What's New in Rust's "Devblog 50" Update

Devblog 50 landed in early March 2015, and it's a good example of what Rust's development looked like at the time: one huge, visible art-and-worldgen leap sitting next to a week of grim, invisible networking debugging. André pushed procedural terrain forward with rivers, bridges and altitude-aware biomes, Vince finished the reinforced building grade, and Garry spent most of his week chasing a single bug that was silently dropping entities on people's clients. It also required a map wipe.

Rivers, bridges and a reshaped procedural world

The first pass at procedurally generated roads had a habit of taking absurd routes or crossing themselves in ways that made no sense. Most of that got fixed here, though road network generation was explicitly still an ongoing project. Alongside it came an initial version of bridges — very much a work in progress, but enough to keep landmarks properly connected instead of leaving them stranded behind terrain.

The bigger swing was rivers. Facepunch were honest about why rivers are a pain: they cause Z-fighting between the river mesh and the terrain mesh, they misbehave when the terrain mesh switches LODs, and they make "is this thing underwater?" checks an order of magnitude more complicated. They shipped them anyway as a proof of concept, with the known caveat that you didn't get wet crossing one.

The payoff was structural rather than cosmetic. Because rivers now flowed down slopes properly, a lot of the old zero-level water — which was supposed to read as rivers but never really did — could be removed. That freed up enormous amounts of terrain elevation, which in turn allowed a big increase in the number of mountain lines simply because there was room for them.

Terrain texturing got the same freedom. Biomes started depending on both latitude (how far north or south you are) and altitude (how high you are), rather than just position, giving noticeably more variety across a map. Rounding the pass out: a new warehouse landmark, bigger and more condensed rock clusters, improved sand dunes, nicer mountaintops and smoother texture blending.

The packet bug that ate the week

After the move to RakNet, players were reporting entities that simply weren't there — the server was sending them, the client never showed them. A checksum added to the entity networking process confirmed a lot of invalid packets were arriving, and players missing entities started getting kicked on the assumption they were on bad connections.

Then the same people kept getting kicked, repeatedly. Since RakNet is a mature, well-tested library, the working assumption was that the bug had to be in Facepunch's own code. Hours went into tearing that code apart and reassembling it differently. No change. Other native code was disabled in case something was overwriting packet memory. No change. Compiler flags, RakNet defines, sending too much data — all investigated, all no change.

The pattern came out of player feedback: it only happened when a packet was larger than the MTU, meaning it had to be split. Logging confirmed it — split packets were being reassembled, and the one that errored had been put back together with the last piece received first. RakNet wasn't reordering the fragments. A fix went in and the dev servers stopped seeing the issue.

Network stats and connection fixes

A side effect of all that debugging was a batch of new network tooling. Bandwidth usage showed on the dedicated server again and was more accurate, and player pings started appearing in the status command output. Two new commands arrived:

• net.log [0|1] — logs all network traffic to a CSV file
• dev.netgraph [0|1] — overlays network stats on the client

Two long-standing annoyances also got sorted. The "you are already connected" problem — where being kicked didn't actually remove you from the server, so you couldn't rejoin and the player count never dropped — was fixed. And a genuinely nasty lerp bug was caught: ping wasn't being converted from seconds to milliseconds when calculating interpolation. It was clamped, thankfully, but it meant player movement was rendering roughly half a second behind reality instead of one ping's worth. If the previous version felt laggy, that was why.

Sound

Everything finished moving over to the new sound system, with volume levels tweaked across the board — that migration bought a lot more control over playback. Work started on distance filtering, so distant gunshots and explosions genuinely sound different rather than just quieter. Going underwater now plays splashing sounds and muffles everything else.

Reinforced grade

Vince finished off the reinforced building grade, positioned as the top tier that combines the properties of wood, stone and metal. The stated long-term goal was for wood, stone and metal to stop being a linear upgrade path and instead be chosen for their specific properties, with reinforced offering the best of all of them. Facepunch acknowledged that plan would take a while to actually shake out.

Cheats and exploits

A cheat that patched the Windows kernel to bypass EAC was doing the rounds; EAC were aware and it was slated to be blocked and banned the following week, with a pointed note that anyone compromising their machine's security to cheat had been warned.

The gamma exploit — cranking brightness to see in the dark — got a blunt but effective counter. When something gets really dark now, the colour is cut off and drawn black. It costs a bit of image fidelity, but it means nobody has to play the game washed out just to stay competitive.

Players were also going to sleep to look through walls in third person. Sleeping now renders through the player's eyes instead, which required building a new in-the-eye camera mode. Admins could toggle it with F3, and Facepunch admitted it was fun enough that they wanted it in the game properly — while noting that was months away.

Everything else

• Wolf attacks now show directional damage indicators, so it's clearer where you're being mauled from
• Screen overlays toned down
• Radpills fixed
• Window bar upgrades
• Campfire slot count fixed
• Admin noclip (right shift and L)
• Loot spawn, weapon damages and other balance tweaks

The wipe

The terrain changes were large enough to force a wipe. Only the map wiped — blueprints were kept. Facepunch's framing was that wipes were a regular necessity at that stage of development and they were trying to keep them to an absolute minimum, with a fair guess that half the playerbase loved them and half hated them.

Looking ahead, the stated priorities were stats for building damage and a general balance pass, plus batching to speed up building rendering, which was starting to get slow. Server performance was the quiet win of the period — not long before, servers were struggling to hold 30 FPS after two days of uptime, and by Devblog 50 they were seeing 200+.