What's New in Rust's "Devblog 76" Update

Devblog 76 landed in September 2015 with three notable firsts: weapon attachments as a working system, Savas Island as Rust's first purpose-built no-build PvP map, and an open question to players about whether weekly patches were still serving anyone. Beds, bolt rifle manual cycling and projectile penetration through building parts rounded it out.

The Update Frequency Question

Garry put the numbers on the table. Facepunch was losing a day each week to packaging the patch and a couple more to putting out the fires it caused - roughly 20% of every week spent on the mechanics of patching.

He framed both sides honestly. Maybe weekly patches push the team and keep the game relatively stable. Or maybe they stress and overwork everyone into shipping unpolished, incomplete, untested, buggy features instead of taking time to play the game and fix underlying problems. The question posed to players was whether to keep going weekly or move to bigger monthly patches.

Weapon Attachments

Garry added weapon attachments, which required a substantial amount of back-end work to make function at all. The only attachment at launch is the silencer, with placeholder art. It works on most bullet weapons and adjusts the weapon's stats slightly - Garry pointedly declined to publish those numbers, leaving players to assume and get angry about them.

This is explicitly a proof of concept before the real work starts. Every weapon that can take an attachment currently has two slots, which will change. You access weapon slots by selecting the weapon in the inventory menu and dragging attachments to the slots at the top. One warning shipped with it: a networking issue meant the silencer would only appear visibly attached under specific circumstances, with a fix promised the next day.

Gooseman's next task was modelling the rest of the attachment family - red dot sights, zoom scopes, flashlights, silencers, bayonets and laser sights.

Savas Island

Petur's no-build combat map became playable and got a name: Savas Island. It ships with a single game mode, a soft King of the Hill - soft because there's no actual scoring yet, but the map is built so that occupying the hill is rewarded.

It's deliberately fairly symmetrical, so that if Facepunch ever implements a focused team-versus-team mode, a suitable map already exists. Petur was upfront that it hadn't been properly large-scale playtested, so the pacing might be off and loot spawn rates wrong - it needed to be played before it could be tuned. A standard Rust version of Savas was planned for players who want a full but very compact Rust experience.

Beds

Maurino implemented beds. They work like sleeping bags but are more expensive, must be placed indoors, and have a much quicker recharge rate. Letting multiple people authorize to a single bed was on the list for the following week.

Bolt Rifle Manual Cycling

The bolt rifle and shotgun wouldn't perform their cycling animation while aiming down sights, and the reason that mattered is specific to the bolt action: with extreme zoom and long-range targets, quickly unzooming to cycle is disorienting and makes it hard to judge how far off a missed shot was.

The fix is manual cycling. You click to shoot and the weapon fires while staying zoomed in. Click again at any time, or release right mouse, and the weapon cycles and readies the next shot. Maurino's own prediction was that making it easier to use probably means nerfing it the following week.

Projectile Penetration, Part 2

After a week of players testing body part penetration, Andre judged the system solid enough to extend to the world - carefully, to avoid unbalancing everything at once:

• Wood barricades can be penetrated by certain rifle bullets and shotgun slugs.
• Twig building parts can be penetrated by all bullet types.
• Twig building part health increased from 5 to 10 to compensate.
• Reduced the penetration power of arrows and throwables.

As with body parts, bullets deal less damage after penetrating something than they would on a direct hit.

Procgen10.1 and Reflections

The month's wiping update brought world generation tweaks: lowered field rocks, reduced waterside rock scale, per-biome adjustments to forest shape, size and frequency, cliffside topology for future object spawns, and support for empty topologies which matters for custom maps. Hapis Island also finally spawns barrels again.

Andre added clouds, sun, moon and stars to the reflection pass, which greatly improves specular highlights from the sun and makes water considerably more interesting to look at. He also fixed a long-standing issue where the sun and moon could slightly desync between client and server and visibly jump when resynchronized.

The Collider Limit Explained

Collider batching didn't make this update - it needed more dev testing, and since this was a wipe week the collider limit wouldn't bite for another 2-3 weeks anyway. But Andre gave a clear explanation of the underlying problem.

