What's New in Rust's "Devblog 80" Update

Devblog 80 landed on 1 October 2015 with a wipe attached. Two weeks after the attack helicopter's debut, players had comprehensively worked out how to kill it, so this patch was largely about making it a real threat again - including a napalm mechanic built specifically to stop one clever exploit. Around that, the bow got reined in, small stashes came back, and most of the fortnight went into optimisation work that shows up mainly as fewer stutters and much faster server saves.

Helicopter 2.0

Maurino opened by admitting the community had absolutely wrecked the thing - he'd watched it get destroyed repeatedly without it claiming a single life. The root cause was a bug: the chopper had 100% penetration values set, so bullets passed through it like a laser beam and damaged every hitbox inside. You could stand underneath it and destroy the main rotor and engine in one go. That's fixed, and the rest of the balance pass went further:

• Door guns fire slightly faster and do slightly more damage.
• A larger gap between door gun bursts.
• 2.5x health for the tail rotor and engine.
• Smoke on the weak spots now appears when they're at 50% health, rather than after a single hit.
• Tool cupboards can no longer be used to prevent rocket strafes.
• Loot crates are genuinely unlootable until the flames go out.

The headline addition was napalm. Some players had realised they could circle a single piece of cover indefinitely and solo the helicopter. Now, when you deal a significant chunk of damage to it, the helicopter blankets the area that damage came from in napalm, forcing you to relocate. The intent was to make it take several players holding multiple positions to bring one down.

You can also now harvest the helicopter's gibs for metal fragments and high quality metal. They're hot on arrival, though - the advice was to wait around 8 minutes before trying.

Bow Rebalance

The other contentious change was the bow, which Maurino noted people were already up in arms about on Reddit without having tried it. The changes:

• Bow repeat rate is slightly slower.
• The bow has a little more aim sway.
• Bow headshots score 120% damage instead of 300%.
• The crossbow fires arrows with much faster velocity - a 50% bonus instead of 20%.
• HV arrows are thinner than wood arrows, so you need to be more accurate with them.

The reasoning was straightforward: the bow had some of the highest DPS in the game, was the easiest weapon in the game to obtain, and could one-shot a fully armed player. Hunting geared players with a bow was still viable - it just takes two hits now instead of one. It also still kills a naked in one shot to centre mass.

The Small Stash Returns

Maurino brought back the small stash: a very small storage container aimed at early-game players who can't build a base yet but still want somewhere to keep their gear. It's a default blueprint. You place it on terrain, fill it, and there's a menu option to bury it. Once buried it's completely invisible to everyone, including you - the only way to reveal it is to be within 2 metres and stare directly at it for several seconds. With that shipped, Maurino's stated plan was to finish a couple of endgame tasks and then give the early game a lot more attention.

Garbage Collection and Server Saves

Garry's section opened with a shot at everyone demanding optimisation, because that's exactly what the fortnight had been spent on. His protobuffer work reached its conclusion: changing some classes to structs, pooling objects, avoiding foreach, avoiding new byte[] allocations and avoiding creating BinaryWriters where possible. The result is that writing network messages is now totally garbage-free, and reading only allocates when reading a string, which he couldn't get past.

The scale is worth noting: this saves anywhere from a few kilobytes to a few megabytes of garbage every frame. That makes garbage collection far rarer, which means servers stop freezing for roughly 1.5 seconds every 20 seconds to clean up.

The second big win was saves. Servers save state every 5 minutes so a crash or restart resumes near where it left off. Fine early in a wipe, but around 200,000 entities it was taking 4 to 5 seconds. During that window other objects - the helicopter, the plane - freeze in place, and when the server responds again you're rubber-banded back to where you were 5 seconds earlier. Through caching, the pooling above and some cunning, Garry got that down from 5 seconds to 0.1 seconds in testing. Since even that's a small blip, auto saves moved from every 5 minutes to every 10.

Prefab Pooling and Rendering Fixes

Andre finally shipped prefab pooling, something planned for a very long time. Creating and destroying objects is expensive in general and especially in Unity - instantiating allocates heavily, that memory has to be collected when the object dies, and the instantiate itself is slow. The first iteration covers effects, decals, dynamic decor, building blocks and sounds, all systems that had been spamming instantiates on the assumption pooling would eventually absorb the cost. For players it means less stuttering from fewer garbage collections and higher framerates, because as long as the pool has a recyclable object the slow instantiate never happens at all.

With the big allocation problems handled, smaller ones became visible. Grass mesh rebuilds got significantly reduced dynamic allocations thanks to new low-overhead Unity mesh rebuild overloads. And a cliff mesh LOD setup problem meant cliffs were being rendered at full quality at any distance - a fix that likely mattered a lot for some players' framerates.

