What's New in Rust's "Devblog 43" Update

Devblog 43 arrived in mid-January 2015, and in hindsight it was one of the most important patches of Rust's early experimental era. This was the week blueprints came back, radtowns appeared on the map, and loot barrels started dotting the island — the foundations of Rust's whole progression loop. It also shipped the game's first assault rifle and finally killed a server-emptying network bug.

Blueprints Return

Like legacy Rust, you now start with only a limited ability to craft items and need to find and study blueprints to unlock new ones. The team was still tweaking exactly which blueprints you start with versus which you have to find, and asked for feedback.

Neat technical detail: blueprint data was decoupled from map save data, so a server administrator could wipe the map but keep everyone's learned blueprints. Garry also wanted to eventually expose that data to server mods, so providers running multiple servers could share blueprint and player state between them.

Radtowns and Loot Barrels

Radtowns arrived — explicitly built from placeholder asset-store models while the team figured out what works before committing to custom art. They function much like legacy's: buildings, respawning loot, and radiation. The procedural system was still learning how to place them and blend the terrain around them so they look long-abandoned, so some weirdness was expected. The stated ambition: more interiors, and eventually every building enterable.

Alongside them, random loot barrels started spawning around the map — break them for items or blueprints. These were a self-confessed placeholder until more loot-spawning monuments existed, part of the radtown strategy of giving people a purpose to roam the island. "They won't be barrels forever," the devblog promised. (A decade later, they're still barrels.)

The airdrop was fixed too: it had been dropping an impotent package dead-centre of the map. Now the package is potent, lands somewhere random, and carries higher-value loot than any other loot spot — free of charge.

New Toys: Assault Rifle and Bear Trap

Paul, Tom, Goosey and Helk got the assault rifle into the game — an AK47 in all but name, sporting a shovel handle. The gun that would come to define Rust's meta started here.

The bear trap also shipped. It kills animals and players outright (eventually it would trap rather than kill), and corpses of anything that trips it stick around for quite a while, so you can revisit your traps and see what they caught — an obvious fit for base defense experiments.

Xavier also produced a bunch of new jackets; only one made it in for now because there was no UI to handle reskins yet, but plenty of variety was banked for the future.

Combat Balance

• Aiming down sights now reduces recoil, and crouching reduces it further; weapons have higher recoil in general.
• The bolt rifle now has no aimcone — the bullet goes exactly where you aim, plus gravity.

Big Fixes

The long-standing mass drop bug was finally solved. After about 50 players joined and a few hours passed, everyone on a server would periodically disconnect every few minutes. The culprit was Lidgren, the low-level network library: its recycled-packet list grew so large it stalled the network thread, which stopped sending data until clients gave up and disconnected. The team had long been unsure whether it was their own bug or a DDoS attack.

The missing lock weirdness was also fixed — locks sometimes rendered at the centre of the world instead of on their door, and saves could lose the door-lock attachment entirely, leaving a door that didn't know it had a lock and would open for anyone.

• Fixed player corpses not spewing their contents when destroyed.
• Fixed lootables becoming permanently occupied.
• Fixed the code lock not displaying its status in the world.
• Fixed unducking when opening the menu.
• Network position updates tweaked so clients get more up-to-date information.

Linux players had a rougher week: a bug in the current Unity 5 beta was crashing the game on startup, with a fix hoped for the following week's update.

What Came Next

The mood in the summary was buoyant — servers stable and performant even with 200 players, and the game "definitely fun to play again." The plan for the following week: bug fixes, balancing, replacing the old UI (including the much-hated stacking/splitting system), and adding damage, drowning, on-fire and bleeding overlays so you know when bad things are happening to your body.