What's New in Rust's "Devblog 48" Update

Devblog 48 arrived in February 2015 after a very short sprint - about two days since the previous update, thanks to another schedule change. Despite that, it carried a big one: Rust's networking moved off Lidgren and onto Raknet. Alongside it came the finished metal building tier, animal hide clothing, a metabolism that actually works again, and bullets that behave like bullets.

Thursday devblogs and updates

Patches moved again, this time to Thursdays, with the devblog moving alongside them. The reasoning covered both previous attempts. Friday updates cost the team their weekends fixing bugs, which in turn ruined players' weekends through unfixed bugs, mid-session patches, server restarts and occasional wipes. Monday updates had the opposite problem: announcing the contents on Friday meant that if a wipe was coming, playing over the weekend felt pointless, and nobody wanted to move to the dev branch because dev servers get wiped constantly during testing. Thursday was the compromise - close enough to the weekend to deliver something fresh, far enough out to patch anything game-breaking first.

Raknet

The networking system switched to Raknet, a widely used library bought by Oculus and made open source. The practical difference from Lidgren is that Raknet is written in C++ rather than C#. Garry pushed back on the assumption that this alone brings a massive performance boost, but said it definitely shouldn't be slower, with possible benefits around garbage collection.

The real argument was reliability: Raknet is tried and tested, so when something breaks the fault is theirs and therefore fixable - something they never had with Lidgren. The transition also served as an excuse to clean up the networking layer, which had accumulated multiple functions doing the same job and some seriously underused systems. As with any swap of this size, the expectation was that it fixed a batch of problems and introduced some new ones.

Metal tier and building feedback

Vince finished the metal tier, with the price and health of every block balanced to suit it. Hit feedback also stopped being generic: hitting a metal block produces sparks and hitting a stone block produces dust, rather than everything behaving like wood.

Metabolism and localized damage

The metabolism had been broken for a while, meaning nobody had starved in a long time. It's enabled again, with deliberately simple rules:

• Below 20 calories or 20 thirst, you lose health
• Above 200 calories or thirst, you gain health
• Calories and thirst each drop 0.5 per minute

As the devblog put it, at 80 calories you have roughly two hours of real time before you start losing health. Movement, heart rate and heat are deliberately not factored in yet - the team wanted to feel out the base rates before layering anything on.

Localized damage also returned. Rust previously did more damage for a headshot than a toe shot, then lost the behaviour in an internal refactor. It's reimplemented and more accurate than before - accurate enough that you can shoot people in the thumbs.

Clothing and footsteps

Xavier's animal hide clothing made it in, covering boots, a vest, pants and a poncho. Wearing the poncho and vest together caused heavy z-fighting, which was flagged for a fix.

Alex reworked footsteps, replacing all the sounds and adding variations for running and crouching, plus tuning to stop sounds playing when they shouldn't. The most welcome part: your own footsteps are quieter and play in 2D, so it no longer sounds like someone is running circles around you.

Anti-cheat

EAC patched in the background, fixing an error relating to SP2 and finally allowing Windows 10 players in. Garry took the opportunity to explain the outsourcing decision: they didn't get into game development to fight anti-cheat battles, and having specialists handle it lets the team focus on the game. By his account it was working - hacks for Rust existed and always would, but there were far fewer for the current version than for Legacy. He also floated an idea: a cash reward system for people who report unpublished ways around the anti-cheat rather than keeping them secret.

Melee raiding balance

Internally, the team built in-editor tools to preview exactly what melee-versus-building value changes actually do, since the effects are hard to reason about abstractly. That produced a round of melee weapon balance changes. On publishing the underlying data, Garry weighed it up: the data will get extracted eventually anyway, and more eyes means fewer mistakes, but publishing removes some mystery and makes every change instantly visible and contested. He concluded the pros win, and that once they can generate the data they'd find a way to release it - possibly even making it tweakable by server owners.

Other changes and fixes

• Bullets are now affected by drag and can ricochet, with damage based on velocity
• Timed explosives do a lot more damage
• Arrows move faster but hurt buildings a lot less
• Fixed the "bootstrap error" that left the game stuck on the bootstrapping screen - something was blowing up in Unity Analytics, now wrapped in a try/catch
• Fixed black water on the lowest settings
• Fixed admins not being admins in some respects
• The wooden door key can be burnt in a fire or furnace
• Updated the bootstrap screen

Two known issues were called out: balance would remain unsettled for a while as values shift, and the upgrade text on doors was wrong.

Wrapping up

With the Raknet move fresh, Garry expected several days of debugging ahead. The following week was earmarked for the repair bench and more items from the baseline priority list.