What's New in Rust's "Devblog 153" Update

Devblog 153 rounded out March 2017 with "binoculars are in, work begins on a new monument, and more" - and that new monument turned out to be the first look at the Launch Site, the future home of Rust's end-game. Alongside it came a war on the furnace-splitting exploit, a pile of cost reductions, and a significant shake-up of the skin economy.

Binoculars

"Shut your blinds! Binoculars have arrived!" The Binoculars can be found in Purple Crates or crafted for 5 High Quality Metal and 1 Gear - and if you end up not wanting them, recycling gives a chance to get the Gear back. Right click to peer through, left click to cycle zoom levels. Pilgrim delivered the model complete with LODs, fresh off finishing the Tier 1 Workbench and already starting on the Tier 2.

The Furnace Exploit Reckoning Begins

An oversight in the Furnace code had taught players a trick: split the contents into multiple stacks and each stack cooks separately, vastly increasing throughput. Helk called it what it was - "a bug and an exploit" - but the urgent problem was server performance: overflowing furnaces constantly created and destroyed entities as they spat Charcoal into the world. The interim measure: any Furnace or Campfire that overflows now turns itself off. That effectively costs a slot and, in Helk's words, makes Large Furnaces "suddenly seem far more attractive" - with a fuller fix promised in the following weeks.

Portable Deployables and Fuel Panels

Objects that hold fuel gained a proper fuel inventory panel for loading and unloading - covering lanterns, Candle Hats and Miner Hats (you can finally extract fuel from headgear). Building on that, a batch of deployables became pick-up-able with building access and a Hammer equipped: Tuna Can Lamps, Lanterns, Ceiling Lights, Flame Turrets and Auto Turrets. Light sources keep their fuel in the item; turrets attempt to empty their contents into your inventory first. Helk admitted the hammer mechanic was "sort of a weird" placeholder that "serves its purpose right now in preventing screw ups."

Cost Reductions All Round

• Holosight: Tech Trash cost down to 1. Silencer: down to 5 HQM. C4: one less Tech Trash. "Maybe we'll see a few more attachments these days?"
• Crossbow: the contentious Gear cost removed (offset by more wood and fragments) - "Let's see if everyone bitches about this and I have to add 3x Tech Trash to the recipe next week." Good timing for skins like the Tank Crossbow.
• Eoka: reduced cost, "making it even cheaper to not craft."
• The Muzzle Brake got higher durability and further recoil reduction.

Skin Market Shake-Up

Garry announced a significant economic change: skins can no longer be listed on the Steam market while they're still for sale in the item store - usually about eight weeks from initial availability. The old system of prices rising over two months had failed in practice because "after the first week no-one buys their skins." The hope was twofold: skin authors profit more from their own work, and once a skin leaves the store and becomes marketable, it retains or exceeds its original price. Flippers were explicitly not the priority: "We're trying to make sure that the item's author is making the profit from it being sold, not the flip men." Alex Webster complemented this with finished fixes for world models displaying skins incorrectly - some issues dating from day one, only exposed as artists placed fine detail into previously unused texture areas.

The Launch Site

Vincent unveiled greybox work on a new monument: a rocket launch site, complete with the rocket itself, a factory, and office outbuildings. It was explicitly aimed at higher-tier, end-game players, with loot spawns "higher tech than the rest of the game's locations." The layout tells a story - the launch platform and its chute at one end, the factory that built the rocket at the other, connected by rail - with interior segments planned for the factory hangar and at least one office, and an underground network beneath the launch platform, unlike previous monuments.

Performance and Polish

Andre extended pooling to nearly all common client-side entities, greatly reducing stutter when they spawn, and optimized runtime mesh building down to around 0.1ms per frame at peak - a 10-20x reduction depending on the task. Ragdoll culling for players and animals shipped, sleeper culling improved, and he flagged workshop skins and high-population server performance as the next targets. Elsewhere: the map-drawing sync bug (drawn sectors not updating for other players) was fixed with credit to community reporter bawng; the Spinner Wheel got its sound un-occluded so it's audible through Chainlink Fences and Shop Fronts, and stuck spears and bullet decals now spin with the wheel; campfires stopped occasionally hurting people while unlit; and a wake-up-jump climbing exploit was closed. Taylor began standardising clothing displacement values so layered items stop clipping and floating - groundwork for wearing Heavy Armour over clothing - and viewmodel animations for the AK47, M92, Spear and both shotguns got "chunkier," with the long-standing FOV-change clipping bug fixed. Alex Ramsey declared footwear-specific footsteps done - "Hearing the light pats of your bare feet switch to clompy rubber when you pop a Hazmat Suit on feels great" - holding the release a week for safety. With Unity 5.6 imminent, Garry put dates on the new AI system: April 6th if all went well, May 4th if not. The end-game era was coming into view - and you can trace the whole skin economy those changes shaped on our skin tracker.