What's New in Rust's "Devblog 151" Update

Devblog 151 landed in March 2017 under the modest banner of "loadout lockers, optimisations, fixes, and more." The Locker turned out to be one of Rust's all-time great quality-of-life items, the Patrol Helicopter got meaner about being cheesed, and Andre's profiling uncovered a genuinely absurd performance culprit: pumpkins.

The Locker

Helk "didn't want just another deployable for decorating your base," so the Locker shipped with real functionality: three sections, each with a swap button. Press it and all your clothing plus your belt contents move into the locker, while whatever was stored there gets equipped instantly. Changing loadouts - or stripping down fast and knowing exactly where everything went - became a one-click operation. The workshop wasted no time dressing it up, with skins like the Army Locker and Grid Locker appearing in the same cycle.

Helicopter: No More Tool Cupboard Voodoo

Players had been exploiting the Patrol Helicopter's AI, using "Tool Cupboard voodoo" to stop it from making strafing runs - it would never strafe a target that wasn't authorized in the area. Helk's fix: it now always strafes, but uses napalm instead of rockets against unauthorized targets - and napalm was modified to damage only players, so the change couldn't be weaponized to grief other people's bases. "I'm excited to see how much more difficult this makes the helicopter to take out."

Turrets for the Masses

Both the Flame Turret and Auto Turret got cost reductions, and Auto Turret parts began appearing (rarely) in Radtowns and in the purple crates at abandoned vehicles. Helk's prediction: "Let's see if we can crash the servers this week when every noob has one deployed in their 1x1."

Shops, Decor and Survival Tweaks

• Vending machine map indicators: empty or out-of-stock machines now show as a red icon on the map, ending the cross-map trek to a raided shop. A rating system was acknowledged as still needed.
• Decor deployables (rugs, chairs, tables) now require building privilege plus an equipped Hammer to pick up - no more accidental grabs or drive-by furniture theft. C4 also stopped sticking to them.
• Animal Fat from fishing: gutting a Small Trout now yields four Animal Fat, smoothing out the early game where fat was scarce until you could suddenly drown in it after one bear.
• An accidental revert was itself reverted: the previous week's SAR buff and SAP nerf had been undone by mistake - "Sorry about this, guys" - and were restored.

The Optimisation Report

Andre's week was a masterclass in profiling-driven work, aided by new tooling he built to measure per-entity overhead and async work:

• Plants were the worst entities in the game for client-side performance - mostly pumpkins and hemp, costing more than buildings. "Since that's clearly ridiculous I've put some optimizations in place."
• Workshop skins had become a significant performance drag as more items became skinnable. Background loading was optimized, memory leaks in skin loading and plant material updates were fixed, and a temporary escape hatch was added: itemskins 0 in the F1 console disables workshop skins entirely (not saved between restarts, deliberately).
• Multithreaded mesh batching finally went live: the vast majority of batching work now runs on a thread, speeding up mesh refreshes and cutting the stutter when large buildings update - foundational work that occlusion culling depends on.
• The networking grid became more granular, splitting massive buildings into smaller parts to soften entity-streaming hitches.

Vincent contributed too, cutting vertex counts on stone and sheet metal building tiers - the most geometrically expensive ones.

Coming Attractions and Polish

Vincent revealed two new items in progress: a Spinning Wheel for making decisions - planned to be paintable like signs and workshop-skinnable - and a netting block that fits wall frames and works like ladders, enabling continuous climbing surfaces inside bases. Pilgrim's Tier 1 Workbench neared completion, Damian finished the locker art and started remaking the ancient bed deployable, and Taylor wrapped the Wooden Armour bake while debating whether a headpiece made sense. On the polish front: Revolver, Guitar and AK47 third-person animations completed; the Double Barrel Shotgun's ironsight recoil toned down and its ugly sights remodelled; muzzle flashes fixed for Muzzle Brake and Boost attachments, plus a new silencer flash with a little puff of smoke; and impact effects modernized with inspiration from Battlefield 1. Alex Webster dug into workshop skin distortions on world models - some dating "from day one" and only exposed now that skin artists were adding fine lines and writing - promising careful fixes that wouldn't break existing skins, and asking creators to check their work as models updated. And Alex Ramsey recorded footwear-specific footsteps for nearly every surface ("other than gravel, carpet, and crunchy bark dust/sticks, which should be sorted after I take a trip to Home Depot"), plus a new M249 gunshot at Helk's request. If any of this era's locker, fridge or carpet skins caught your eye, they're all catalogued on our skin tracker.