What's New in Rust's "Devblog 175" Update

Devblog 175 landed on 31 August 2017, one week after the Bradley APC was dropped into Launch Site as an admitted work in progress. Predictably, players broke it, and this patch is largely Helk's response: pathing fixes, double the health, a loot table that stops it being an explosives farm, and a coaxial gun that actually aims where it's pointing. Elsewhere, long term persistence got promoted on the roadmap, SMGs joined the learnable recoil club, and Andre found another memory leak.

Bradley upgrades

The single biggest problem was pathing. If the Bradley was in a tight area and changed its mind about where to go, and the new destination was behind it, it would try to turn around — and in genuinely tight spots it would get stuck doing a permanent Austin Powers three-point turn. The fix was marking certain path nodes as straightaways: if it needs to reach somewhere behind it, it first paths to the nearest non-straightaway node ahead, then routes from there. So it drives out of a corridor before making a drastic turn. It occasionally looks dumb, but as Helk pointed out, in real life your only option would be reversing — which he hadn't implemented yet.

Some road cones and boxes near the Bradley's route also turned out to be apparently made of lead and were snagging the tank; they've been moved aside or deleted. The rest of the changes:

• Health increased from 500 to 1000, meaning six rockets or two C4 to destroy it.
• It now heals itself over 60 seconds if it hasn't been attacked for 5 minutes, so you can no longer cherry pick Bradleys left damaged by someone else's failed attempt.
• Damage effects similar to the helicopter's, so you can judge its condition from a distance.
• The coaxial machine gun now aims directly at its target. It used to aim slightly to the right, meaning hits were essentially down to aimcone spread. It's far deadlier now, so damage per bullet was cut to 7 (from 10) to compensate.
• Emissive material switching for day/night is back, which also means destroyed Bradley gibs no longer have their headlights on.
• You'll no longer get kicked for flyhack if you manage to jump on it — though the coax can now hit you while you're standing up there.

Gooseman updated the main cannon and coaxial muzzle flashes, which now eject casings. The loot table was rebalanced too: no more C4 or regular rockets. The exploit was obvious in hindsight — kill a Bradley with one C4, get three back, repeat, and you've got an explosives farm. The best you'll get now is a few HV rockets or a handful of grenades, with autoturrets, weapons, ammo and (if lucky) armored doors as the other notable drops. The secondary and tertiary weapons didn't make it, needing a few more days; after that Helk planned to move onto progression and raid balance, which he called more important.

Long term persistence moves to "Now"

The more consequential news was a roadmap change. Helk moved long term persistence into the "Now" section, acknowledging that the team had let it drift with "yeah yeah we'll get to that" for too long and that it clearly needed addressing before leaving early access. He planned to experiment with a few options, and mentioned toying with something akin to blueprints — with the promise that whatever they landed on would be tested and approved before launching.

Recoil: SMGs done

Helk settled on a learnable pattern for SMGs and deployed it to the Custom SMG and Thompson, which share the same pattern for now. That leaves only semi-autos before the recoil rework is finished — "hopefully forever", in his words.

Helicopter and explosion effects

The helicopter got a few small but noticeable fixes: its muzzle flash rotation no longer always points up and instead faces whatever it's shooting at, the debris effect was improved, and the spotlight was given a smaller bias so there's less light clipping at night — less light bleeding through roofs and similar.

Gooseman (Minh Le) built effects for the CH47 helicopter, arriving at some unspecified future date, and Helk couldn't resist reusing them to upgrade the existing explosions. Both the helicopter and the tank now have much better debris effects on death, and hitting the helicopter's weak spots produces a nicer effect instead of oversized brown sticks with strange physics. The oil fireball particle effect around Bradley and helicopter debris sites was also updated to use a texture similar to the newer explosion effects.

Memory leaks, GC part 4, and asset stripping

Andre found another leak, this time from paintable sign textures not being freed under certain conditions. It triggered when a paintable sign was destroyed and — far more importantly — whenever you respawned in a different area of the map, which made it a significant one.

The fourth week of GC work was spent on the file storage backend used by paintable signs, rewritten to eliminate major allocations on both client and server. The biggest gains came from rewriting the caching mechanism, which massively improves performance whenever a new or updated sign has to be loaded from the server. He also optimized the internal texture processing library used when a sign entity streams in on the client, plus assorted smaller offenders like storage container hashing and coroutine yield instructions.

Two more housekeeping wins: roughly 300MB of unused assets were stripped out, some of which were actually being loaded into RAM. And Unity's dynamic batching was disabled entirely — Unity recommends turning it off on essentially all supported platforms, and since Rust uses its own batching system for semi-static objects like buildings plus instancing for dynamic ones, it wasn't doing anything. Performance was confirmed unaffected before pulling the plug.

Andre also finally fixed the roof side walls, which had for a long time sometimes had no collision or been missing visually. Players had figured out how to exploit it, which moved it up the queue. And decor spawn parameters got a cleanup, with bush spawn rules changed to favour fewer, bigger clusters over individual bushes scattered everywhere.

The craftable hazmat suit

Taylor Reynolds, still deep in the character rework, used downtime waiting on bakes and library rebuilds to start a craftable hazmat suit. The goal is a clearer visual distinction between players and scientist NPCs while still giving players radiation protection. It's less MacGyver'd than the old radsuit — RIP frog booties — but still reads as cobbled together from scavenged pieces. What he showed was a rough blockout of one option from Paul's concept art, with the intent to eventually model all the concept's variations so they can be swapped.

Exploits and graphics

Diogo dug into gameplay code to kill a long-standing flashlight abuse exploit that relied on a bug leaving the light permanently on client-side. He also fixed a see-through-wall exploit that produced a kind of pixel distortion leaked by players moving behind a wall — only visible from further away, which handed an advantage in long range fights.

On the optimization side he downscaled textures that were larger than necessary, packed more materials and reduced system RAM footprint on some textures, describing it as an incremental process running for another couple of months given how much content there is. The new explosion particle shaders were also changed so they're affected by fog and atmospheric scattering.

AI and tank sounds

ptrefall more or less finished navmesh grid linking, but with no time to test it, it stayed off main until the following week. He did fix nav_disable, which the previous patch had broken. A side effect: an animal that fails to find navmesh to stand on now dies and produces a corpse rather than standing still or vanishing. Scientists still disappear into thin air on failure, since their loot is more valuable — acknowledged as a stopgap, with the proper solution being not to show them at all until valid navmesh exists.

Alex R declared the granular engine sound system done aside from code cleanup. A new approach to cycle start/stop point detection got it about as accurate as choosing the points by hand, and the slight pitch shifting to generate extra cycles for sparse RPM ranges worked well — useful beyond the tank, since other prototypes will be able to leverage the same system. With the engine locked, he moved to the rest of the tank: a design pass over the engine sound, gunshots for the main cannon, the coaxial machine gun and the side machine guns, turret rotation sounds, and tread sounds. The treads take a granular approach too, though a much simpler one — just playing individual clacks back to back based on speed. Remaining were lurchy chassis sounds for quick stops and bumps, explosions for main shells and the tank itself, fly-by sounds for cannon rounds, and missile sounds.

The rest of the changelist

Also fixed: occasional occludee-related errors, lighting sometimes going dark (mining ores being one trigger), cave entrances sometimes appearing closed on low graphics quality, and NREs when using the spawn bradleyapc command. Memory pool buffer sizes were adjusted as part of the ongoing optimization work. With the supermarket and gas station finished and waiting on next week's wipe, the small monument push was about to actually reach players.