What's New in Rust's "Devblog 191" Update

Devblog 191 was Facepunch's last patch of 2017, landing just before Christmas. It's a grab bag in the best way: weapon admire animations finally shipped after a month of animation work, nights got genuinely dark as an anti-gamma-hack measure, and two light sources - a handheld flashlight and throwable flares - arrived to go with them. The upkeep system introduced two weeks earlier also got its first round of softening and, more importantly, a UI that tells you what's actually going on.

Weapon admire animations

After roughly a month of work from Alex Webster, a nearly complete set of weapon admire animations went live. Press the examine key to look over your weapon and its skin - the default binding is N, though some players had to bind it manually in the options menu.

Upkeep changes and notifications

Looking at real bases showed upkeep costs running slightly higher than predicted, so the brackets were loosened. Tier 2 and Tier 3 upkeep thresholds were each raised by 50 blocks, meaning you can add another 50 blocks before your base bumps into the next tax rate - useful breathing room for modestly sized builds.

Decay timers were extended too. Stone now takes a total of 5 hours to decay a layer when upkeep isn't met, up from 3, and sheet metal takes 8 hours, up from 5.

The bigger improvement was information. A status indicator now tells you at a glance how your building is doing: a bright red indicator if it's decaying, a green one with a rough estimate of remaining time if it isn't, so you don't need to keep walking back to the cupboard. These indicators only appear if you're authorised on that tool cupboard, so enemies can't read your upkeep state. Game tips also pop up reminding you to craft a tool cupboard and to actually put resources in it, and they stop appearing once you've opened a cupboard 10 times. Hovering the "Cost per 24 hours" text gives a tooltip with your upkeep rate and total placed block count.

Andre also fixed upkeep timer serialization. Because blocks can't pay fractions of a resource, they overpay slightly each period, and their next payment window is extended by the overpaid amount to keep it fair. That extension is now saved across server restarts - a tiny amount in practice, but it matters on servers that restart frequently.

Flashlight and flares

The two-year-old flashlight model and animations sitting unused in the project were handed to Minh Le for an update, and the result shipped as a handheld flashlight item. It's a common drop, cheap to craft, throws out a significant amount of light, and can be used to bash heads in.

Flares came back as well, one of the first items implemented back in Legacy. Found in basic crates and caves, they're thrown like a grenade and burn with reddish illumination for two minutes.

The crossbow can now take a Flashlight Mod after some model hierarchy fixes. It'll also accept a laser sight, though it isn't recommended - the laser doesn't point anywhere near where the arrow actually goes, a fix deferred to the following year.

Darker nights

Night-time changes rolled out with a balance motive rather than an aesthetic one. Nights had historically been unbalanced by players abusing gamma hacks, so moonless nights became pitch black while moonlit nights actually got a little brighter - the brighter moonlit nights being the deterrent against cranking gamma. The intent was to make players prepare for night while guaranteeing everyone is playing under the same conditions. This was explicitly a first pass with more tweaking promised. Related, a fog start distance was added in dark environments to close another gamma and navigation exploit, and a bug where fog was sometimes still rendered inside caves - letting people navigate them without a light source - was fixed.

Occlusion culling goes wide

Occlusion culling had only been tested on staging in short bursts, which wasn't enough for a feature that runs largely on the GPU and needs results across many operating systems, hardware setups and driver configurations. It's also the kind of system where failures become exploits, so this patch pushed it out enabled by default for wide-scale testing. The convar was left unsaved: culling.env 1 on by default, culling.env 0 to disable it if you hit problems, with a client-update rollback ready if things went badly.

Bonus Door Garland

The last piece of Christmas content missed the previous week's deadline and arrived here: a Door Garland, craftable if you own the Window Garland Steam item from the week before. That was a first for Facepunch - a single Steam item unlocking multiple in-game items - and shipped with fingers crossed rather than certainty. It sat alongside the rest of that season's festive cosmetics like the Santa Bandana, Snowboy and Christmas Furnace.

Fixes and cleanup

• Beam effects are visible again - the old beam code was leaking memory and had been commented out. Most noticeable on flashlights and ceiling lights, plus a line drawn from emission to end point for the laser sight.
• High external stone gates had been decaying far more slowly than other walls and gates. Fixed.
• Downed players no longer keep their collider enabled, so they can't block doorways. You can trample straight over them instead of helping them up or finishing them off.
• Roof conditional models, which had degraded as the building system evolved, had the majority of their problems fixed - not perfect, but the big issues are gone. Re-adding wall corner pieces and other conditional models was pencilled in for 2018.
• A sweep through the most common client and server errors introduced by recent content pushes, which had been spamming logs particularly on modded servers.
• The spinner wheel sound playback bug was fixed.

Art, AI and audio

The final loot box - the Building Supply crate, containing building-material-specific loot - was finished, and progress continued on Paul's chainsaw concept over the break.

AI work this week was mostly tweaks to animal behaviour and navmesh obstacles like foundations. High walls got thicker obstacles so animals can't attack through them, and standing on ore nodes is no longer a safe haven from animal attacks. Most of the AI workload went into Scientist NPCs, which weren't ready yet.

The deployable sound project is essentially complete, with only stragglers left like a squeak when a ceiling light swings and a sound for grabbing a searchlight to aim it. Attention shifted to parity between what you hear in first person and what other players hear looking at you, starting with melee weapon swings. New sprites and effects were also made for stepping in water, and the vehicle water particle effect was redone because the earlier version looked far too thin from certain angles.

That was it for Facepunch's 2017. If you want to browse the Christmas cosmetics from this era, they're catalogued on our skin tracker.