What's New in Rust's "Devblog 47" Update

Devblog 47 landed in mid-February 2015 under the banner "Roads and Reloads". It was described as a slow week, and much of it was infrastructure work players would never see - but the two visible additions were significant, and the gathering rework quietly changed how everyone farmed. It also came with a warning: the accompanying patch would wipe saves and blueprints.

Roads

Andre got roads into the game. They connect landmarks and rad towns, and you can walk on them. Everything was still at the programmer-art stage, but since roads have to work across millions of procedurally generated maps, the team wanted them in early to surface problems as soon as possible.

Reloading

The reload work started ambitiously. Holding R brought up a reload menu showing your weapon and every ammo type that fits it - left click an ammo pile to add one round of that type, right click to fill the gun with it. The idea was granular control, and eventually alternating ammo types within a single clip.

Then, as Garry put it, they realised nobody would ever actually want to do any of that, and switched to normal reloading. Goosey had already produced reload animations for everything, so the plain version came out looking good anyway.

Item condition and gathering

Helk reworked both how items lose condition while gathering and how gathering itself works. Each weapon now explicitly defines its behaviour on hitting an object: how much resource you get, how much is wasted, and how much damage the tool takes. Balance values weren't final, but the structure gives far more flexibility to tune each tool individually.

The bigger player-facing change: instead of every hit giving you a portion of each resource type inside an object, gathering now dispenses only one type at a time. Harvesting takes just as long overall, but you get less resource spam and more of each individual type per hit.

Sprint and melee

Following the previous week's sprint restrictions, melee got smoothed out. Rather than having to release sprint for a split second before swinging, trying to use a melee weapon now automatically stops your sprint for a very brief moment. Less hectic and more user friendly.

Balance changes

• Canned food now leaves an empty can when eaten
• Empty cans can be smelted into metal fragments - in campfires
• The stone spear now costs a wooden spear plus some stone
• The sleeping bag now costs 30 cloth instead of 50
• The lantern consumes fuel

The item system retreat

A cautionary tale about ambition. The plan had been to host all of Rust's items on a website so anyone - including non-programmers without Unity - could edit them, with artists uploading models and materials that the game would download and just work. Eventually it would open to the public, with players creating items and voting on which ones got added.

Garry named the mistake: premature generalization, building a system before knowing what it was or how it would be used. Items are now defined in Unity instead. Adding a new item means copying an existing one and changing a few text entries. Under the old system you'd go to the site, create the item, fill everything out, go back to the game, download the definition, and repeat the whole loop if anything was wrong. As he summarised it for players: two days spent making the team more agile.

Compile issues

Several days were lost to compile problems that made the dev servers largely inaccessible. The cause turned out to be a hard limit: the resources file in a Unity build tops out at 2GB, and Rust had gone past it, producing a cryptic error. The hacky fix was to create one scene referencing all the textures and another referencing all the sounds, which pulled those assets out of resources.asset and shrank it considerably.

Anti-cheat and analytics

Shortly after the Monday patch, EAC enabled game file hashing, which shut down the resource-editing cheat discussed the previous week. Anyone who had used it needed to verify their game files to re-download clean versions before playing again. One awkward side effect: Windows 10 was being classed as a cheat at the time, with EAC working on it.

Google Analytics was also swapped out for Unity Analytics - nothing elaborate yet, just general metrics like player counts, memory usage and average framerate.

Wipes and testing

The update wasn't released on the Friday, following the new schedule, and was due early the next week. The bad news attached was a total wipe of saves and blueprints. Server owners didn't need to act since it happens automatically, but Facepunch felt a responsibility to warn players first. Wipes were something they wanted to avoid, and one reason they were considering lengthening sprints to two or three weeks between updates.

They also pointed players at a dedicated development branch thread on their forums for reporting dev-branch bugs before they reach live - explicitly not a place for suggestions, ideas, or live-branch bugs that haven't been verified on dev. And, as ever, the standing reminder that the balance isn't perfect and is an ongoing process.