What's New in Rust's "Devblog 193" Update

Devblog 193 landed in January 2018 with two new arrow types, a long-overdue rewrite of how key locks work, and a substantial pass on fog, weather and the night sky. The key lock change in particular was aimed squarely at the new player experience - key lock raiding was removed from the game entirely, and the person who placed a lock can now just open their own door.

New arrow types

Bone arrows and fire arrows both went in. Bone arrows travel slightly slower and hit for less damage, but they're dramatically easier to land - their bounding box is three times that of a regular arrow. They're a default blueprint, so everyone has them from the start.

Fire arrows were shipped with a frank admission that they were a rough first pass. The visual effects weren't good and the mechanic didn't work as designed: the intent was that you'd have to dip a drawn arrow into a lit campfire to ignite it, but technical problems meant they simply arrive magically lit. They're also somewhat easier to hit with, and deal 20 fire splash damage in a 2m radius around the impact point. Because that splash damages wooden doors and deployables, they can technically be used to raid. Unlike bone arrows, fire arrows have to be found in the world and researched. Changes were promised for the next patch: lighting them from another player's torch or a campfire, and better particle effects.

Key lock overhaul

Key locks got rethought in the context of Rust heading toward leaving early access. The old system regularly locked new players out of their own bases on respawn because they hadn't crafted spare keys, and the whole design had been convoluted for years without ever really working.

From this patch, whoever placed the lock can open and close the door without a key at all, while still being able to craft keys to hand out to friends. The number of key combinations was also raised from 100 to 1,000,000, which effectively ends key lock raiding. That practice had mostly victimised brand-new players, and it hammered servers too - people would spam-generate random keys, leaving hundreds of non-stacking blank key items rolling down hillsides. The stated goal was to make locking your own door a right rather than a privilege.

Fog, weather and night

Fog parameters got a serious cleanup. Weather parameters are now randomized every 18 hours, and when foggy weather rolls in the fog fades up to maximum density over 6 hours - at peak density the world genuinely looks foggy. During clear weather the atmospheric haze that had been washing out the sky was removed entirely, giving a real contrast between clear and foggy conditions instead of everything looking hazy all the time.

The fog algorithm itself was improved to remove unfair advantages from being in a different biome or at a different altitude than another player. Fog density is now guaranteed to be identical from A to B and from B to A. A pleasant side effect is that the cargo plane and helicopter are properly fogged again when you look up at them.

The night sky was fixed up too: stars are visible again, and the sky is darker at midnight to cut the contrast between ground and sky.

Trees and building damage visuals

Damian built a set of pine trees this week, similar in shape and size to the old ones but cheaper to render and denser. Diogo added several features to the foliage shader alongside them, including one that hides geometry planes when viewed from sharp angles, so foliage reads as volumetric rather than obviously polygonal.

Vincent revisited the old system where damage to building blocks was shown by darkening the block. It's coming back, but using blending masks to display damage gradually and progressively rather than as a flat darkening.

Performance and placement fixes

Checking for nearby cupboards was slow on the client, and because the decay timer notifications all depend on finding the dominating cupboard, that cost was being paid every single frame. Since the client code only drives the UI and the server verifies all the actual building tests anyway, the client now refreshes the cupboard once per second - a big win on modded servers where enormous bases are common.

Server-side, one optimisation alone removed 3ms per frame on the staging servers, which is substantial when a whole frame at 60 FPS is around 16ms. Elevator volumes were optimised too.

Junk piles were spawning in some very odd spots. They're now much better connected to the terrain beneath them and avoid spawning partially on roads, which had been producing strange terrain bulges. Road grass decor also aligns to the ground properly now.

Underwear option

Taylor put together an alternative skin set featuring underwear that removes all nudity from the game, including edge cases like genitals clipping through clothing. The request comes up regularly from content creators whose videos get flagged on YouTube or Twitch despite the pixelation filter, and from players who'd simply rather not see it. The art was finished and just needed adapting to the different skin types. No guarantees were made that it would stop future flagging, but it should help.

Animation and audio polish

Admire animations had shipped at the end of 2017 with several placeholders, and this patch upgraded a long list of them: pickaxe, bandage, bota bag, water bottle, big cleaver, crossbow, hammer, mace, salvaged axe, salvaged icepick, torch and longsword. Bugs where the bone knife and beancan grenade auto-admired on deploy were also fixed.

Most held items now have third-person deploy sounds, and some items that never had first-person deploy sounds got new ones. What remained were throw sounds for things like C4 and grenades, plus one-offs like bandaging and syringe use.

Viewmodels - mostly firearms - had their animations tweaked to feel snappier over the preceding weeks, with new smoke sprites, smoke coming out of the ejector port, and texture specularity adjustments to better distinguish plastic from metal parts.

Rounding things out: an EAC SDK update, final art for the tool crate (the purple box), a fixed Harbor mine entrance and sky dome on Hapis, missing sound references on a few SoundPlayers, and the Christmas light exploits that had been doing the rounds.