What's New in Rust's "Devblog 33" Update

Devblog 33 was published in November 2014 and Facepunch kept it deliberately short - most of the week went into building system work they weren't ready to describe yet. What it does contain is significant, though: this is the devblog that introduces the tool cupboard, an item that would go on to define Rust base ownership for the next decade, along with the decision to stop making players hammer their buildings to upgrade them.

A change of mindset

Rust's design had always leaned away from overt game systems in favour of things being believable in-world. That approach had served the project well, but it was also limiting - and limiting players' enjoyment. The previous week's door change is the example given: you unlock a door, walk through, close it and lock it, and next time it simply opens because it remembers you. That's a compromise of the ideology in service of gameplay, and the team decided to make more compromises like it in the short term.

Tool cupboard

The tool cupboard is the direct product of that shift. You place one inside your building, your friends walk up and authorize on it, and from then on nobody except you and your authorized friends can build within a 30 metre radius of it. Being inside an authorized cupboard's radius also grants extra abilities, like demolishing and flipping or rotating building blocks.

Crucially it doesn't grant permanent ownership. Someone can break in, destroy or clear your cupboard and take over - at which point you can't build in your own base and have to break back in to steal the cupboard back. If a cupboard is placed within the radius of an existing one, the oldest cupboard takes priority.

Garry was open about the risks. The main worry was that the cupboard becomes something you absolutely must own, because otherwise someone could drop one on your doorstep, demolish a wall and walk in - though he also floated that this might simply be your own fault for not building one. It was headed to the dev server for testing the following week, with an explicit caveat that its existence now doesn't guarantee it stays, since something better might make it redundant.

Building system

The other major decision: hammering to upgrade is gone. Someone had pointed out to Garry that they spend most of their time in Rust hammering things, and however satisfying that is, it isn't what Rust was meant to be about. The resource cost should be the tax on upgrading, not five minutes of swinging a hammer.

Beyond that, a lot of work went into the build system without being described, on the grounds that talking it up before it's proven risks disappointing everyone if it gets thrown out and redone. It was expected on the dev branch the following week.

Legacy server bans

An update to Legacy was released that blocked a large number of server IPs - all of them either fake servers redirecting to another server, or servers artificially inflating their player counts. This followed the equivalent blacklisting work done on Experimental a couple of weeks earlier.

Art and work in progress

• Andre changed the grass.
• A pie menu was shown in an unfinished state.
• Howie concepted the key code lock, and Tom started modelling it.
• Goosey made a finishing model, with no plan yet for when or whether it gets implemented.
• Dan was settling on a base for his lighthouse.
• Scott finished the loot crates.
• Xavier started modelling meat.

The week closed on a positive note - the team finally felt they were getting to grips with the building system, and three more people were hired. Next week's plan was more of the same: finishing the building system, testing it and handing it off to artists, plus bug fixes, gameplay and stability work.