What's New in Rust's "Devblog 34" Update

Devblog 34 landed in November 2014, back when Rust's "experimental" branch was still being rebuilt from the ground up week by week. The headline was the new building system, which was sitting on the dev branch in a rough, placeholder-art state while Facepunch argued publicly about why the old system needed replacing at all. Around it came a batch of quality-of-life work - a smarter pie menu, hammer demolition, block health bars - plus a rare, blunt admission that the game's performance was in a bad place.

The new build system, and why it changed

Plenty of players had told Facepunch they loved the old build system and didn't want it touched. Garry's response was that the complaints had all arrived after the fact, and he laid out four reasons for the rewrite:

• Rust isn't a hammering simulator. The old system involved a huge amount of hammering. The cost of building something should be resources, not resources plus time spent whacking.
• Get out of your house. Under the new system building is more expensive, which pushes players outside to gather. Anything that encourages exploration was seen as a win.
• The art cost was too high. Every component needed seven different stage models - wood, wood2, stone, stone2 and so on - which is an enormous amount of art for things like stairs that don't need it.
• It was going to look bad anyway. Even after all that art, there'd still only have been six wall types, and walls would have looked identical inside and out.

At the time of writing the system was in testing on the dev branch only. Menu items were broken, some blocks didn't work, and the stairs were still just slopes. The models and textures shown off were explicitly placeholders. Garry wanted it more capable before forcing it on everyone, and invited people to play the dev branch and report back.

Hammer work: demolition, rotation and health

Three connected changes made the hammer the centre of the building loop. Demolition arrived as a right-click option: the block's health slowly drains until it falls apart, and you can speed that along by bashing it with the hammer a few times.

Rotation came in because walls are sided, and placing one backwards would otherwise mean demolishing and rebuilding it. The degree and direction depends on the block - walls rotate 180 degrees to face the other way, foundations rotate around 90 degrees so you can line the floor texture up (though the plan was for that texture to eventually use world coordinates so it wouldn't matter).

Health bars and the dark overlay gave you two readouts on the same thing. Building blocks show low health by turning darker - described at the time as "pr0grammer art" - so you can spot damage on your base from a distance. Up close you get an actual health bar. Garry framed the bar as a compromise he hoped to remove one day, once players could accurately read a block's health just by looking at it. For now it did two jobs: showing exactly how much damage you were doing, and communicating that blocks repair themselves over time rather than needing to be hammered.

Menus and interaction

The pie menu got disabled items and selected items this week. It also kept its slightly unusual rule: the right-click menus on the building plan and the hammer both require a left mouse click to confirm a choice, rather than releasing on the option like in Battlefield. The reasoning was that you often want to open the menu just to check what's selected or what's available, and requiring a left click makes the selection deliberate. Alternatives like neutral centre or outer zones were tried and found more error-prone, so audio and visual cues were added to tell you whether the menu just closed or you actually picked something.

A legacy feature also came back: hold USE for menu. Tap use to run an item's default option, hold it to open the full menu.

Helk returned this week and contributed two things: knocking on doors, and mousewheel slot switching.

Survival and PVP changes

Starvation now actually kills you. Before this, nobody had died of hunger at all, which is an awkward thing to admit about a survival game.

PVP looting was disabled. You had been able to walk up to another player, select loot, and take their gear - including mid-firefight, pulling the gun out of their hands. Facepunch considered the feature fun and worth keeping, but far too strong without a delay or initialisation time to warn the victim, so it was pulled to be reworked later.

Animals move faster thanks to Andre, making them harder to catch and harder to escape. The AI behaviour itself was still flagged as needing a lot more work.

Dropped items now vanish after 60 seconds, purely as a server performance measure. The stated intention was to rate items so a dropped rock disappears quickly while a dropped gun lingers - not possible yet because they all shared the same prefab.

Two smaller items: nametags returned after being removed due to a Unity 5 beta and UnityUI bug that had since been fixed, and woodpiles were removed on the grounds that Rust already had plenty of wood sources.

Local chat

Text chat became local, so an incoming message is probably actually aimed at you rather than being an argument between strangers about who should be on the server. Facepunch acknowledged this would annoy some people, so server owners can restore the old behaviour with server.globalchat 1.

Performance: the honest version

Garry didn't soften this one - performance was a joke, the game used too much memory, and it ran badly most of the time. He also ruled out the popular scapegoat: it wasn't the grass. Three avenues were being explored:

• Terrain rendering. The new terrain shaders looked better than the default but ran much slower. Diogo was adding shader LODs to ease that, though a compromise looked likely.
• Trees. Moving trees into Unity's terrain system would bring batching and automatic LOD handling, but with a catch - updating one tree means updating all of them. With 30,000 trees that was measuring around 300ms, a noticeable hitch, but possibly worth it.
• Physics. Some trees had around 10 colliders each and some rocks used 500-polygon collision meshes, across 30,000 trees and 10,000 rocks. Nobody yet knew how much of the memory and CPU cost that accounted for.

Art and what came next

Goosey modelled and animated the chicken, including an alternate skin, and Paul produced a set of headlight concepts for players to vote on. Garry closed by calling it a busy week with good progress toward a build system that works, and pointed at the following week: a big code refactor so the other programmers could actually read the building code, more performance work, sleeping bag improvements, and hopefully a major building system addition.