their caloric yield doubled to make them genuinely sought-after food (meat items were slightly nerfed in parallel), and every plant now gives at least 2 clones, with healthy plants producing up to 6. Farming had gone from an afterthought to a real gameplay loop in about a month.

Balance: Cheaper, Faster, Snappier

Helk went through the economy with shears:

• Crafting times: arrows down from 20 seconds to 5; most guns (Bolt, AK, SAR, SMG, Thompson and more) cut from 3 minutes to 1. Bear traps and auto turrets got faster too. Further cuts were held back deliberately - they'd only need reversing "when I add the Workbench..."
• F1 Grenade: much cheaper, spring removed from the recipe, building damage almost completely removed, and a snappier throw animation - repositioning it as a proper anti-personnel combat tool.
• Cost cuts: the Double Barrel Shotgun down to a single Pipe in components, the Landmine's Gear cost removed (a one-use deployable eating a valuable component was "silly"), all barricades cheaper with reduced Blade requirements, and a slightly cheaper Waterpipe Shotgun.
• Holosight: after finding it "virtually invisible" in daylight on a battlefield server, Helk enlarged the reticle and made it stay red during the day.
• Oil Barrels: unbroken barrels were keeping junk piles alive for their full ~20-minute despawn timer, eating population slots and starving the map of fresh piles. Low Grade Fuel was added to the barrel alongside the crude to give players a reason to finish the job.

Tech: Loading Times and a Unity Step Back

Andre finished the first iteration of the world serialization system: client and server can now cache and load the procedurally generated world, promising vastly improved loading times on consecutive joins and restarts. It was slated to go live with the next week's wipe, with server-streamed worlds - opening world generation to server-side mods - hoped for the following month. Less happily, the recent Unity upgrade had to be reverted to 5.4.2f2 after a physics engine problem stopped some servers from starting; the downgrade reintroduced alt-tab issues in exclusive fullscreen. Andre also spent unglamorous days in memory management and networking, fixing a minor memory leak on server join, a server entity leak when dropped items fell out of world bounds, garbage collection from cave triggers and a long tail of similar bugs - plus a new free console command that frees all possible memory.

Art, Animation and Audio

Alex Ramsey recreated the classic Rust intro music - rebuilt from scratch since only the mixed-down file survived, meaning the old layers couldn't feed the dynamic music system. Not in-game yet, and not note-for-note identical (a few parts "always felt a little off"), but close enough to stir memories. He also shipped new Recycler sounds - one layer being a recording of himself shaking a filing cabinet "like I was riding a bull" - while Helk slightly reduced the Recycler's volume but increased its audible distance. Distant gunshots and explosions got polish passes, and the bow/crossbow double-shot sound bug was fixed. Elsewhere: Vincent's overgrowth pass covered the powerplant, sphere tank and lighthouse with the airfield in progress; Damian textured the military tunnel bunker rooms; the third-person animations were being redone for the new rig - with hand placement now done precisely in Maya instead of IK, ending hands clipping through guns; and Taylor returned to the Heavy Plate Armour, aiming to start rigging within a week before handing Helk "the unenviable task of balancing it." Between the workbench tease, world streaming for modders, and heavy armour on the bench, Devblog 145 left plenty on the horizon.