What's New in Rust's "Devblog 52" Update

Devblog 52 landed in late March 2015 and is mostly a collection of small mercies — the kind of update where nothing headline-grabbing arrives but half a dozen daily annoyances quietly disappear. The most significant thing in it isn't a feature at all: it's the announcement at the end that Facepunch considered the stabilisation phase done and were switching back to adding new gameplay.

Lock removal

When the ability to demolish doors was removed, it created a genuinely miserable side effect: upgrading from a key lock to a code lock meant manually destroying your own door, burning through multiple tools to do it. You can now remove an unlocked lock through its option menu, which drops it into your inventory and leaves the door free for a new lock. Straightforward fix to a problem that shouldn't have existed.

Building skins and polish

Vince put serious work into building skins this week, setting up a system where the ground accumulates dirt around the edges of structures. The point is to break up tiling so buildings feel less like blocks bolted together and more like something planted in the terrain. Everything also got LOD'd, which should mean a performance improvement — though Garry cautioned that the benefits might not show up immediately, since his own changes for handling the increased skin component count weren't merged to the main branch yet.

Tom spent the week fixing and polishing the player skins that were rushed in the previous update. Still only two skins and two meshes — the same four face combinations — but cleaned up, and in a much better state for producing more skins and heads in future.

Auto sprint

Maurino added auto sprint after noticing that holding the sprint key across long distances was making his left pinky sore. The rule is simple: sprint for more than three seconds and you can let go of the sprint key — your character keeps running as long as you're holding forward. Any other movement key, or releasing W, disengages it. The design intent was that most people wouldn't even notice it was there.

Damage flinching and sound

Minh added new gestures to players and animals, so taking damage now produces a pain flinch based on where the hit landed. Not every animal was done at this point, but it fills in a layer of visual feedback the game had been missing entirely.

Alex rewrote a large chunk of the underlying sound system, which probably fixed the freeze that occurred when ambient sounds played — Facepunch hedged that one honestly, saying they hadn't experienced it since but couldn't be certain, and asked players to speak up if it persisted.

Legacy update

Legacy Rust got an update the same day, with nothing exciting in it. Unity Analytics was added so Facepunch could get a definitive read on Legacy player counts when making decisions, and a fix went in making it harder for servers to fake their player counts.

Everything else

• Heat wave effect added to furnaces and campfires
• Increased visibility of water footsteps
• SSAO updated to actually be visible — though the advice was to turn it off, because it's slow
• Arrows now give 2 per crafting session and are cheaper
• Shotgun shells now give 2 per crafting session
• More clothing model combinations made compatible
• Fixed item deletion when picking up an item with a full inventory
• More icons updated
• PVT enabled by default, with the setting saved

A change of direction

The summary carried the real news. Facepunch had spent months trying to reach a stable baseline, and decided that although things weren't perfect, it was time to start pushing forward with features again — reasoning that balance, performance and stability would be affected by new features anyway, so holding off until everything was perfect made little sense. The tradeoff flagged up front was that some weeks would look lean, since sprints can run a couple of weeks before landing.

Garry also announced he'd stop writing the devblogs himself. The bus factor was too low — as the previous week had demonstrated, nothing got posted if he wasn't around — so the plan was for individual devs to write up their own work with Buck curating and posting.