Other fixes from Andre: arrows being almost impossible to fire through window bars, a crash in the status console command, building stability issues caused by collider batching, entity collision events not resolving batched colliders, water level tests for entities with zero bounds, and terrain alpha cutoff range being too far away. Pooling support was added to all LOD components, an AssetPool optimised for Unity assets was introduced, and CraggyIsland, the dev test map, got an update.

Water 2.5 Ships

Diogo stopped tweaking and merged Water 2.5. The recap: local reflections on all water surfaces, rivers using the new water shader, a batch of long-standing bugs fixed, and runtime memory allocations cleaned up. His next-week list was the usual post-merge shape - fixing whatever the new water code surfaces, more water tweaks, and native code updates to clear some Unity 5.2 warnings.

Sound Overhaul

Alex Rehberg fixed something subtle but pervasive. Unity uses a linear volume scale while human hearing is logarithmic, so halving a sound's volume in Unity doesn't sound half as loud. Beyond making editor sliders dominated by loud levels, it meant fades spent too little time at low volumes and sounded abrupt. With that corrected, ambience transitions and all distance crossfades are smoother - the helicopter propellers being the easiest place to hear the difference.

He also started pooling the sound system, fixing bugs that came from recycling sound objects, so every prefab spawned to play a sound is now pooled. Alongside that: first pass wooden and metal door impact sounds, first pass thunder, a longer audible range on the rocket flight sound, a toned-down wounded heartbeat, bush rustle tweaks, adjusted gunshot and explosion ducking, third-person reload sounds re-set-up, a calmer reverb tail after each shot so multiple simultaneous gunshots don't sound ridiculous, mixer tweaks, and starts on large compound gate open/close sounds and bullet ricochet sounds. This devblog's poll asked players what they thought of the wounded scream.

Doors, Gates and Skins

Vince came back from vacation to mostly invisible but foundational work: replacing the procedural animations on gates and player building doors with bespoke ones, and putting all doors and gates on a shared hierarchy and animation pool. That's specifically groundwork for easy updates and skins for doors and gates later. The animation work was slated for the following patch. He also confirmed the dungeon branch wasn't going into main for this patch, since the dungeons still needed work once Andre's terrain features arrived - most likely landing the next wipe cycle. In the meantime he wanted to explore gate skins and player building block skins, described as wallpapers.

Howie, also back from vacation, took a first run at gate skins. The complication is that Facepunch wanted skins that work on both stone and wood gates, and those two frames differ, so his initial designs probably wouldn't carry across. He planned to focus on the doors themselves and the locking mechanism design while reusing elements from those concepts, before returning to the abandoned military tunnels.

Weapon Add-ons and Characters

Gooseman revisited the holosight model where the dents looked off, added wear to the red dot, and built the rail pieces that act as the intermediary between an add-on and the gun it attaches to. Paul explored sniper scope concepts - a retrofitted telescope, a glass bottle (his own caveat: fun, maybe not 100% workable as game logic), mounted magnifying lenses, and DIY builds using copper piping, pipe clips and cloth binding. He kept attachment points simple, a metal plate or a bolt, so a scope can plausibly stick onto any gun and you can build something absurd like a silenced sniper P250.

Tom pushed on the AK47 rework. The extra UV space benefits anyone making AK skins, and he planned a tutorial on transferring old skins onto the new mesh. He also began LODs for the female character. Taylor started looking at reworking the male character model, mostly rebalancing body proportions while everything is still loose. Xavier's contribution was customisable shorts, with more gaudy clothing promised.

Savas Island Update

Petur's SavasIsland_koth update went live with this patch. You can no longer build directly over the construction hut, and hill owners have a way to clear existing building parts thanks to a new rapid-spawn C4 platform that defenders can build around and fortify - the goal being to stop hill bases growing out of control. He also produced an updated map, with the clarification that good and bad loot boxes appear everywhere, but a metal crate is far rarer on the beach than in the dome, and the central ammo farm remains the only source of exotic ammo.

Other Notable Changes

The changelist has a healthy tail beyond the headline items. Roof blocks are both cheaper and tougher. NPCs die of starvation more often, and calorie consumption went up. Ragdolls now inherit effects, so blood no longer vanishes the instant someone dies. You can no longer loot a corpse from far away. Arrows, spears and sign world models got gibs. On the server side, time warnings now indicate whether a garbage collection caused them, the console shows garbage collection counts, errors and exceptions are highlighted red and log full stack traces, developer 1 only works for developers and admins, and EAC was updated.

Between the pooling, the protobuffer work and the save time collapsing from 5 seconds to 0.1, Devblog 80 is one of the least visually interesting and most quietly important patches of that year. Andre's closing note was that after weeks of back-end work he wanted to get back onto map features - which is where the next stretch of devblogs headed.