What's New in Rust's "Devblog 66" Update

Devblog 66 landed at the end of June 2015 and was one of the denser patches of that year. It introduced a genuinely novel dynamic weather system, added the semi-auto pistol and road sign armour, made crouching silent, and rebalanced a long list of things Garry had been meaning to get to for months. It also followed a weekend where Garry asked Reddit for bug reports and got 191 new entries in the tracker, most of which he spent the week working through.

Dynamic Weather

Andre built the first version of Rust's custom dynamic weather system, and the approach is worth explaining because it's not how most games do it. Rather than defining a set of predefined weather types and fading between them when an event triggers, Rust generates a set of weather indicators like a real weather report - percentages for humidity and precipitation, expected wind speed - and maps those to a visual representation: rainfall, snowfall, object fog density, atmospheric fog, cloud coverage and so on. Those indicators can depend on the server seed, time, date and biome.

Getting good results out of that takes tweaking, but the payoff is that technically no two days look exactly the same, and real-world weather phenomena can emerge naturally without writing dozens or hundreds of separate rules. Andre's example was light rain under a relatively clear sky - the setup that produces a rainbow in real life, though he was careful to note there are no rainbows in this first iteration.

Weather also touches gameplay. Water catchers now gather water from condensation (fog) as well as precipitation (rain and snow), players get wet standing in the rain, and a water screen overlay appears when you look straight up into it - the same effect that triggers right after stepping out of a body of water. Plenty was still missing and most of the sounds were placeholder, but the framework was in.

Building Costs and Rotation Rules

Garry took a pass at building balance that mostly amounts to making costs match the space a piece actually occupies:

• Triangle foundations and triangle floors take up half the space, so they now cost half the resources to place and half to upgrade. They also gained the same shell protection as their square counterparts.
• Floors, doors, pillars, half walls, doorway walls, window walls and foundation steps all cost less. Pillars and half walls are smaller; doorway and window walls need something else to complete them.
• Maximum health was lowered on doors, window bars, pillars and the low wall, though their protection values are unchanged.

The bigger behavioural change: you can only rotate a placed block for 10 minutes after building it, which ended the stairway vault trick. As compensation, you can now demolish a block for up to 10 minutes after placing it - a fix for the misplaced-foundation problem that had annoyed players since forever. Building inside the terrain collider was also blocked, killing underground bases.

C4, Codelocks and Crafting

The C4 change was the headline balance item: timed explosives now only damage the building component they were placed on, in line with Legacy, with the hope that it pushes players toward using it more tactically. It still damages players in the blast radius.

The Codelock no longer needs a blueprint. Garry acknowledged the community was split roughly 50/50 on this, and framed it as a stopgap: the way blueprints were found at the time "kind of sucks" and was going to change, so making the codelock free to craft was a fair interim call. The Pump Shotgun and its blueprint spawn more often - he considered making that a default craft too, but decided an offensive weapon should be something you find.

Gunpowder crafting was addressed with a small trick: it now yields twice as much per craft, using twice the ingredients. Technically the same rate, but far fewer trips through the menu.

Furnaces got a server-load fix. Twenty-furnace bases spitting charcoal everywhere were hurting performance, so furnaces now produce less charcoal, and spilled charcoal that collides with existing charcoal stacks onto it - with the despawn timer resetting on stack.

Randomised Body Size

Player bone scaling is now randomised based on your SteamID, in the same way skin colour already was. Garry noted, with some resignation, that all the gameplay advances and bug fixes never get picked up by the gaming press, but the moment body proportions became randomised it was everywhere. The actual point wasn't the anatomy detail the press ran with - it's that varying the whole body changes each player's silhouette just enough that friends become recognisable at a decent distance.

Movement and Stealth

Two movement changes, one of them significant. Footsteps no longer play when you're not moving, a bug Garry admitted he should have fixed six months earlier. And crouched players now move silently, with the view model bobbing slower when crouched - a deliberate push toward more stealth, more observation, and generally slower gameplay.

Interface Work

A solid batch of UI improvements shipped:

• Right-click in loot to automatically move an item to your inventory, with a short timer shown before it transfers.
• The gap between storage box slots is gone, so you can no longer miss a slot and drop the item into the world. The main inventory already had this fix; boxes had been overlooked.
• Campfires and furnaces gained on/off buttons in their loot panels, so you don't have to exit the menu to toggle them. The fuel currently burning shows a fire icon.
• You can drink from the water catcher via a button in its panel. Dragging water out of the catcher into the world was removed for being weird.
• Selecting the contents of a container item was disabled - the candle hat example being a selection panel that replaces itself with the fuel's panel, which confused everyone.
• Toggling lens dirt off in F2 now only turns off the dirt, not bloom, and a low quality bloom mode was added so some form of bloom is always on.

