What's New in Rust's "Devblog 194" Update

Devblog 194 arrived in January 2018, a month out from Rust leaving Early Access, and it shows: a lot of this patch is housekeeping done properly. The new makeshift Hazmat Suit went live and became craftable, Scientist NPCs started rolling onto official servers, cheat reporting was rebuilt around accounts, and Andre spent most of the week on memory and workshop skin optimisations. Helicopter crash sites also got a lot harder to fence off.

The new Hazmat Suit

Taylor's makeshift Hazmat Suit replaced the existing item visuals, largely so players can be told apart from scientists once the NPCs are properly in the game. Legitimate scientist suits will still be findable, so roleplaying as an NPC remains possible. The bigger change is that the suit is now researchable and craftable at a Tier 2 Workbench rather than being scavenge-only. A future goal was floated of randomising each suit slightly based on its item ID, so a group wearing them wouldn't look identical.

Helicopter crash sites

Securing a crash site was too easy - large groups could simply wall it in or ring it with turrets. Two changes address that. The crash site now has a building blocked radius around it, small but enough that you can't intersect the gibs with High External Walls. And Auto Turrets now lose health when picked up, which had been an oversight enabling the turret-ring strategy for free. Deploying turrets around a crash site now carries a repair bill afterwards, and that isn't cheap.

Combat and building tweaks

The repair delay after an object is attacked went up from 8 seconds to 30. Defenders had been erasing raid damage by hammering the damaged parts between rocket shots, so the longer window gives an attacker time to reload and fire again - a deliberate push to make online raiding more viable.

Explosive ammo, broken by the previous week's changes, was fixed. You no longer have to aim slightly away from a target to apply the explosive splash, so you can shoot doors directly for maximum damage, and the damage value is calculated properly again after a bug that was doubling damage against objects.

Arrows got some attention too. The highlight on dropped arrows now shows the arrow head, and fire arrow fireballs slow movement - a genuine area denial tool. On quality of life, you can now rotate Workbenches with R while deploying them to fit tight spaces, and rotate Tool Cupboards after placement with the hammer as long as they aren't locked, so a badly oriented cupboard can be flipped around and locked properly. And, at long last, the Small Furnace emits heat.

Cheat reporting and the Staging branch

Cheat reporting changed shape. Previously you filled in a name, email and captcha, with a half-working attempt to remember your details on Facepunch's end. Now you sign in to report cheats or leave feedback, which is a small friction cost that buys real benefits - most notably, you get emailed when the hacker you reported is banned.

Because plenty of players simply didn't know how to report, a report button was added to the death screen. That inevitably adds noise, but it also means hackers get reported and investigated far more often. A related confusion was fixed as well: hackers could use streamer mode to hide their name, and the report page then showed their real Steam name, leaving reporters unsure they had the right person.

With the Early Access exit approaching, update distribution was reorganised, including adding a Staging version of Rust to Steam that appears in your library automatically if you own the game.

Scientist NPCs

Scientists ran on Staging all week, causing chaos in Military Tunnels, and were eased onto official servers with this patch. Server owners can enable them by setting squadmanager.squad_disable to false in their start-up scripts, with behaviour improvements continuing the following week.

Admin tools

Admins can now pull the combat log of any player on their server with combatlog <player> from the client console, using full or partial player name, Steam ID or IP address. The combat log also stopped taking a count parameter, using the combatlogsize value instead.

Server owners also get a warning on joining their own server if any anti-hack mechanisms are disabled. That came directly out of noclipping exploit reports which, on investigation, invariably turned out to be servers running with noclip protection switched off.

Memory and skin optimizations

A new optimisation automatically identifies and strips empty game objects from prefabs. These accumulate because client-only components are stripped from server builds and vice versa, sometimes leaving a game object with nothing left in it - especially common when stripping mesh renderers, since in Unity every LOD typically has its own game object. The savings scale with entity count and were demonstrated on a server holding 154k entities. Client memory benefits too, but servers see the bigger effect.

Most of Andre's week went into item skins. Downloading large numbers of skins performs much better now, and skinned item icons load asynchronously so the game no longer stalls when you open a container full of skinned items - a big deal for anyone without an SSD. The icons are also compressed in memory, cutting RAM and VRAM usage significantly. Getting there involved fighting Unity's limited support for asynchronous asset loading.

Error fixes

Rust has had remote error reporting since the Experimental days, quietly forwarding unhandled exceptions. After months of heavy content pushes, plenty had slipped through simply because they never occurred on Facepunch machines. Andre worked through a large batch of them, which surfaced some minor bugs and the occasional one-line performance win along the way. The changelist reflects it: fixes for community UI, weapon holster, HTTP image, network stream, skin loading, planner, bloom and voice recorder exceptions, plus assorted Unity ones.

Art and audio

The underwear censorship option was reworked from an alternative player model skin into an attire item. That's a small visual improvement since it's a real mesh rather than a texture, but the bigger reason is that it opens the door to skin creators. The art was finished, awaiting code support. To be clear, it remains a censorship option rather than a craftable in-game item.

Anisotropic filtering was found not to be benefiting some textures at all because their maximum filtering settings weren't configured correctly. Damian went through most of the tiling textures by hand, so textures generally look considerably sharper at distance with AF enabled.

Admire animation upgrades continued across the water jug, salvaged hammer, water bucket, wooden spear, stone spear, flamethrower, satchel charge, C4 and bow. On the audio side, third-person parity moved onto small one-offs: subtle movement when someone aims down sights, audible grenade pin pulls and fuse ignitions, arm movement when winding up a melee swing or throw, and bandaging sounds for yourself and others. Fresh source material was recorded for the flashlight and binoculars, with flare sounds started.

Other notable fixes

• An out-of-bounds exploit near the Military Tunnels entrance, and another allowing building in unintended areas inside the tunnels.
• Chairs could be placed inside trees and clutter; shelves could be placed on roads; the dropbox could be placed underwater. All fixed.
• The Jack O Lantern can be picked up, only accepts wood, and can no longer be placed through walls.
• Vending machines are now destroyed when the construction beneath them no longer exists.
• The Small Refinery wasn't generating charcoal.
• Junk pile respawn time went from 20 to 30 minutes, garbage collection was eliminated from the voice recorder, and a terrain hole at the Hapis launch site was patched.

Elsewhere, Vincent showed early work on the Water Well mini monuments - built to look player-made, sitting inside decayed and overgrown fake player bases and repurposed landmarks, mixing player deployables with existing landmark art.