What's New in Rust's "Devblog 81" Update

Devblog 81 landed on 8 October 2015, a week after Devblog 80's rough release and its postmortem. Most of it was cleanup - daily updates, a forced server update and a lot of bug fixing - but it also gave the first proper look at the auto turret, walked back part of the bow nerf, and shipped an in-game bug reporter that was a direct response to the previous week's testing failures.

The Auto Turret

Maurino's turret was aimed squarely at offline raiding, giving defenders something that works while they're not logged in. He laid out the design constraints up front, expecting the usual reaction:

• A 180 degree firing arc - the back is vulnerable.
• Short range, roughly 20-30m.
• Vulnerable to bullets, melee and explosions.
• Needs to be loaded with ammunition.
• Can only be crafted with parts found in the world or from events, not from raw resources.

The hope was that it would change how people build - corridors, overhangs and approaches that make turrets awkward to attack - and make offline raiding require more thought. As always, nothing was framed as final; the plan was to keep adjusting until it was fun.

Bow Balance, Round Two

The bow changes from Devblog 80 had generated a lot of noise, so Maurino explained his reasoning in full. The bow was never intended as a strong PvP weapon - it was meant for hunting animals and giving newer players a ranged edge over other newer players. In Legacy Rust nobody considered using a bow in PvP at all; the current expectation had grown out of six months of the weapon being left alone.

A key detail he'd never made public: when implementing the bow he deliberately gave arrows a very large hit radius, far bigger than a bullet's, so you can miss by around half a foot and it still counts as a hit. That grace area existed precisely because the bow wasn't supposed to do high damage. The math as it stood: 50 damage with a large grace area, a 1.25s repeat rate, a default blueprint, and about five minutes of gathering to craft it. His point was that if players prefer a bow over a revolver, something is broken - possibly a wider problem with how hard mid-tier items are to obtain, which he flagged for investigation.

He also conceded the nerf overshot. The correction going in was to raise the headshot multiplier so an arrow still one-shots a true naked with a headshot, while reducing the grace radius so you have to actually aim. That was framed as a middle ground until a compound bow arrives and bow gameplay gets another proper look.

The F7 Bug Reporter

After a week in which most of the release's bugs were visible on the dev branch but nobody was playing it and there was no way to report anything, Garry added an in-game bug reporter. Press F7 to file a report, and it sends along your system specs, which lets Facepunch narrow problems down by server, version and hardware.

He also did a client performance pass. Blueprints were causing a freeze when opening the inventory menu, and grass displacement became optional. Updates were going out daily that week, so most players already had the changes - but their servers might not have, so a forced server update (not a wipe) went out that night so everyone would benefit.

The Memory Leak Hunt

The memory leak from the postmortem was still unsolved. The core obstacle remained that Unity gives no way to see how much memory the program is actually using at runtime - everything useful is hidden. Garry wrote a set of C++ functions to pull memory usage figures out, hoping a pattern would emerge. Diogo was working the same problem from the other side, planning to deploy profiling tools into native code specifically to track leaks there.

Collider Batching and Building Colliders

Andre had to disable collider batching the previous week after a last-minute issue with certain building parts whose colliders were no longer convex. He fixed it that Friday but left batching off by default so that the week's debugging couldn't be confused by it. Server owners approaching the collider limit could turn it on with batching.colliders 1 in their startup parameters, with a plan to re-enable it for everyone the following week.

Making building colliders batchable meant switching all buildings to concave colliders, which broke deployable placement on foundations - fixed in the hotfixes after the previous update. The upside is significant: concave colliders mean more accurate building colliders, including being able to walk around beneath wood and twig foundations. Andre also took on a set of long-standing exploits around building piece rotation while he was in there.

Elsewhere he fixed console issues - the console no longer refreshes its text when it isn't open, which used to cause performance problems whenever errors were being spammed, and it now retains all messages logged before it was first opened. He profiled the audio systems after the previous week's sound trouble and moved ambient sound loading onto a background thread, removing some significant framerate spikes. He also started on a prefab preprocessing warm-up option, since prefabs still go through a preprocessing step on first instantiation that can cost multiple milliseconds mid-game. Smaller fixes: random "Look rotation viewing vector is zero" warnings, the deprecated DDraw shader, the foundation pickaxe exploit, rocket and grenade damage against structures, and LOD grid errors when objects change cell.

Water 2.5 Held Back

Because of the previous week's stability problems, Water 2.5 was held out of stable until things settled. Diogo used the time on fixes: tessellation and displacement in low quality modes, white sprite artifacts caused by fog mishandling in additional light passes, water rendering order, SSAO artifacts caused by water, rivers incorrectly getting ocean wave displacement, and ocean rendering gaps. Further out on his list were particle fog, shore foam and a more heterogeneous distribution of shore wetness.

Art: Turret, Tool Cupboard and Tunnels

Vince deliberately stuck to art that couldn't destabilise anything while the coders fixed the build. He remade the tool cupboard, one of the game's ugliest pieces of temporary art - and noted that even though the long-term plan is to remove the tool cupboard entirely, the model will be reused as furniture for home decoration and storage. He then whiteboxed the sentry turret over one of the concepts to help Helk get it moving, with final art due within hours. As Vince pointed out, none of it was going live that week, given the focus on stability. The header image confirmed which turret concept won: number 3.

Howie built a central hub area for the underground military tunnels, the destination for the access tunnel he'd shown a few weeks earlier, and worked on more wood gate skins. He'd already started blocking out a second hub design, on the reasoning that multiple access tunnels can lead to multiple rooms.

Gooseman finished low-poly versions of the silencer, flashlight and laser sight, shown attached to an AK47, and lined up helicopter LOD models plus an M249 view model so players can pick one up and use it from a crashed helicopter. Tom finished the AK47 texture and set the materials up in Unity ready for LODs, and sculpted the makeshift holosight from Paul's concept. Taylor kept iterating on the male body sculpt and started on head proportions, aiming for something gaunt and malnourished rather than, in his words, too "default guy". Xavier lost the week to illness.

Effects and Audio

Scott added blood splat decals that apply to surfaces behind a character who's been shot, and stripped most footstep impact effects from animals, leaving snow, sand and water. He discovered the game already has a concept of "stab" and started building effects and decals for spear and knife hits, alongside stone bullet decals - tricky because they have to cover all stone types. Entry and exit bullet effects exist now, though nothing is wired up yet, since the blood impact system differs from the standard particle effect system. He also reduced the number of feathers a chicken sheds when flapping.

Alex Rehberg finished reducing garbage collection allocations in the sound and ambience systems, completed large gate open/close sounds and bullet ricochet sounds, made a sound for burying the small stash, and started on auto turret audio - power up, power down, destruction and turning. For fun he spent a day building ambience (wind, crickets, birds) entirely from synthesis with no pre-recorded sounds, and was happy enough with the results that they'll go into the game in the next ambience pass. He also dug into Unity's Audio Plugin SDK, since DSP effects are powerful - underwater muting is one - but Unity's built-in ones don't sound good enough to lean on.

The forward-looking notes were the interesting part. Maurino called the turret his last endgame task for a while, wanting to make the early-to-mid game last longer, give those players more to do, and make maps geographically meaningful enough to spread player tiers apart rather than throwing nakeds into endgamers constantly. Garry, meanwhile, decided Facepunch wouldn't wait for some future Unity release to improve AI - he planned experiments on making it less terrible, and adding zombies.