What's New in Rust's "Devblog 42" Update

Devblog 42 landed in early January 2015, and it was one of those weeks where the unglamorous work mattered most. The headline was a massive server performance fix that stopped servers from grinding themselves into a wipe within a day, but the patch also delivered the first real weapon recoil system, a reworked stability system, and animals that suddenly got a lot harder to catch.

Server Performance: From 5fps to 60fps

Garry fixed a couple of huge issues with server performance this week. Previously, once a server hit around 50,000 entities its framerate would drop to around 5fps, things would get steadily worse, and a wipe became inevitable — usually within the space of a day. After the fix, official servers were running at a solid 60fps with 200 players and over 150,000 entities. For context, Garry's Mod topped out at 128 players and 2,048 entities.

The biggest underlying culprit was how physics triggers were being handled — a long-standing problem — and the gains were expected to translate into some client-side framerate improvements too.

On the networking side, congestion detection was added: when your connection is overwhelmed, the game stops trying to send packets, so you freeze briefly until it recovers. The upside is that servers can detect a healthy connection and push more data at it, which basically removed the slow "receiving entities" counter when joining a server on a decent connection.

Invisible Walls, Mostly Fixed

The infamous invisible walls bug got a major fix. Entities weren't always being transmitted reliably, meaning the client sometimes never received them and was oblivious to their existence — most visibly as missing walls in bases, though it applied to all entities. The problem became much rarer after the fix, though some reports of it lingered, and the team asked players to keep flagging cases.

Combat: Recoil and Melee That Actually Hits

Helk essentially created the weapon recoil system this week — weapons now jump up and around when firing, like a proper first-person shooter.

Melee accuracy also got sorted. A fix from earlier had regressed during the big weapon refactor: melee attacks were tracing a thin ray (like a bullet) instead of a sphere, so you had to be pixel-perfect to connect. With the sphere trace restored, hitting things with melee weapons became far easier.

Relatedly, other players hadn't been holding weapons properly or playing attack animations for a couple of weeks — another loose end from the weapon refactor that got plumbed back in.

Building: Stability Rework and Triangle Pieces

The stability system had been broken for a while — sky bridges were possible. It was reworked this week for better performance and reliability, so unsupported structures fall down like they should. The underlying logic changed, meaning some builds became more stable and some less, with the team asking for patience while edge cases shook out in the wild.

• Triangle foundations can now have supports placed on them.
• Triangle floors can be joined to each other, so you no longer need walls to complete a roundhouse roof.

Meanwhile, Vince made steady progress on stone walls — art in the pipeline for a future patch.

Smarter, Faster Animals

Animals really don't want to be eaten anymore. They now move closer to their real-life speeds, weave back and forth to avoid being hit, and try to flee out of view — but they can't maintain top speed for long, so a dedicated hunter can run down exhausted prey. Animals also develop a pecking order: high-ranked animals get right of way while hunting and feeding, and equally ranked animals duel to establish dominance.

The team acknowledged animals might feel too fast, but argued killing a deer should feel like a genuine achievement, with the knock-on problems addressed via loot spawns and crafting recipe tweaks later.

Graphics Quirks and New Fog

Andre fixed the "everything is black" bug on OSX and Linux, caused by the move to Unity beta 18, by disabling reflection probes on those platforms — with the side effect of full-white water, plus some black water flickering for certain users. A proper fix was expected in a later Unity beta.

He also started on a new fog system. The old fog was a single colour that thickened with distance; the new fog is per-pixel and environment-aware, shifting colour based on where the sun sits relative to what you're looking at, with horizon clouds to soften the join between land and sky.

Anti-Cheat

Some EAC timeout kicks had been showing up, tied to an increasing number of SteamAPI errors on EAC's side, with work planned the following week to stop that being a problem. The system was still doing its job, though — another ban wave went out the day of the devblog.

What Came Next

With server performance finally sorted, the team could stop firefighting and move on to gameplay. Garry started work on the lootspawn/blueprint system, hoping to ship it the following week — with fair warning that nobody would have blueprints at first and a flurry of follow-up patches was likely. A pivotal system in Rust's history was about to arrive.