What's New in Rust's "Devblog 29" Update

Devblog 29 landed on October 10th, 2014, just a week after the experimental version of Rust went live as the main game - and it showed. This was a heads-down stabilization patch: the team spent the week crushing bugs, getting all the craftable guns working, and quietly laying groundwork for bigger systems like building upgrades, blueprints and the Steam Workshop.

Bug and Exploit Fixes

The headline act was an old-school changelist of fixes for the most annoying issues players had reported since the switchover:

• Fixed locks disappearing when upgrading doors
• Fixed climbing up buildings by tapping jump
• Fixed looting and deploying through doors
• Fixed strafing right making no footstep sounds, plus fixes for sounds not playing at all or playing too loud
• Fixed melee attacks versus sleeping players, and players in a burlap shirt being unhittable
• Fixed water levels not working properly - drowning and getting wet behave again
• Fixed crafting continuing after death

One elusive wakeup bug survived the week - the team thought it was fixed, but reports said otherwise.

Weapons and Tools

Several of the weapons and tools the art team had been building over previous weeks were implemented in-game, including a spear - not yet throwable, though the stated plan was to make "pretty much everything" throwable eventually. More importantly, all craftable guns now work, with a few small remaining issues the team asked players to keep reporting and voting up. Scott also continued reworking the Stone Hatchet.

Streamer-Friendly Chat

Streamers asked for a way to hide chat, and got one: press F1 and type vis.chat 0. Garry also acknowledged that the censornudity convar only partially worked, promising a fuller solution the following week so YouTubers and Twitch streamers could broadcast with no risk of on-screen anatomy.

Building Transitions and Editor Tools

The team explored how building upgrades should look, prototyping per-component animations so a half-upgraded structure would visibly show bricks or wooden panels appearing step by step - reversible so demolishing a building would give damage feedback too. After testing, Garry scrapped the idea rather than commission 72 transition animations that would complicate every future building component, opting to find a smarter programmatic solution instead. He also shared a cautionary tale about spending a day building Unity editor tools that risk becoming redundant the moment a system changes - advice: put the least effort possible into internal tools.

Workshop Ambitions

An early look at what would become one of Rust's defining features: Steam Workshop support. The stated ideal was the TF2 model - community members make items and clothes, and if accepted into the game they earn royalties. The open questions were all practical: how uploads would work, whether to build a website or extend the Unity SDK, and how to handle Rust being built on the then-closed-beta Unity 5. Meanwhile, Meg concepted underwater remnants, Howie worked on more monuments and building-stage visuals, and Diogo experimented with parallax textures on the terrain shader.

Looking Ahead

The summary was refreshingly honest: another week of bug fixes, performance work and light balancing was expected before pushing new features. The biggest missing system was blueprints - at the time you could craft everything from the moment you spawned, which was never the intent - and the team hoped the following week's under-the-hood work would move that forward significantly.