Moving to Unity 5 was expected to solve the 65k collider limit, and it did. However, a bug in the PhysX version Unity upgraded to introduces a new limit around 256k colliders, and Unity has no immediate plans to upgrade PhysX - so Facepunch has to solve it themselves. There's real complexity involved: once a collider is batched, you need a fast and efficient way to look up the original collider from the triangle that was hit. The backend was done, with the remaining work being to expose it in a form that doesn't make every programmer who touches it want to hang themselves.

Spectator Mode

Spectator mode had been neglected because it was mostly an admin tool, but modded servers were using it heavily and vehicles will eventually use a similar system, so it got a pass. First person now locks to the target's view angles, though their player model is still visible. Third person's odd offset from the player is fixed. And the long delay between switching spectate target and actually arriving - whose length depended on various server factors - is gone; you now start tracking the player immediately with their surroundings appearing around them.

Water and Graphics

Most of Diogo's work went to a separate branch for water 2.5: revamping local screen-space reflections to be performant enough for mainstream hardware, adding fog and scattering to reflections, getting rivers to match the sea, and improving underwater mode. Getting clouds, sun, moon and stars into the reflection map made a huge difference, causing some double-lighting and specular problems that were then sorted; extending it to all reflecting surfaces was floated for the future. Improved global water reflections did make it into this build.

Bug fixes delivered late the previous week:

• Fixed PVT going crazy in lower quality modes and showing black artifacts.
• Fixed PVT dropping to far too low a resolution, though this still needed work.
• Fixed incorrect SSAO on tree barks.
• Fixed the see-through walls problem caused by SSAO.
• Fixed water artifacts when switching weapon.
• Simplified Amplify Color shaders, which may help with warnings on some platforms.

VFX, Animation and Audio

Scott added smoke, embers and heat-haze to the large furnace and smoke to the small one, while Gooseman attached the frosty breath effect to players with code to activate it when the temperature drops. Scott also started adding effects to deployables - sparks, falling dust, dripping oil - and worked on beefing up the full screen damage overlays for better feedback on when and from where you're taking damage. On his list next: proper seed planting effects, effects for picking up small rocks and wood, improved stone harvesting, and dampening footstep effects on most terrains because they're too cartoony.

Gooseman completed relax gestures for several weapon holds - rock, unarmed, hatchet and shotgun - and improved the wounded animations with a smoother get-up transition.

Alex Rehberg added reverb to the static structures spawning on Procgen maps and Savas, which required building a system to activate and deactivate reverb zones as the local player enters an area, since Unity only supports spherical reverb zones and most buildings are not spheres. He gave gibbable objects the ability to specify an effect when they break, made new gib sounds for pumpkins and barrels, did a first pass on rocket launcher sounds, fixed small pump action shotgun issues, and matched the codelock's code-changing beeps to the in-world beep volume.

Dungeons and Art

Vince pushed the powerplant dungeon to a testable state and was happy with its flow - no position in the level seemed overpowered for offence versus defence, with medium to large props defining line of sight and direction. It won't make this month's wipe, but he was confident of landing it and two or three others next month in a greyboxed but playable state. He also built more industrial cover props and started the second dungeon, a train yard, noting that two weeks of greyboxing had given him a realistic sense of the final art workload - substantial, but manageable across several months.

Howie finished his set of 10 Steam trading cards, designed to reflect the major changes Rust has been through as well as a few things the community made famous, showing only a few as a teaser. Xavier finished the customizable pants started the previous week. Tom shared progress on the female character sculpt and asked for feedback, with the sculpt due to be finalised before moving to low poly.

Everything Else

• Pressing F4 takes a screenshot both with and without the HUD.
• Pressing F9 takes a screenshot at 5x your resolution, described as buggy as hell.
• The raid camera automatically hides the HUD and has smoothing.
• Tweaked viewmodel aiming to reduce jitter at lower framerates.
• Fixed muzzle flash positions on some weapons and worldmodel collisions for some dropped weapons.
• Fixed player eye brightness, and dropping a blueprint on an item sometimes combining or stacking them.
• The censor shader no longer falls back to a black rectangle on low shader LODs.
• Server events like the airdrop are no longer always triggered after a server restart.

The forward plan was straightforward: more weapon attachments from Garry, with Maurino joining to make attachment selection more robust and finally deliver a long-running PvE encounter that should have shipped weeks earlier, while Andre wrapped up collider batching and moved to tooling that makes Vince's dungeon work faster.