What's New in Rust's "Devblog 162" Update

Devblog 162 landed on 1 June 2017 as a wipe-day patch, and it is the one where Rust's gunplay got torn down and rebuilt. A large, loud reddit argument about how bad the shooting felt pushed Helk to accelerate a recoil revamp he had been planning for months - and while digging into it he found that Rust's aimcones had been calculated as squares rather than circles for the entire life of the game. Alongside all that came the Drop Box, the first phase of the Hapis Island overhaul, and a solid pile of world generation changes.

Recoil revamp

Helk's description of the old system was that shooting felt like using a controller: you know what you want to happen, but you have to fight to get your cursor where you want it. The revamp moves Rust closer to a traditional first-person shooter with three main changes:

• Less horizontal recoil, so staying on a target is easier.
• First-shot accuracy on rifles. The first round is essentially dead accurate, and the longer you hold the trigger the worse it gets via a growing aimcone. You can tap for accuracy or spray and accept that fewer rounds land.
• Recoil compensation. If you hold the trigger and the weapon climbs, releasing the trigger corrects the gun back to its original aim position.

Helk was explicit that this was a first pass, not a finished system - some weapons were certain to be under or overpowered, and he asked for feedback to flesh it out over the following week. If you hated recoil compensation specifically, you could disable it with player.recoilcomp false in the console.

Some weapon costs were adjusted during the rebalance too: the Thompson costs 10 less High Quality Metal, and the pump shotgun and laser sight each cost 5 less. The Laser Sight itself was reworked to remove aim sway rather than aimcone, with a small reduction to hip aimcone on top. The Rocket Launcher can now fire 50 rockets before breaking instead of 20, floor spike health was doubled, and view shake was standardised across all bullet weapons.

Aim squares

The other half of the gunplay story is a genuinely funny bug. While implementing the shotgun trap, Helk noticed its spread pattern was square rather than conical and mentally filed it for later. Prompted by the same week's reddit uproar, he went back to it and found the problem was systemic - every weapon in the game calculated its inaccuracy over a square rather than a circle.

He implemented the correct maths, so aimcones are now actually circular. The knock-on effect is that any given inaccuracy value now covers roughly 20% less surface area, which means every weapon in the game came out about 20% more accurate as a side effect of the fix.

Drop Box

Another Concept Limbooo revival, the Drop Box mounts on a wall and is accessible from outside the building. Like the mailbox you insert items and submit them, and they are retrieved from the rear interior side. It is a one-way outdoor item portal.

The two use cases Helk described were slaving - people working for you get a safe, easy way to deposit what they gather - and resource runs, where you can drop off a load without walking through a hundred doors first. The Mailbox also gained a submit button, and you can no longer right click to deposit mail items directly into mailbox storage.

Hapis Island overhaul, phase one

Petur rolled out the first part of a long-overdue Hapis Island overhaul, with clearly stated goals: make the terrain more engaging and less flat, fix gameplay issues like loot scarcity, add caves, mines and other subterranean elements, make each area feel distinct, add and modernise the radtowns using new assets, and rework mountain slopes to allow base hiding in the style of legacy Rust.

Phase one delivers an entirely reworked west coast, thicker forests, brand new caves and mines, radtown changes and additions, and general terrain and river polish. In detail that includes a new high-end radtown that can spawn some of the best loot in the game, a set of recyclers and repair benches, mines containing ore nodes and mining-specific loot, numerous lone wolf and small group caves scattered around the map, and a stranded convoy with loot on the north-eastern road. The rivers were reworked with a better waterfall, forest density was improved, and the radtowns generally hold more loot.

One known issue shipped with it: river reflections on Hapis were broken, pending a client patch from Diogo, with Water Reflections set to 0 as the temporary workaround. Phase two was promised for the next wipe day.

World updates

Andre's wipe brought a batch of world generation fixes and improvements. Wooden logs found in forests can now be harvested for wood, and all cacti yield cloth and cactus flesh when hit with a gathering tool. A few of the more annoying small trees were removed from the spawn table, and the remaining smaller trees now yield the same resources per hit as big trees so chopping them is worth the time.

Ore nodes in the arid biome are now slightly covered in sand so they blend with the ground the way arctic ores blend with snow, and clutter rocks were scaled up a little so they are not so easily mistaken for collectible ground ores. Ore objects also gained entity pooling support. Finally, the dynamic moon phase cycle was re-enabled, so nights vary between fairly bright and genuinely dark depending on the moon's phase and position.

Hacks, exploits and server crashes

Andre added a set of new server-side checks. Held item deploy time when switching weapons is now verified server-side, and medical tools can no longer bypass their cooldown by stripping the animation client-side. Various RPC calls gained additional checks against invalid interactions, and player hack reports are now logged on the server so server owners can track them. Any violation of a server-side check is now reported to EAC for use when investigating hack reports. A speedhack false positive that could snap players back while sliding down mountain sides was also fixed.

On stability, the server crashes and freezes that had plagued the game since the new AI went live were partly explained: a corrupt navmesh could snap animals into infinity, which was suspected to be freezing some servers. The team planned to monitor stability over the following week to confirm the fix and find whatever remained.

Monuments

After playtesting and discussion with Vincent, Damian refactored the rocket factory. The old walkway layout was boring to play through, so it was streamlined: clearer paths through the level, more platforming challenges, collapsed walkways serving as staircases, and working lifts between floors. A few hard-to-reach secret areas with hidden loot were added as a reward for exploration, alongside modelling and texturing polish for all of it.

Vincent worked on the office building exteriors, replacing the temporary blocky look with a slanted, meaner silhouette that reads as more "sciency" - fitting for that part of the complex. The layout around them was reworked to feel more functional and to carry the state-of-emergency look used elsewhere in the game. Interior and exterior LODs were next, then beautification. The target for releasing the new monument and the updated airfield was July's wipe.

PGt1ps resurfaced after a stretch of secret concept work to replace the temporary road signs spawning along the roads with proper art, on the grounds that they had been annoying him every time he saw them.

Hand viewmodels

Taylor finished texturing the arms, including all the special maps Diogo's new shader uses. One notable feature is the ability to mask off skin tinting, which allows accurate depiction of unpigmented areas like fingernails and palms on darker skin tones. Matching new proportions to an old rig is always a compromise, but he considered it close, with a final skinning pass in progress. The changelist also carries a fix for skin tones being too dark compared to previous weeks.

Audio

Alex R finished a first pass at shotgun trap sounds and kept working on melee weapon impacts, recording more material to layer in and getting most of the final editing done. He also added global per-sound voice limiting to the engine - a response to performance problems caused by the sheer volume of bullets multiple shotgun traps can produce. The existing system limited voice counts within a given range, which he prefers because it makes sure you never miss gunshots you need to hear when being shot at from two directions, and that remains the default strategy. The new global per-sound limit is a safety net for cases the range-based system does not curb aggressively enough.

On music, finishing touches continued alongside progress on new songs and tweaks to existing ones, with a preview of another new track - Alex liked the ambience and pads but wanted another higher-energy section or two before the heart-pounding vibe really landed.

The changelist is long, with the usual crop of smaller items: skinned items now show correct icons even with itemskins set to false, the gloss slider works on roadsign armour in the workshop, resources no longer spawn inside each other, repair is no longer free on some objects, monument interaction issues after a fresh wipe were fixed, and you can no longer fall through the terrain near military tunnels. There is also a cluster of lighting fixes covering over-bright particles, miner hat intensity, heli damage smoke, heli and cargo plane rotor lighting, and effect.bloom toggling the effect instead of switching quality.