What's New in Rust's "Devblog 65" Update

Devblog 65 shipped in June 2015 and is best remembered as the week farming first appeared in Rust - in an extremely rough form, with placeholder art bought off the asset store. It also gave the first public look at the female character model, added the wolf headdress and bota bag, and ended with Garry announcing that the next week would be spent polishing rather than adding anything new.

Farming, Version Zero

Two plants went in: pumpkins and corn. They need water, heat and sun to live, and the more of each they get, the faster they grow. They hate being planted on rocks and snow.

Garry was blunt about the state of it - the whole thing was four days of work, all the art was placeholder, and "it works, but it ain't pretty". Most of that time went into the workflow rather than the plants themselves, building a system where new plants could be added easily. That workflow investment carried over to pretty much every other asset type in the game, clothes and weapons included, which is the sort of thing that doesn't show up in a screenshot but pays for itself repeatedly.

Wolf Headdress and Bota Bag

Xavier's wolf headdress model made it in. It's crafted from a wolf skull and some cloth - the first of the trophy-style headwear that became a Rust staple.

The bota bag also arrived as a default craft. You can fill it from your water catcher, though filling from rivers wasn't supported yet. Like the farming, it was described as boilerplate: functional, unpolished, to be revisited.

Firefight Performance

Garry dug into why players were lagging so hard during firefights and found that player models were being rebuilt more often than necessary. Model rebuilds normally happen when a player changes clothes and are a fairly intensive process, so triggering them spuriously in a fight is about the worst possible timing. The fix was to only rebuild when there are definite changes.

The Female Model

Tom shared the first look at the in-progress female character model, along with the reasoning behind it. The explicit goal was to avoid making her aesthetically idealised - in the same way the male models aren't perfect specimens, neither should the female be. "No huge boobs nor four-inch waists here." Scott put together a comparison image showing three days of progression. Low-poly work, texturing and a possible rig test were lined up for the following week.

Water Fixes and a Quality Slider

Diogo fixed the water glowing at night along with some subsurface refraction and shading issues, so it now looks consistent across the whole day-night cycle.

More significantly, a memory leak was reported to Unity that week, and while nobody could confirm the connection, Water2 was a suspect. To make it possible to rule in or out, the Water Reflections setting was replaced with a Water Quality slider - setting it to 0 disables Water2 entirely and reverts to Water1. Players hitting memory problems were asked to try zero and report back. These changes went to the development branch, so they took a while to reach stable.

Also fixed: a cascaded shadow bug introduced by the water, and a potential speedtree shader transmission bug found while porting to Before.

Animation, Art and Monuments

Gooseman finished the shivering animation for when the player gets too cold, and rigged and animated the new semi-auto pistol Tom had built the week before. He also started a new helmet, with the bone club view model queued behind it.

Xavier spent most of the week learning Substance Painter and Substance Designer, betting that the learning curve would pay off by speeding up one of the slowest parts of clothing creation. The half-finished road sign armour jacket served as the testbed, with matching pants to follow.

Vince completed and animated the windmill player structure, earmarked for the eventual electricity update, then moved onto the Sphere Tank monument. The plan there was interesting: open up the interior so attacking and defending means crossing unstable gantries and hanging pipes, keep the inside free of player-built structures to control how open the space stays and make it harder to defend, but still allow building on top. He was also toying with putting crude oil at the bottom, which would draw a steady stream of visitors and keep whoever owned the place permanently on edge.

Dan finished the high-poly pass on six new melee weapons from a Paul concept, due for texturing and world models the following week.

Paul finalised the wooden armour concept - an improvised look, basic planks held onto the body with netting and rope wrapping, chosen for a unique silhouette and to give early players basic protection that takes some damage then breaks apart. He added an optional headgear piece carved out of a log that can be worn with other sets.

Megan reworked the survey charge, liking the idea of pushing it into the ground so the resources feel properly unearthed rather than just sitting on the surface, and started exploring Scott's suggestion of driving it with C4 instead of a fuse. She also began sketching tier two cooking, reasoning that with more foodstuffs and tier two buildings arriving it was time for different food types, preservation methods, and ways to make food go further. Icons this week: seeds, pumpkins, corn, the bota bag and the wolf headdress.

Alex Rehberg delivered what many players had been waiting for - vastly toned down chicken sounds - plus metal door sounds, a new set for the quarry, and updated bush rustling. He also started on distant gunshots and a generic system for crossfading between sounds based on distance, which he hoped to eventually use for things like only playing trickling water detail on rivers when you're right next to them.

The Rest

• Dedicated server text is yellow when running in debug mode.
• Dedicated server console shows the map name.
• Added a Depth Of Field option.
• Terrain parallax works.
• Added SQLite.
• Changed mouse input to use GetAxisRaw.
• Fixed floating buildings.
• Increased decay rate.
• Fixed the hemp bush blocking bullets.
• Added entity.debug_lookat for admins.
• Menu music obeys the volume control.
• Spear hold positions.
• Fixed a C4 directional damage bug.

The closing note set expectations for the week after: a deliberate pause on features to polish, bug fix and optimise, on the reasoning that several weeks of feature pushing had left nothing particularly finished.