What's New in Rust's "Devblog 152" Update

Devblog 152 arrived in mid-March 2017 with a distinctly playful streak: a paintable wheel of fortune, climbing nets for your base, and a bed you could actually be proud of. Underneath the toys, though, sat two of the better fixes of the era - the end of the great pumpkin infestation, and the elimination of frame drops during sustained gunfire.

The Spinner Wheel

Straight out of Concept Limbo came the Spinner Wheel: place it, paint it, spin it, and it stops at a random spot. Games of chance were the obvious use, and Helk leaned in - it can be deployed on tables ("roulette"), and you can restrict spinning to players with building privilege. "It's so silly but I can't wait to see what people do with it: I personally plan on setting up a small casino..." Pair one with something like the Antique Dining Table skin and you've got proper gambling-den ambience. The team also wanted the wheel paintable like signs and eventually workshop-skinnable, so ready-made wheel designs could fill in for anyone who couldn't draw.

Netting: A New Way to Move

Vincent's Netting block shipped - a simple wall-frame addition with outsized implications for base design. It works like ladders but lets you climb laterally as well as vertically on the ropes, creating continuous climbing surfaces and entirely new ways to move between floors and access areas of your base.

The Pumpkin Apocalypse, Ended

"Oh my Lord. You know we have a problem when the second most populous entity on a server is a damn pumpkin." Rustafied Main had been running with around 90,000 pumpkins at one point - a direct consequence of pumpkins living through 7 growing seasons while every other plant got 1. Helk cut them to a single season, and one of the stranger performance problems in Rust's history ended. It compounded nicely with the previous week's plant entity optimisations.

Loot and Balance

• Supply Signals became findable in green military crates - very rarely, at about a 2% chance - giving ordinary players a shot at calling in an airdrop.
• Heavy Plate Armor was quietly the best rad gear in the game by accident: a +50 radiation protection value had slipped through on every piece, beating the Radsuit. Fixed to a more reasonable 7 per piece. "Whoops."
• Harbors got a small last-minute buff: both now have small refineries "placed in really risky places" - though only taking effect on wipe, meaning April 6th for official servers.
• The cave death pit - the community-polarizing drop before safe cave areas - gained a small passage down to the pit itself, located after the jump. Cave-dwellers get an easier life, failed raiders can recover their gear, and everyone can retrieve their stuff.

Gunfire Lag, Solved

Andre tracked down why sustained automatic fire tanked performance: the sheer quantity of effects and sounds attached to player rigs made every transform update extremely slow. His fix combined faster effect recycling - detaching effects from the rig as quickly as possible - with transform caching that accumulates all viewmodel adjustments (recoil, sway and so on) in temporary variables and applies them once per frame. The result: the overhead from long bursts of fire was "essentially eliminated," with savings of 8ms on full-auto weapons like the M249 and improvements across the board. He also stripped obsolete scripts and unused animator components to trim memory usage, and wrote checking scripts so artists don't reintroduce them. Foundations now displace grass too, with bushes planned once the old and new foliage systems unify.

Everything Else

Vincent revealed the Airfield expansion: an underground network of tunnels in the style of the Trainyard's, with bunker rooms, sewers and a short natural cave segment - letting players cross the airfield hidden in dark passages and resurface at the far end, with ore nodes in the cave section and mining crates on the bridges between cave and bunker. It was due to merge from the art branch at the beginning of April. Damian's remade bed shipped - "enjoy all the pyjama parties that you want" - and Pilgrim finished the Tier 1 Workbench model before moving on to binoculars. Taylor finished texturing the Wooden Armour rework, delayed a week by clipping issues over clothing. The console UI gained autocomplete, demos got voice recording and better playback, viewmodel animations were de-floatified on Helk's "weightless guns" feedback, and Alex Ramsey's footwear-specific footsteps neared completion - garden soil re-recorded with crushed rock for extra crunch - alongside the finished new M249 gunshot. "Pew pew!" With Airfield tunnels and the Workbench looming, spring 2017 was shaping up nicely - and every skin of the era is browsable on our skin tracker.