What's New in Rust's "Devblog 64.1 - A Miner Update" Update
A one-day follow-up patch to Devblog 64. The Mining Quarry passed its overnight testing and shipped to Steam, bringing with it the Survey Charge - a small explosive you throw at the ground to see what ore sits underneath before you commit to a spot.
Devblog 64.1 landed in June 2015, a single day after Devblog 64 itself. The main blog had said the quarry was finished but untested, and that Facepunch didn't want to push it live until it had been given a proper run. It got that run overnight on the dev branch, survived, and shipped to Steam the next morning. This was a small patch with one big thing in it.
The Mining Quarry
The Mining Quarry was the headline. You place it on the ground, fill it with low grade fuel, then climb to the top to start the engine, and it slowly gathers ore for you while it runs. It was the first piece of genuinely passive resource generation in the game, and it changed what a base was for - suddenly there was infrastructure worth defending rather than just a box of loot.
There were placement rules from day one, and they were deliberate. You could not place a mining quarry near a building, and you could not place building parts near an existing quarry. The stated reason was to stop players entombing their quarry in a protective sarcophagus, Chernobyl style. If you wanted the ore, you had to accept that the machine sat out in the open where anyone could walk up to it.
Survey Charges
Every area of the map yielded different results from a quarry, which raised the obvious question of how you were meant to pick a spot. The answer was the Survey Charge, a small explosive you toss onto the ground to survey what lies beneath the surface.
After it detonates, resources fly into the air like confetti - and the number of resource items you see indicates the gathering efficiency of that area. It was a nicely readable bit of design: no numbers, no menu, just more stuff in the air meaning a better spot. Megan had concepted the survey charge only the week before, so it went from sketch to live item unusually fast.
Together these two items gave the June 2015 build its first real prospecting loop - blow a hole, read the spray, plant the quarry, defend it. The pumpjack, the second mineral extractor, was already lined up as the follow-up a couple of weeks later.