What's New in Rust's "Devblog 190" Update

Devblog 190 arrived in December 2017 and turned the Christmas event back on, which for most players was the headline. Underneath the tinsel, though, this was a serious follow-up patch to the previous week's upkeep overhaul: building tier hitpoints were normalised, deployables inside building privilege became decay-proof, and doors and frame inserts started costing upkeep to close an abuse route. Animal AI also got a two-week rework.

The Christmas event

Every so often you'll hear jingle bells. When you do, head outside and look for a gift - two spawn per player within roughly 40m of where they're standing, and you bash them open to claim the contents. Presents come in three sizes: small, medium and large, and if you stockpile enough small ones you can trade up to a medium.

Contents vary, mixing resources, weapons and candy, and some players get coal instead for being terrible human beings. Among the notable finds are Santa hats and reindeer antlers, both wearable and offering a decent amount of protection, plus a candy cane club - a formidable weapon that you can, genuinely, lick.

Two types of stocking were added as well. Hang one inside your base and it fills with loot each time the jingle bells ring. The larger stocking has a better chance at good items, and both last around 5-10 refills before giving out.

A craftable Christmas Tree went in as a default blueprint. It starts bare, and you find the decorations inside presents or trade for them - there are seven to collect, some rarer than others, and any you don't want can be recycled for materials.

On the Item Store side, a set of purely cosmetic festive items appeared: a Snowman (credited to blasterdevil on Reddit for the idea), a Festive Window Garland, a Christmas Door Wreath, and Christmas Lights.

Fireplace deployable

A stone fireplace deployable was added as a common blueprint drop. It reads as a Christmas item but was designed to stick around generally. At this point it's essentially a glorified campfire with 75% comfort and a larger range, with plans to eventually have it heat the whole house and any connected indoor building blocks. It also happens to be an ideal place to hang your stockings.

Building tier normalisation

Protection values across building tiers were normalised so the displayed hitpoints actually make sense:

• Armored: 2000 HP
• Metal: 1000 HP
• Stone: 500 HP

Metal is now cleanly twice as strong as stone, and armored twice as strong as metal. Because metal gained roughly a 60% strength increase, its base cost went up from 150 to 200 metal fragments.

The small holes in the various building tiers were also removed. That does two things: it stops raiders peering through your walls to identify the loot room, giving another reason to upgrade to metal, and it helps enormously with the incoming world culling changes by removing the need to render the inside of a base from outside and vice versa.

Upkeep and decay follow-ups

The tool cupboard gained an extra row of slots - about all that was possible without reworking the UI, with more changes explicitly promised. Players were also warned to stop storing gunpowder and explosives in cupboards, because the planned hotfix disallowing that would simply destroy anything that didn't belong there.

Deployables placed inside the building privilege radius are now protected from decay, which is how you keep high external walls from crumbling. There was no clean UI for this yet - you had to check the building privilege badge in the bottom right corner of the screen to know whether something was covered.

Doors, wall frame inserts and floor frame inserts now require upkeep too. Players had been leaning on them to build bases whose upkeep cost came in far below what the system intended. New decay.delay convars were also added, all defaulting to 0. And in a small mercy, all barricades can now be repaired with the hammer.

Animal AI overhaul

Two weeks of work on animal behaviour landed, aiming for predictability and consistency rather than raw difficulty.

Fleeing now runs on two factors. First, if an animal's health drops below a threshold there's a chance it flees - thresholds and chances differ per animal, and it doesn't matter what caused the damage. Second, each animal has an afraid range and a list of things it's afraid of; if one of those enters range and the animal is aware of it, it runs. Animals have limited cones of vision, so it's still possible to sneak up close from behind something that would otherwise flee from you. Some reaction time remains baked into the system, which can occasionally make animals look slow on the uptake.

Aggression works off an aggro range: entering it gives a chance of the animal going hostile based on its hostility and defensiveness values, and entering attack range always triggers aggro. De-aggro range sits a little beyond aggro range, and there's a time limit on how long an animal will chase you, which resets each time it lands a hit. Hungry animals will now walk up to plants and other food sources and eat.

Overall, animals commit to decisions instead of ping-ponging between them - while wandering they hold a course and only turn sharply when spooked or when water or terrain blocks the path. The new system is also lighter on server performance. Separately, animals can no longer walk through closed doors at monuments.

Other fixes

Furnace skins, broken by a mistake the previous week, actually work now, with the three highest community-voted skins approved. A long-standing vending machine exploit was also closed: you could previously pay with a broken item and leave the shop owner out of pocket. Any item with a condition value now needs at least 50% condition to be used in a vending machine, which matters a lot more now that weapons are traded frequently for research purposes.

On audio, open/close sounds on deployables now play only for the person doing the opening or closing - they had shipped as world sounds and the feedback made it clear that was the wrong call. Beyond that, a large batch of new deployable interaction and placement sounds went in, with the remainder a couple of days out.

Christmas got the attention, but the tier normalisation and upkeep tightening in this patch are what made the previous week's building overhaul actually work as designed.