What's New in Rust's "Devblog 67" Update

Devblog 67 arrived in early July 2015 after a short delay, and it's a patch defined by two admissions. The first was that relying entirely on EAC for anti-cheat wasn't working, so serverside checks started going in. The second was that ore gathering was badly balanced. Alongside those came landmines, the bone club, the riot helmet, and the ninth iteration of procedural world generation.

Serverside Anti-Cheat

Maurino spent part of the week building a second layer of anti-cheat on top of EAC, having concluded that leaving it all to EAC clearly wasn't working. The most requested piece went in first: serverside noclip protection. The upside is that no client-side cheat can defeat it, since the server is the authority. The downside is that it may increase server CPU usage.

The framing was realistic rather than triumphant - this wouldn't resolve cheating, but it would make cheaters both less obvious to everyone on a server and less destructive, with more improvements to follow as they watched how it held up.

Ore Yields Rebalanced

Maurino called the existing ore economy plainly wrong. It was ridiculous, he said, that a single ore node could yield enough metal to make three or four guns, and there were cases where a few lucky players hoovered up everything and left nothing for anyone else.

The fix was blunt: ore node yields were halved, with the maximum number of ores spawning increased by 50% to compensate. Net result, roughly 25% less theoretical ore on the map. It was explicitly framed as a temporary measure - the stated goal was to make finding ore feel like finding a bit of treasure rather than a time sink, which needed a proper revisit.

New Gear: Landmine, Bone Club, Riot Helmet

The landmine became the game's third trap. Maurino's description was, appropriately, "pretty self-explanatory". Tom modelled it as a quick break from face work, and it went in the same week.

The bone club filled a gap at the bottom of the melee ladder. It's cheap to make and hits about twice as fast as the starting rock, giving fresh spawns a real first upgrade. Alongside it, the torch was given a combat use: igniting it adds +10 fire damage to melee strikes, but a lit torch only survives 6-7 hits, so it's a burst option rather than a permanent buff.

The riot helmet came in as a reasonably common drop that's very good against melee hits and slightly worse against bullets than the bucket helmet - an interesting inversion of the usual straight-line armour progression.

Fire and Incendiary Changes

The fireballs left behind by incendiary rockets got a package of buffs to make them worth the ammo: fire deals much more damage, standing in the flame slows your movement, flames now emit light, and flames come in different heights.

Procgen9

Andre shipped the ninth major iteration of procedural world generation. He'd only started a few days earlier so some edges were rough, but there was enough good in it that he didn't want to sit on it for another month.

• Reworked arid biome with more vegetation and height variation.
• Smoother biome transitions overall.
• Improved hill noise visuals and forest texturing, with more bushes so forests read as thicker.
• Rivers are now all generated as prototypes with the longest ones selected, and river width is randomised along the path.
• Tweaked lake and island shapes.
• Added palms to arid and temperate beaches, plus smaller cliffs at the beach-to-land transition.
• Added colliders to the airfield warehouse and metal building; removed invisible colliders around the big powerline poles; fixed rocks spawning inside powerlines.

The Bloom Explanation

Bloom had been forced on for everyone the previous week without explanation, which caused predictable confusion and anger. Andre gave the reasoning here: turning bloom off yields a significant competitive advantage, and with physically based rendering and HDR colour buffers they believe convincing results are achievable with it on.

That said, the complaints weren't unfounded. Some assets caused massive unintended bloom flares, and the effect blurred the image and looked like fog in places. Fixes this week: water and terrain wetness sun reflections are less intense, only very bright objects cause bloom (which stops the whole image blurring), and bloom blending is now additive so it looks less foggy. Garry fixed a number of SpeedTree assets with very intense bloom highlights. Players still seeing flares were asked to dial back the decor quality slider in F2 and report which object was at fault. The torch viewmodel also stopped being lowered right into the line of sight while running.

The Linux Situation

Garry addressed the broken Linux build directly. The cause was a bug in the latest version of Unity, fixed in Unity's internal builds but not yet released, so Facepunch were waiting alongside everyone else. Rolling back wasn't viable because it would drop a number of other important fixes with it.

He didn't soften the reasoning: if the same bug hit Windows users they would roll back, because Windows is the huge majority, and sometimes the majority has to be prioritised. The consolation offered was that the game is in early access, in alpha, and updated every week - so it wasn't going to stay that way.

Animation and Art

Gooseman finished the bone club viewmodel animations, started on crouched turning, completed a generic "doing something on the ground" animation, and - notably for anyone who'd been shot at close range mid-conversation - added third person animations for aiming a bow, ending the situation where someone chats calmly to you and then there's suddenly an arrow in your face. Weapon model positions in third person were also nudged so they sit better in the hand.

Tom reworked the metal facemask and plate armour textures, having been reminded how bad they looked by every screenshot he saw of them. Dan continued on the second three of his six-weapon set, sorting textures for Unity along with world models and LODs.

Paul finished the bone armour design after several rounds of changes, landing on two designs that both went down well. The constraint that shaped it is a good summary of Rust's armour philosophy: armour protects where it covers, rather than granting an arbitrary armour value. He floated the idea of a randomised clothing system combining different pieces, and planned to move on to more endgame gear influenced by tactical military and riot equipment - Kevlar or an improvised Rust stand-in for it.

Megan kept iterating on tier two fire and cooking, favouring multi-purpose setups the player can reconfigure to their needs, and worked on masks and headgear built around tribe or group identity. Howie finalised the smaller auto turret that uses the game's existing rifles, then started developing the look and feel of vehicles - modular construction so a wide variety can be built from minimal assets, and explicitly utilitarian rather than just fast transport, with hauling large amounts of resources as a core use. A fractionating tower for distilling multiple fuel types was next on his list.

Alex Rehberg delivered a first pass at stag sounds and worked on making the ambience system weather aware, though only the stag sounds shipped this week. He was experimenting with how ambience should change indoors - rain hitting a roof being a favourite sound of his for the sense of shelter it gives - with the goal that rain and birds stay clearly audible through a window, door or open wall, so standing under a covered porch would let you hear rain falling around you and hitting the roof above at the same time. He also made distant gunshots audible from farther away, so players looking for trouble can find it and fresh spawns can avoid it.

Vince returned from time off and resumed the Sphere Tank monument. Xavier lost most of the week to missing or corrupted project files, computer issues and internet downtime.

Everything Else

• Fixed supply drops dropping too many mining quarries; supply drops now drop more survey charges.
• Rocks no longer lose condition when harvesting flesh.
• Bone knife range increased.
• Shotgun slug is more accurate but does less damage; shotgun view sway increased; the repeating shotgun headshot sound was lowered.
• Coffee can helmet cost reduced.
• Increased quarry audio range.
• Beartraps and landmines displace grass. Beartrap cost reduced slightly and made more common.
• Traps no longer show health, making them harder to spot.
• Fixed keypad culling out too soon.
• Fixed ragdolls freaking out with arrows and spears stuck in them - the source of several genuinely funny YouTube videos that had to be sacrificed.
• Increased moon and star brightness.
• Optimized dynamic decor spawning, object counts, grass and decor refreshes, and the overall world layout in remote areas.
• Weather override admin commands now take floats.
• Removed the pain sound.

Two sections of this devblog were partly redacted with block characters - Maurino got excited and started announcing something Facepunch weren't ready to announce, and Alex's audio notes were cut back for the same reason, with an editor's note admitting they'd left just enough visible to be annoying. Next up: more anti-cheat work, possibly the pumpjack, and a round of polishing, performance and memory investigation.