What's New in Rust's "Devblog 70" Update

Devblog 70 landed in July 2015 and Facepunch billed it as possibly the biggest change to the game since the reboot. They weren't overselling it: this is the patch that put High Quality Metal behind mining quarries and moved most firearms onto it, rewiring the entire mid-to-late game economy in a single night. It also added the pump jack, small refinery, large furnace, crossbow, three two-handed melee weapons, and a spear nerf that was long overdue.

The High Quality Metal Change

Maurino was upfront that some players would hate this and that the game's balance might be thrown off entirely for a while. The change set:

• Most firearms now take High Quality Metal instead of Metal Fragments.
• The Armored building tier requires High Quality Metal.
• The Metal Facemask and Metal Chestpiece require High Quality Metal.
• High Quality Metal comes from smelting High Quality Metal Ore.
• You can pretty much only get High Quality Metal Ore from a mining quarry.

Read together, that turns the quarry from a convenience into the gateway to guns and armoured bases - and since quarries can't be walled in, it forces the most valuable infrastructure in the game to sit exposed. It's the moment Rust's progression stopped being purely about looting radtowns.

Pump Jack and Small Refinery

The Pump Jack joined the quarry as the second extractor. It works the same way - use a survey charge to check whether an area has oil, then place it down - and runs on low grade fuel to extract Crude Oil.

That crude oil feeds the Small Refinery: put oil in, turn it on, and after a while it boils down into low grade fuel. The point is a self-sustaining fuel loop for your quarries. Like the quarry, it must be placed on terrain rather than inside a building.

Large Furnace

Maurino's stated motivation was hating the sight of rooms containing 957 furnaces all running at once. The Large Furnace has many more slots and smelts much faster, and also has to be placed on terrain.

Crossbow and Two-Handed Melee

The Crossbow, finished by Tom and animated by Alex W, went in as a common drop that fires arrows a bit faster than the bow.

Three two-handed melee weapons arrived with Gooseman's animations, all built as slower but harder-hitting with good range - the time between swing and hit is longer than you're used to, but the payoff is large:

• Mace: high blunt and stab damage.
• Cleaver: high slash damage.
• Longsword: great range.

The Spear Nerf

Maurino's complaint was specific and correct: Rust had something like 17 melee weapons, and virtually every melee fight he'd ever seen or been in was spear versus spear. The cause turned out to be an almost 3m range that made it flatly the best option. Its range is now shorter and its melee grace area smaller, so it takes more precise aim than the larger weapons - the hope being that the rest of the melee roster finally gets used.

Two Exploits Closed

Reports came in of players looting through walls, so a serverside check went in making it impossible.

The second is a better story. Ranged weapons were dead accurate as long as you weren't aiming down the sights, and some players worked out they could run a tool that magnified the pixels in the centre of their screen and land perfect headshots from across the map. The fix was to add an aim cone when not aiming down sights - a change almost nobody except the exploiters would notice, with a proper loose-aiming implementation planned later.

Also on the security side: players using Family Share are no longer allowed on a server if the owning account is banned.

Freelook, TrackIR and Synchronized Ambience

Networking head view direction to other clients hit a last-minute issue requiring third person animator changes, so head networking was disabled again. While in there, Andre decoupled head and body orientation across a range of code, opening up the option to do some things in the direction the player's head is looking and others in the direction their arms point.

TrackIR gained trackir.refresh and trackir.recenter console commands, automatic state refresh when opening the F2 menu (so forgetting to launch the TrackIR software before connecting is recoverable), support for the third head rotation axis, and more head movement freedom. That last one means you can now get a proper look at the floating hands holding your weapon in first person - which prompted Andre to start researching how to eventually render the whole player body in first person without losing the high-quality animations viewmodels provide.

The most quietly clever item is synchronized ambience. Andre's bugbear is playing with friends where one person hears a localised effect nobody else does, which in Rust was usually an ambient sound firing on one client only. Rather than networking every ambient event to every client - unworkable given how many of both there are - he built a clock that derives a seed from the ingame time and date, which are already synchronized, and is therefore guaranteed to hold the same state on every client. Events subscribe to it with a repetition interval and variance and fire simultaneously everywhere, with zero networking overhead. He suspected he might be the only person on the planet excited about this. He probably wasn't.

Weather and Loot Spawns

It was raining far too much, so overall rain probability was cut by a third, with a slight bias toward stronger rain in the temperate and tundra biomes when it does rain. Rain was also added to the arid biome at a less intense peak - something Andre noted he should have done when the new arid biome shipped earlier that month.

A loot spawn refactor replaced a large chunk of old code with something shorter that behaves much the same. The visible effect is that barrels in certain radtowns no longer spawn underground, meaning slightly higher barrel counts around radtown centres and the return of garbage cans to many of them. Server owners also get a batch of load-time errors fixed.

Exterior Walls, and Why They Aren't Live

Garry worked on exterior wall placement. It's in the game as a hidden blueprint that only admins can spawn, because the design question isn't settled.

