What's New in Rust's "Devblog 184" Update

Devblog 184 landed on November 2nd, 2017, right as the Halloween decorations came down and winter rolled onto the island. This was a forced-wipe patch that kept blueprints intact, and it was a meaty one: a brand-new early-game weapon, a rethink of how the procedural map lays out its biomes and monuments, a complete overhaul of loot tables, and the first properly buildable icebergs. It also nudged gunplay again with stance-based recoil, so there was something in here for basically everyone to argue about.

The Nailgun Arrives

The headline addition was the Nailgun, implemented by Helk with some quick animation work from Gooseman. It shipped as a default blueprint, crafted from Metal Fragments and Scrap, and was explicitly designed to bridge the gap between bows and the revolver in the early game. It carried a 16-round clip and fired slow-moving projectiles, so you needed to land quite a few nails to seriously hurt an armored player. Helk openly admitted the team didn't know yet whether it was overpowered or underpowered, and promised a compensating balance patch the following week once real-world data came in. Nailgun ammo was added as a default blueprint alongside it.

Loot Overhaul and the New Basic Crate

Hand in hand with the map changes below, Helk completely rewrote how crate loot was calculated. The old system rolled a high chance of mediocre items with a rare chance of something good; the new system always spawned a decent item, with a chance of a better item stacked on top. In radtown terms, every crate now guaranteed at least a decent component, with everything else as bonus.

• A new Basic Crate appeared at gas stations, supermarkets and warehouses, containing at least one Workbench Tier 1 item with a chance of two (the art was placeholder, with a real model still being concepted).
• Crates always spawned one component, with a 40% chance of a workbench item.
• The airdrop was set to always contain at least two weapons with ammo and two pieces of armor, ending the era of eight riot helmets and rotten apples.
• Military Tunnels began spawning two elite crates.
• The Candle Hat became a default blueprint, and Metal Window Bars got cheaper to research.

Notably, this loot experimentation was the stated reason there was no blueprint wipe this patch — the team wanted to keep tweaking weekly and only wipe BPs once the system settled.

Tiered Procedural Maps

André reworked world generation to split the map into distinct gameplay tiers. One side of the map was randomized as a tier 0 start area: temperate climate, newbie-appropriate loot, and plenty of coastline to spread out the wipe-day spawn wave, placed as far as possible from late-game points of interest. Tiers 1 and 2 then got randomized biomes — predominantly cold, hot, or a mix depending on the seed — with monuments spawning in the appropriate tier based on their loot quality. The 'better' radtowns therefore spawned further from the start zone, and as a side effect the maps gained more contrast between biomes and more height variation on the terrain.

Stance Recoil

The recently shipped recoil system had been broadly accepted, but one complaint stuck: there was no reason to crouch, since players could strafe at full accuracy and hit targets at long range. Stance recoil fixed that. Crouching kept the exact same accuracy as before, standing gave a slight accuracy decrease, and standing while moving decreased it further. Helk called it fair, said he crouched out of habit anyway, and predicted — correctly, one assumes — that Reddit would tear it apart regardless.

Icebergs, Ice Sheets and a Colder Coastline

Damian Lazarski's new icebergs and ice sheets finally shipped, spawning along the edges of the arctic biome as the first step toward making ocean areas genuinely usable. All of the big icebergs had buildable areas and were easily accessible; the largest ones had walkable slopes, while ladder raiding remained viable, just slightly harder. Sand was also removed from the arctic coastline, and a shading fix landed for multi-layer materials like the icebergs themselves.

Hapis and Savas Island Love

With Petur busy on project MOSS, Alistair took over custom-map duty. Hapis Island received the Bradley APC patrolling the Materials Extraction monument, medium radiation added to that same monument, loot spawn tweaks, updated map markers, and a batch of exploit fixes — with more Hapis work queued up. Savas Island got map markers of its own plus north and south recyclers, along with assorted fixes.

AI, Networking and Under-the-Hood Work

After a week of Halloween murderers roaming the island, ptrefall folded the lessons into the Player NPC that underpins the upcoming scientists — bug fixes, optimizations, and a repaired nav_disable convar that properly turns the AI off again. The Halloween content itself was disabled, with the team noting the murderers surfaced a pile of AI issues that would help future humanoid NPCs. On the networking side, EAC shipped optimized network encryption algorithms — server owners who had dialed encryption back for performance reasons were encouraged to try it again — plus an EAC SDK update.

Player Models, Hair and Graphics

Diogo Teixeira removed the Large Scale Occlusion graphics option entirely: it was a performance hog, and Unity API limitations made it too expensive to fix properly, with a volumetric global-illumination approach mooted as a possible long-term replacement. He also picked up the hair gameplay code, targeting a rollout the following week with hairstyles randomized per Steam ID for starters. Taylor Reynolds meanwhile made the cranium shape consistent across all male and female heads (so hairstyles stop clipping), improved elbow and wrist geometry and skin weighting, toned down bone scaling that was disproportionately affecting heads, and widened skin-colour variation — while confirming, for the record, that genital scaling remained unchanged. Alex Webster also floated admire animations, letting you inspect your weapon skins in detail, and asked players whether he should keep extending them to more weapons.

Closing Thoughts

Devblog 184 was one of those patches where the systemic changes mattered more than any single item: the tiered map and guaranteed-loot crates reshaped the early game far beyond what a nailgun alone could. Smaller fixes rounded it out — a garage door sound that finally scales with audio volume, a player-preview blinking fix, and various Hapis exploit patches. And if the admire animations left you staring lovingly at your weapon skins, you can browse and price every one of them on our skin tracker.