What's New in Rust's "Devblog 35" Update

Devblog 35 shipped in November 2014 and was, in Facepunch's own words, the building update. The new building system came off the dev branch and went live for everyone, and it arrived alongside something bigger that had been kept quiet the week before: structural integrity, meaning buildings could now fall down. The default map also got dramatically smaller, and the tree and terrain optimizations teased in Devblog 34 landed.

Structural integrity

The "something big" hinted at the previous week wasn't the new build system at all - it was making buildings collapse. Garry was quick to correct a misconception: this isn't a weight system, and doesn't take weight into account at all. If anything it's the opposite. The goal was to give players more freedom, specifically self-supporting floors without a pillar or wall under every single floor block. That only works with integrity in place, because otherwise you'd get sky bridges. With the system running, floors on floors become legal, and anything that goes too far simply falls down.

He was also upfront about the limits: not a structural engineer, not aiming for realism, and fully expecting players to build things that defy physics. The line drawn was between letting people build the legitimate structures they'd always built, and stopping stairs to the moon.

From a raiding perspective this was flagged as a total game changer with unknown consequences - something to be watched, tweaked, and counter-measured over time. Known bugs existed, unknown ones certainly did too. And no, falling blocks didn't kill players yet, though everyone agreed that would be cool.

The new building system, live

With the system rolled out to everyone, the devblog spelled out how it works so people would at least be angry at the right things.

Building Plan. You craft a plan, hold it, then hold right mouse and left click to pick which component you want to place. Blocks start out black, meaning low health - but you don't have to do anything, they gain health on their own. Looking at a block gives you a tooltip with its current health. If a placement is unstable, the tooltip also shows stability as a percentage and the health bar background turns red.

Hammer. Whacking a block speeds up its health regeneration. The boosted rate falls back to normal slowly, so a couple of hits is all that's needed. Holding right mouse while looking at a block opens a menu for upgrading, downgrading, rotating and demolishing. Upgrading to stone or metal raises the block's maximum health, which turns it dark again until it regenerates. Since some melee weapons are poor against stone and metal, upgrading is worthwhile - especially on exposed foundations.

Tool Cupboard. Some hammer options are locked unless you're inside the radius of an authorised tool cupboard. The cupboard restricts building tool use within its radius to authorised players only. It's craftable from the menu, and once placed you should authorise yourself with it. The bottom left of the screen tells you whether you're currently within its influence.

The work-in-progress caveats were long: all models were basic geometry with placeholder textures, real art still to come, some pie menu descriptions and icons missing, the black overlay flickering, and the placement guide block jumping around.

Map size cut to 16km2

Andre added a server variable for map size, set with the command line argument -server.worldsize followed by a number. The default became 4000, which put the default map at 16km2 - down from 64km2. It was acknowledged as a gameplay change, but one expected to help performance considerably.

Window bars and other additions

You can now fit bars to windows. You can look, loot, throw and shoot through them, but you can't walk through them.

Goosey kept working on the chickens, and Andre got them into the game and made them dance. Not finished, but present.

Optimizations

Both performance experiments from the previous week came through. Andre did the tree work, so trees should be much faster, and Diogo tweaked the terrain shader, which should be significantly faster - especially at lower quality settings. Analytics were now running to measure whether the benefit was real, with a graph promised for the following week.

Operation Unsuck

Facepunch also started rethinking map generation. The plan was to build a non-procedural map that's actually playable, then generate the procedural maps from that - the logic being it's easier to design for a fixed map, and the programmers writing the procedural systems would then have a clear reference for what the output should look like. No timescale was given. Howie and Paul produced environment paint-overs showing possible directions.

Wrapping up

Garry admitted he could have kept the building system on the dev branch for another couple of weeks, but forced the release because a couple of weeks tends to become a couple of months. Roadmap targets weren't hit and one extra feature got pushed. The following week was set aside for damage control - bug and gameplay fixes, polish, performance - plus the ongoing weapon refactoring, which turns weapons into actual entities rather than just items. That refactor was being done on its own branch, periodically, with the honest note that when it lands you probably won't see an immediate benefit; it just makes weapons far easier for the coders to improve later.

Comments were also removed from the devblogs again, with the reasoning that the ratio of legitimate commenters to trolls had gone bad and a studio making games doesn't have time to moderate it. Players were pointed at their own preferred discussion venues instead - and at rustafied.com, whose near-daily coverage got a warm shout-out in this devblog.