What's New in Rust's "Devblog 185" Update

Devblog 185 arrived on November 9th, 2017, one week after the big winter map shake-up, and it tackled two very different itches: vanity and progression. Player hair finally shipped after years of uniformly bald islanders, and Workbench Experimentation gave the new blueprint system the scrap-sink it had been missing. Around those headliners came nailgun follow-up tuning, a much crisper temporal anti-aliasing implementation, a big occlusion-culling win, and an early look at the Building 3.0 overhaul.

Player Hair Is Here

Matt and Diogo Teixeira wrapped up the last few tech issues and got player hair into the game. At launch there were two hair styles per gender, two facial hair styles, plus eyebrow and body hair, with tech in place to make hair deform with clothing and fit every face. Hair was designed around TSSAA anti-aliasing (in the graphics options), with ongoing work to improve how it looks under other AA solutions or none at all. With the underlying tech essentially complete, the plan was to roll out many more hair and facial hair styles — plus hair colour and dyeing — over the next few updates. As the devblog put it, everyone gets hair, so the trope of Rust being a game about bald psychopaths was now only half true. Being new tech with a lot of hair-and-face combinations, some bugs were expected.

Workbench Experimentation

Helk added Workbench Experimentation to the progression system. Using a workbench now popped up an Experiment UI where you could spend scrap to produce a random blueprint appropriate to that workbench tier. The system checked what you'd already learned, so duplicates were impossible — unless you neglected to study the blueprint it just produced. Helk acknowledged the game had arguably come full circle back to something like the old experimentation system, but argued this implementation felt far more solid. He was also mulling whether everyone should unlock items in the same fixed order via experimentation, and framed the design as a choice between hunting random loot and researching it directly, versus a slower but more certain grind of dumping resources into the workbench.

Nailgun and Combat Tuning

The week-old Nailgun got its promised follow-up pass:

• Nails now embed themselves in objects and are retrievable.
• Projectile 'thickness' was slightly increased, so you land slightly more hits.
• To kill 'nail raiding' before it started, nail damage was switched from 'bullet' to 'arrow' type, so nails no longer damage wooden doors or structures.

On the recoil front, stance recoil was removed from the crossbow and hunting bow, restoring their old behaviour with no movement inaccuracy, and Helk planned to tackle the first-shot inaccuracy when standing still and tap firing the following week. A separate fix also stopped the flame turret from being lockable.

Research Cost Reductions

A batch of items had their research costs reduced by one tier: the Oil Refinery, Searchlight, Large Medkit, Miner Hat, Chainlink Fence and Gate, Prison Wall and Door, Double Sheet Metal Doors, and Floor Grill. The HV Arrow also became a default blueprint.

Graphics: New TSSAA and Occlusion Culling

Because the hair shading techniques (similar to those in Paragon and PUBG) leaned heavily on temporal anti-aliasing, Diogo rolled out a new TSSAA implementation from Unity's Post Processing Stack v2. The result: much crisper output and less blurring in motion, at roughly the same cost as SMAA. The convar was reset to graphics.antialiasing and TSSAA became the default option.

He also scored a big win in dynamic occlusion culling — the system that hides players and NPCs behind terrain and walls — by eliminating an occluder pre-pass and cutting a good chunk of CPU overhead. Artists no longer needed to mark objects as occluders or build occluder meshes, since every surface now occludes; even vegetation could cull hidden entities. Mid-to-high-end machines could expect a nice FPS boost, while potato machines were likely bottlenecked elsewhere. The one trade-off was a single-frame delay in culling results, with prediction techniques planned to mitigate it — nearby entities were unaffected, as they're never culled.

Building 3.0 Preview

André began work on the next iteration of building mechanics, targeting completion before the end of the month. The goal list: update building IDs when structures split or join, emit building privilege from the building blocks themselves rather than a radius around the cupboard, require (or potentially enforce) one cupboard per building, introduce upkeep — buildings consuming resources before they start to decay — and explore half-height walls. The first step, a new back end with fast building-block and cupboard queries plus correct ID updates on split/join, was already done, with privilege checks and the upkeep front end up next.

Launch Site, AI and the Rest

Damian Lazarski reworked the Launch Site rocket factory building around a new purpose: a PvP-oriented area. Jumping puzzles were simplified, makeshift cover added to walkways, the interior made less linear, hanging walkways added for crossing between sides, some elevators replaced by staircases to discourage camping, and two new roof paths added front and back — likely accompanied by a rollback of the recently increased radiation, since the roof would be harder to defend. These changes were slated for the following week's patch rather than this one.

On AI, ptrefall said this was probably his last week on the troubled Navmesh Grid — close to complete but painfully hard to stabilize, and blocking NPC behaviour work — with real alternatives already being evaluated. Navmesh Link transitions improved and NPCs got harder to stick, and server owners gained a new convar, AiManager.pathfindingIterationsPerFrame, to balance pathfinding speed against cost. Elsewhere, Alex Webster confirmed the positively received admire animations would continue, player shoulder poses were relaxed when holding certain weapons, new Houdini-made FX sprites entered the pipeline, Alex R delivered new nailgun and garage door sounds, and another EAC SDK update landed.

All told, Devblog 185 was a quieter patch than 184 on the surface, but Workbench Experimentation quietly became a cornerstone of Rust progression, and the Building 3.0 groundwork laid here would reshape base-building within the month.