What's New in Rust's "Devblog 44" Update

Devblog 44 arrived in late January 2015 with a lot happening at once. The headline was a substantial rework of procedural terrain generation, which meaningfully changed what a Rust map looked like, backed by a loot overhaul in radtowns that killed off the era of memorised empty boxes. It required a wipe, though blueprint progression survived.

Updated terrain generation

Terrain generation gained sand dunes with a new sand texture, small lakes, and steep cliffs. Underneath that, the overall terrain resolution was increased by a factor of four, allowing far more detail in both the heightmap and the ground texturing. The rewritten algorithm also exposed many more control parameters, which was expected to make fixing terrain layout problems much easier going forward.

Vegetation changed just as much. The server now spawns around four to five times as many trees per world unit by default, and a far higher percentage of the landmass became forest. Bush density was greatly increased, and bushes no longer vanish a few hundred metres out - they turn into billboards visible from any distance. Radtown placement was also improved so monuments sit into the surrounding terrain more smoothly and naturally.

Radtown loot

The old loot behaviour was predictable and disappointing: boxes always appeared in the same spots, and most of the time they were empty.

Now boxes disappear when looted and respawn at a random position. Loot tables were also made noticeably more generous for radtown boxes. Barrels spawn at random positions too, which means no more dummy barrels, and barrels come in different tiers - some carrying better loot, some worse.

Satellite dish

Vince finished the satellite dish monument, described simply as having got a lot more rusty.

Admin commands

Facepunch started a private chat room for server owners to give direct feedback, and the first round of changes came out of it. All admin commands now return a confirmation response, so adding a moderator actually tells you it worked. Three new commands were added:

• removemoderator (steamid)
• removeowner (steamid)
• unban (steamid)

More suggestions were invited, with the stated goal being that no one should feel forced to install server mods just to moderate their own server.

Join timeouts

Players on poor connections had been unable to join servers for a couple of weeks. Some improvement was made, but it appeared to be a universal problem with Lidgren, the networking library. It stayed under observation, with options to be evaluated once the UI work wrapped up.

UI progress

The entire week went into the new UI, which wasn't ready yet. The plan was to finish it early the following week, push it to the development branch for testing, and release to main by Thursday or Friday. Garry was enjoying the work, calling Unity's new UI system the best he'd ever used despite its issues.

Wrapping up

Patches were deliberately held back during the week because they required a wipe. The silver lining: the wipe didn't clear blueprint progression. The following week was set to bring the new UI, and with it an end to what Garry called "stack pickup hell".