What's New in Rust's "Devblog 46" Update

Devblog 46 arrived in early February 2015 focused squarely on raiding, and it changed a lot at once. Automatic block health regeneration went away, a new cheap building tier came in, weapon durability returned from legacy, and two raiding tools - the pump shotgun and the timed explosive charge - joined the game. Movement got tightened up too, and Rust's world finally got proper ambient sound.

A new release schedule

Facepunch stopped releasing updates on Fridays, calling the practice stupid, and moved updates to Mondays while keeping the devblog on Fridays. The intent was to have everything ready on the dev branch by Friday so early adopters can test across the weekend, leaving last bugs to be fixed before Monday's live push and giving the whole week for follow-up fixes. Part of the point was to encourage more players onto the dev branch so changes get tested properly first.

Raiding balance

Automatic health regeneration on building blocks was removed. Freshly placed blocks now start at full health, and upgrading a block also gives it full health. Repairs happen with the hammer and cost a fraction of the block's resources.

That change is what makes the new twigs tier make sense. Twigs is a weak, cheap building tier meant for quickly laying out a base before upgrading it. Because the blocks are so fragile, a mistake takes seconds to smash apart.

Durability also came back from legacy. The idea is to punish using a weapon wrongly - swinging a hatchet at a stone wall wears it out far faster than using a pickaxe would. That makes life considerably harder for hatchet raiders, especially against upgraded walls. Facepunch were upfront that the numbers wouldn't be right on day one and would be nudged over time.

Pump shotgun and timed explosives

Tom, Goosey, Alex and Helk brought the pump shotgun into the game, described as feeling meaty in a way reminiscent of the original Quake.

To make raiding viable against higher building tiers, explosives returned, including a timed explosive charge. The exact crafting ingredients for both the explosives and the charge still needed balancing, but the fundamentals were in. One open question at the time: whether you'd keep being able to throw it, or have to walk up and place it.

Movement changes

You can no longer sprint sideways, diagonally or backwards, and you can't use weapons while sprinting. This brought movement back in line with Legacy, with the stated benefit of making melee fights more feasible and more interesting.

Ambient sound

Alex's ambient sound system went in, factoring in the biome you're in and the time of day. Each biome has a base ambience layer plus a collection of one-off sounds triggered at random to break up the loop. The effect, as described, was that the map stopped feeling like an empty game world and started feeling full.

Gibbing

Late in the week the foundations of gibbing were worked out - something sorely missing and only getting harder to retrofit the longer it was left. Vince made test gib models and Garry hooked up the system. The models were purely proof-of-concept, but with the system working, the team could start producing real gibs for existing models.

Other changes and fixes

• Items are no longer destroyed when your inventory is full - they're dropped into the world, with a drop notice added
• A full furnace or campfire now spits items out instead of losing them
• Fixed cancelling a queued craft not returning resources; crafting can no longer take from or give to wearables slots
• Chat gained scrollable history, clickable avatars linking to Steam profiles, a fix for the chat box reopening on submit, and a fix for the too-many-vertices canvas error during heavy chat
• Fixed walking and running stopping when you close the inventory menu
• Added F2 options to hide HUD, chat and branding, a nudity censor toggle, and proper saving of F2 menu settings
• Added a roof block
• Added Voice UI, unique loot panels, and Building Privilege UI notices
• You can now loot clothing from player corpses
• Added a low health and bleeding overlay; fixed damage info reaching the player late
• Added a radius to some projectiles such as arrows and shotgun pellets, making them easier to hit with
• Fixed the supply drop parachute not closing, and the scrollwheel not skipping items that can't be held

Wrapping up

The week turned out more ambitious than planned - Garry had hoped mainly to fix outstanding new-UI issues and instead shipped a pile of gameplay and under-the-hood work. He acknowledged plainly that some of it wasn't balanced, and that balance is normalised through play and iteration rather than got right on release. Next up: transitioning the network system to Raknet, which he expected would fix a batch of network problems and introduce some fresh ones.