What's New in Rust's "Devblog 51" Update

Devblog 51 shipped in mid-March 2015 and was, by Facepunch's own admission, a rushed one — Garry noted he hadn't got everything done he wanted, though a lot did get fixed. The headline items were a real performance push on both client and server, the introduction of per-player faces and skin tones, and a batch of building improvements that made construction behave the way you'd expect it to.

Performance

The big win was adding LODs to building parts. Only walls were done at this point, with the rest of the set being worked through, but the principle is simple: swap in a lower-resolution mesh for models that are far away. There's no point rendering a high-poly model for something that occupies about six pixels of screen space, and the impact on framerate was described as hugely positive.

Server-side got attention too. The AI now thinks at a fixed rate rather than trying to think every single frame, which is exactly the kind of change that scales well as populations grow.

Race and face

Everyone got a pseudo-unique skin tone and face, tied to their SteamID — meaning, as Facepunch put it, that just like real life you can't change your skin colour or your face. The avatar was randomised from three things: skin colour, head mesh and head material. At launch there were only two face textures and two face materials, giving four possible combinations, with more planned later (at which point people's faces would likely change).

Facepunch were candid about the difficulty of the feature. Players were so used to seeing the Rust character as a white guy that seeing him as a black guy could read as the character being "blacked up" rather than being a different person, and a lot of time went into lessening that effect. The section was explicitly framed as boilerplate — a first pass on an idea with work still to do. Garry's closing note was that seeing different races working together in game made race feel pleasingly arbitrary.

Building enhancements

Vince spent the week on building pieces, leaning on conditional models to make structures look more natural. The conditional model system itself got reworked so it only runs on models close to the player, rather than the previous behaviour of running the logic on buildings a mile away with no prioritisation of nearby ones — which meant that more often than not you never actually saw the conditional models at all.

• Foundation placement relative to the ground is now configurable
• Foundation stairs work far more naturally, with new placement logic: standing on a foundation looking out places them upwards, standing outside places them downwards
• The building guide is more reliable — no more turning red and floating towards you, or staying attached after you've walked a long way off
• The sideways building trick people were using to make skybridges was fixed
• Roof blocks no longer require a floor and can attach directly to a wall, and now have a vaulted ceiling

Stone pickaxe

Until now, gathering ore meant hitting nodes with your rock until you got lucky and found a salvaged tool in a radtown — and using the stone hatchet on ore just wrecked the tool fast. The stone pickaxe was added as a starter tool to fill that gap, described as the yin to the stone hatchet's yang.

Fog and ragdolls

Fog was reworked to give a better sense of distance. Previously it only appeared in the far distance, which looked great in some situations but made scale hard to read — you'd judge a landscape feature as 50 metres away, then spot a nearby tree that revealed it was 500. The new behaviour should make that misjudgement less common.

Ragdolls weren't copying bone positions from their parent, so when one spawned the player or NPC would still be visible while the ragdoll popped in at its default stance — very laggy-looking. That's fixed, and deaths look considerably more natural for it.

Everything else

• Corpses last 30 minutes instead of 2
• Fixed ricochets not showing up unless you were the instigator
• View punch when an item is damaged during gathering, so "wrong" tool usage is more obvious
• Spectate command accepts a username string or SteamID
• Map size and seed available in server tags
• High end tools harvest slightly fewer resources; stone tools harvest slightly more
• Fixed a bug where destroying a building block removed every terrain-placed deployable within a 12m radius
• More icons replaced with Meg's versions

One known problem was flagged rather than fixed: servers hitting around 150,000 colliders saw the physics system break down completely — no building, no explosions, and players spawning in the sky. Facepunch were working on a reproduction case to send to Unity. They'd also started an internal issue list on GitHub, while noting they probably wouldn't open a public issues board since those tend to go badly.