What's New in Rust's "Devblog 49" Update

Devblog 49 shipped at the end of February 2015 under the joke title "Sleeping Bag Charity Simulator". Two design decisions dominated it: sleeping bags can now be assigned to friends, and demolishing with the hammer is gone entirely. Behind those sat a heavy week of server optimization and diagnostics work, plus a solid batch of survival systems - the repair bench, biome temperatures, comfort and reworked radiation.

Assign to friend

A long-debated feature finally shipped. Hold E on a sleeping bag you own, choose assign to friend, search for your friend's name and click it - they now own the bag and can spawn at it. The player list is built from players on the server and from your Steam friends list.

Facepunch had repeatedly talked themselves in and out of this, mainly over the worry that players would kill themselves to spawn near a friend. The anticipated abuse was acknowledged upfront - filling someone's screen with sleeping bags as an insult, or making bags for everyone on the server to lure them into your jail - but the effects weren't judged devastating, and the preference was to handle problems as they emerge rather than close off opportunities for emergent gameplay.

No more demolishing

The conclusion was that demolishing mostly wasn't needed and wasn't being used properly. Breaking into someone's base, finding their cupboard, and then pulling out a hammer to demolish walls and doors hunting for secret rooms is not, in the team's words, common sense game design - nor is removing an entire building in a couple of minutes, or placing a cupboard next to someone who doesn't have one and demolishing their base.

The one legitimate use, remodelling your own base, was judged worth sacrificing. Better remodelling tools might come later once the gameplay effects were understood. The upside was immediate: penetrating a single wall and reaching your cupboard no longer opens up your whole house, multi-chambered safe rooms become viable, and your base is probably still standing when you log in even after a raid.

Repair bench

Helk finished the Repair Bench. Drag in a damaged item, press repair, and get it back fixed for roughly 40% of the item's initial cost for a full 100% repair. The catch: each repair lowers the item's maximum condition until it eventually becomes un-repairable. The model was a placeholder.

Climates and metabolism

Helk gave biomes genuinely different temperatures - you'll freeze to death in the arctic and bake in the desert during the day. Clothing protects against cold, while metal armor magnifies it. Values were subject to change, but the system was expected to shape where players travel, when, and what they wear.

Radiation was split into two categories: radiation level, representing the radiation where you're currently standing, and radiation poisoning, which builds up based on that level - much like legacy. You can wash some radiation off by jumping in water and moving around.

Comfort was also added. It's earmarked for more uses later, but right now standing around a campfire makes you heal faster and stops you getting cold, and you heal faster with a group of people around you. Food no longer gives health directly - you have to metabolise the calories from it.

Networking, missing walls and the freeze bug

The missing-walls problem got a diagnosis: somewhere along the way the server sends a message describing an entity and it gets lost. It isn't specific to building parts - potentially any server-sent entity is affected. The mitigation was to send a hash alongside entity snapshots; if the hash doesn't match, the client is kicked with an error. That doesn't fix the bug, it just converts missing walls into a disconnect. At the time it was hitting roughly 1 in 100 players joining the development servers, with logging in place to gather data from the wider live population.

The freeze bug from the previous week - the game locking up after 10 to 20 minutes - was captured in the editor and traced to a thread locking issue in FMOD, Unity's audio engine. Disabling the ambient sound system stopped it happening, so ambient sound was switched off for the time being. The bug was passed to Unity, though without a hard repro there wasn't much confidence in a quick fix.

Post-Raknet fixes also landed: the server.ip variable, which binds a server to a specific IP address, wasn't working and had been stopping players joining some providers' servers, and disconnected players now get told why they were kicked.

Server optimization and diagnostics

Servers over 100 players had long seen framerates dip badly. A few hours of profiling on an official server with 150+ players connected turned up several performance issues, now fixed - some of which benefit the client too. A bug leaving some entities undeleted was also fixed, part of a broader memory leak problem.

To make any of that tractable, a dump command was added, writing a folder of information about the world including system information, root gameobjects grouped by name and ordered by count (with and without children), a full gameobject hierarchy with component counts, connected players with network stats, and all instanced Objects and ScriptableObjects grouped by type.

It paid off immediately, because Unity's GameObjects, ScriptableObjects and Components use far more memory than expected. The dump revealed unnecessary sub-objects on the server. The example given: a rock weapon has 3 LOD child objects the server doesn't need - cull them and you save 3 gameobjects each, or 1,500 gameobjects across 500 rock weapons in the world. By comparison the torch is 11 gameobjects on the client, and some trees carried 20+ collider objects before optimization. An unexplained leak remained, apparently in normal objects rather than Unity objects, and hard to chase because there's no straightforward way to detect when a plain object is destroyed.

Admin changes and server restarts

Server admins lost access to a set of internal debugging shortcuts. The notorious one was pressing X while looking at a player, which toggles debug mode for that entity and leaves them trailing lines and boxes everywhere they go. Those shortcuts are now developer-only, and a batch of other admin "cheats" such as instacraft were disabled.

A restart command was added for server owners, which notifies everyone on the server and gives a 60 second countdown to get somewhere safe before it goes down.

Other changes and fixes

• New screen overlays for being too cold, too hot, and a directional damage overlay showing where you're being attacked from
• The Eoka now behaves like it did in legacy - hold fire to strike the flint until it goes off, making it a very unreliable firearm. It's craftable without a blueprint
• The bow and arrow are craftable by default
• Fixed the poncho z-fighting; lanterns are destroyable; reduced torch brightness
• Animals make attack noises; fixed melee swing animations not playing for other players
• Hammer attacks are non-repeating and can repair faster
• Fixed items not cooking or smelting after a load; fixed loot containing starter blueprints
• Metabolism changes are networked to the player without delay
• Fixed third person player look angles sometimes going crazy; cargo plane doesn't fly as high
• Ricochet bounces are less random; smoothed radiation screen transitions; made the geiger sound quieter
• Radiation clothing now protects against radiation exposure rather than radiation poisoning
• Banning a player also kicks them if they're connected
• Servers running insecure now run without VAC; players who are VAC banned or running without EAC only see insecure servers
• Fixed letters repeating when renaming a sleeping bag
• Don't warm up stability if server.stability is false

Wrapping up

Garry apologised for how technical the week's writeup was, but counted it a good week that cleared several items off the priority list. The plan for the following week was to take it easier and work on some fun, exploratory things, with a queue of finished work already waiting.