Weapons and Combat Balance

Maurino put the semi-automatic pistol in, built to feel very similar to Legacy's P250. It has an eight round clip, fires faster, reloads faster, and does more damage than the revolver. Gooseman reworked its animations at Helk's request to sit closer to the Legacy P250 feel and be less bouncy.

The road sign jacket went in as an intermediary armour piece: half as expensive as the metal chestplate and half as effective.

Bullet velocity had been a persistent complaint, and HV ammo alone hadn't fixed it, so:

• Explosive and incendiary rounds travel at the same rate as before.
• All other bullet types travel about 30% faster.
• The Custom SMG's velocity penalty dropped from 40% to 20%.
• Shotgun slugs travel faster than pellets.
• Shotgun pellets do 50% more damage - 15 instead of 10.

Mining quarries were buffed hard: slightly faster cycles (5 seconds instead of 6) and 3x the resource yield. Spears went the other way - throw velocity nerfed, throw damage slightly nerfed, and a tiny amount of inaccuracy added so a thrown spear is no longer a laser. Stuck objects like spears and arrows now fall out of objects when those objects are destroyed. Grenade throw power was increased.

Anticheat

Facepunch addressed the cheating situation directly, and honestly: it was bad again, and the expectation was that some weeks they'd win and some weeks the cheat makers would, for months. EAC was bulk banning daily even if it didn't feel like it, and reports tweeted to @rusthackreport were called invaluable - not only for catching individuals but for reading the global picture.

A specific exploit was called out: hackers buying the game, cheating for one hour and 50 minutes, then quitting and refunding under Steam's policy. Facepunch suspected this was what Valve's game ban feature was for, but weren't sure how much a ban achieves against someone who already got their money back, and planned to talk to Valve about it. The bigger strategic admission was that they'd been trying to avoid serverside checks and lean entirely on EAC, and had concluded that wasn't going to work long term.

Art, Audio and Concepts

Tom continued on the female character, testing which clothes work - all the hats fit - with skinning and LODs left to do. Xavier finished the road sign armour jacket and started the matching pants, which are more of an armoured skirt; both are designed to layer on top of other clothing so they act as an added protection layer over shirts and pants.

Gooseman finished the baseball riot helmet and added a howling gesture to accompany the wolf headdress. Dan textured the first three of his six new melee weapons, with the other three and their world models to follow. Howie finalised a design for the larger auto turret, built around modular upgrades - camera, shield, damage and so on - and moved next to a smaller turret that uses Rust's existing guns.

Megan kept iterating on the tier two fire, working out how it could open up cooking and preservation options without getting complicated, and added better chimneys since these are meant to be placed indoors, unlike the furnace. She also kept refining the survey charge, trying both a C4-and-electronics direction and a fuse-based one. Paul spent the week on tribal bone armour, sharing thumbnails and rough exploration to show how many ideas get discarded before a final design lands.

Alex Rehberg finished the first pass of the distance-based audio crossfade system, currently applied to gunshots and explosions, with rivers gaining closer-range bubbly detail later. He noted it already sounds much better than the DSP-effect approach they tried first, and also delivered quick rain sounds for Andre, a first pass on boar sounds, and a start on stags.

Everything Else

• Updated to Unity 5.1.1.
• Fixed being able to wear hide boots over other shoes.
• The codelock now gives a small electric shock on failure.
• Fixed wolves dropping multiple skulls.
• Fixed campfires and furnaces pretending to be on after a server restart.
• Aligned the bolt rifle ironsights.
• Fixed items disappearing when dropped onto wooden boxes in the inventory.
• Fixed locks not always showing properly on wooden storage.
• Dropped items combine and stack on collision.
• Server console reports invalid commands properly; the sleep command is now restricted to admins.
• Added network data caching; player persistence moved to UserPersistance.db.
• Optimized inventory menu performance and fixed some prefab errors.
• Grass treads down on lower shader levels and no longer gets dragged into caves.
• Fixed the serverlist sort order and the wrong description on pumpkin.
• Fixed horse and chicken ragdolls not bleeding; slightly reduced ragdolls going crazy.
• Increased moon god ray intensity at night; fixed slow bootstrapping on OSX.
• Furnace lights fade out with their shadows, fixing light passing through walls.
• Added CraggyIsland, a small test and debug island, plus an editor-only weather test scene.
• Added mod-facing player flags VoiceMuted and ThirdPersonViewmode, and OverlayTOP for the Community HUD.

This was also the week Facepunch started publishing a proper full changelog with each devblog, after players pointed out you often couldn't tell what was actually in a given patch. Looking forward, Maurino promised the pumpjack, a new resource type findable only through mining, and a serverwide event he wasn't ready to describe yet - while Garry was being sent on holiday for a couple of weeks, laptop smuggled along regardless.