The placement itself works well - free place anywhere on terrain, and if it detects another wall nearby it pulls closer and aligns, which feels organic. The problem is that he doesn't want them in the tier system like building parts, preferring you place them straight from your inventory, but letting players plonk down 1000 HP walls instantly isn't great either. The options are place-then-hammer, place-and-self-build, or place-a-frame-and-hammer - and hammering creates an inconsistency, because normal building already uses right click to upgrade, so "left click builds these, right click upgrades those" reads badly. Hence: not shipped yet.

Steam Inventory Expansion

The inventory system launched the previous week with only about seven items, so repeats were constant. This update added roughly 25 new clothing items - largely variants of existing pieces, but enough for real variety - including hoodies like the Black Hoodie, beanies such as the Red Beenie Hat, camo pants including Forest Camo Pants, and footwear like Tan Boots. These items also spawn in loot.

Garry addressed the community argument that skins should only be usable on servers where you've found the original item, so everyone starts a new server on equal footing. He wasn't convinced - blueprints already survive the monthly wipe, so long-time players always carry a reward forward, and the same is true in games like Battlefield where a year's play unlocks more than a fresh account has. Investing time and unlocking things is part of the game.

The concern he did accept was someone spending $20 on weapons, joining a server, and steamrolling everyone. That's the exact outcome they're avoiding, which is why anything touching armour or weapons would ship as reskins you unlock - to use a blue holosight you'd need to have unlocked a holosight on that server. He also floated a bigger question: running around radtowns hunting blueprints is a big part of the game right now, and they're not sure it should be.

Art, Shaders and Characters

Tom finished the crossbow and then went after the player eyes, which he'd wanted to fix for a long time. New textures plus an occlusion mesh that darkens the contact points between eyelid and eyeball make them look set into the face rather than stuck on. Integration across every head model was rolling out progressively. He also cleaned unwanted noise out of the female model's texture and fixed normal map bake errors, removing the dark rings around her eyes.

Diogo's new cloth shader - supporting the fuzzy fabric look - went onto the crossbow and all cloth clothing, with Tom planning to work through every weapon that has cloth on it. Diogo himself was mid-flight on shoreline wetness, getting rivers and lakes working with the new ocean water, and PVT compression and performance fixes, all destined for the developer branch before his holiday so there'd be room to roll back.

On the female model, Garry was blunt: everyone was being mean about its physical appearance, so they're having another run at it. Nothing to show yet.

Vince finished the tier 2 furnace, added a small crater to help track survey charge explosions, and reworked the foundations of most big deployables - quarry, pumpjack, the still-upcoming windmill - so they sit accessibly across all terrain types. He then started artwork on the compound walls.

Gooseman redid the third person attack animations for the two-handed weapons, added the two-handed baseball-mace and two-handed cleaver, and killed two irritating bugs: the third person bow-aiming animation looping constantly, and players sometimes playing a punch animation the instant they equipped a weapon. A recovery-from-wounded animation was in progress.

Howie continued on vehicles with the specific goal of making the modular system not look modular - his first attempt from the previous week read too much like it was built out of Lego, so wheel arches and bumpers went on to make the next two designs read as real vehicles.

Scott nearly finished the first set of bridges: 10 pieces that combine for plenty of variety, usable as long chains of broken sections and columns along a path to aid navigation, but also as a single column or foundation block you stumble across in a forest. Next he wanted biome-specific layers so they blend wherever they spawn - vegetation, moss and ivy in forests, sand accumulation in desert, snow and ice up north - a process that could then be applied to monuments and possibly towns.

Alex Rehberg did a cleanup round on things that had been bothering him: sand footsteps sound much better, grass footsteps are cleaner, the AK doesn't sound as flimsy. He also made sounds for the crossbow, pumpjack and oil refinery, and started refactoring the ambience system.

Other Fixes

• Protection properties for clothing now show in the inventory; the clothing slots moved position.
• Fixed the client regularly sending invalid Steam inventories to the server.
• Fixed clothing not always updating on the player model in the inventory.
• Fixed harvested food not disappearing straight away.
• Added a shadow light count slider to the F2 menu, setting how many lights besides the sun cast shadows - a major performance lever.
• Fixed error spam when graphics.shadowlights was less than 0.
• Made the player movement climbing state slightly less forgiving.
• Fixed a bug that could stop ladder climbing triggering the ladder animation state.
• Fixed airfield hangars and the warehouse floating above ground.
• Fixed beachside trees spawning on cliffs, though savegame-loaded trees stay there until the next wipe.
• Tweaked god ray colour around dawn and dusk. New skin shader added.

Maurino's plan for the following week was bug fixing, balancing, continued work on the new event, and, in his own words, dealing with the wrath of Reddit over the High Quality Metal change. The clothing variants added here are among the earliest entries in Rust's cosmetics catalogue - you can see how much it has grown on our skin tracker.