What's New in Rust's "Devblog 83" Update

Devblog 83 went out on 22 October 2015, with Maurino writing it because Buck was on holiday. The sentry turret finally became playable - on the dev branch rather than in the patch, which was itself a sign of the post-Devblog-80 caution setting in. Alongside it came throwable rocks, an expanded family of signs and frames, footprint decals, and shadow optimisations aimed squarely at the framerate drops around big bases.

Sentry Turret Goes Live on Dev

Maurino finished most of the sentry turret and pushed it to the development branch. He'd already spotted a number of bugs, but described them as mostly easy fixes, with the plan to keep updating it from feedback and have it balanced and ready for the following week's update. The one hard rule confirmed here: you can only craft it from components found at helicopter crash sites and supply drops - no route from raw resources. A full explanation of how it works was promised for the next devblog.

Throwable Rocks

Alex Webster's contribution was small and immediately beloved: throwable rocks. The stated hope was that it adds something to melee and makes new starters more of a threat, with the honest caveat that they'd see how it played out. His fallback justification was better: at minimum it makes the rock more entertaining in beach fights, defending towers, games of rockball, and writing S.O.S. in the sand. More throwable things were promised for the following week.

Signs, Frames and Banners

Vince changed plan after a conversation with Garry, on the reasoning that new content derived from existing tech is worth more right now than gate skins that can't be implemented yet. Signs had been in the game a long time and were already a strong feature, so he expanded the family to cover different kinds of player:

• Hanging signs for shop owners.
• Signposts and community signs for villagers.
• Painting frames in several new sizes for the artistically inclined.

He also changed how the larger wood signs are placed, requiring more precision from the player. That's a deliberate anti-abuse measure: signs were being used as improvised cover and to block access to radtowns and monuments. If you want to place a sign somewhere other than a vertical surface, the standing variants are now the answer. Vince acknowledged the underlying cause - people used wooden signs as cover because the actual cover deployables aren't good enough - and flagged re-evaluating how much cover those provide as a possible next task. He was already working on banners, in two forms: one to hang on walls, one to stand atop a flag pole, both paintable like signs and big enough to display a clan's colours.

Footprints and Shadow Optimisations

Andre began implementing the footprint decals Scott had built. All animals and players now leave footprints, though equipment can't yet change the footstep type, so barefoot player footprints had to wait. While in that code he refactored footstep sound spawning and hooked up the stab impact effects.

The bigger win was shadow performance. Andre added simplified proxy shadow casting geometry to all building blocks, dramatically cutting the triangles processed every frame, then applied Facepunch's custom geometry batching to the shadow casters on top of that. Both yielded decent gains in his test scene. The specific promise: if your framerate mostly drops around big buildings, this is the change you want. The same approach was expected to help keep the far more complex new dungeons smooth once they shipped.

A small mandatory update went out mid-week with a batch of fixes: roof building block conditional models, foundation step placement being blocked in certain situations, the triangle floor deploy volume brought in line with the triangle foundation, UI warmup to reduce stuttering when opening certain panels, upgrades and rotation allowed inside certain building deploy volumes, more descriptive rotation and upgrade error messages, projectile ricochet chance being far higher than intended, sound voice limiter priority sorting disabled in favour of first in first out for now, the campfire building prevention collider reaching beneath the campfire, and door colliders not being solid on the server immediately after placement.

Linux Crash and Memory Leaks

Diogo tracked down a Linux crash at the startup self-check that was stopping the game launching entirely on that platform. The cause was a Unity issue producing an unexpected change in the order of operations during graphics initialisation. It launches properly now, though some non-critical optimisations were temporarily disabled as part of the fix.

He then returned to memory leak analysis and eliminated every relevant leak he could find. None were individually serious, but they add up. The larger, more unpredictable leak was still suspected to be the UI-related problem Unity fixed in 5.2.2f1. He also sorted a nasty rendering issue where transparent objects - placement gizmos, the holosight, powerlines - were drawn under rivers instead of over them.

Underwater and Explosion Effects

Scott started a whole set of water effects, with the goal of making water feel consistent across every interaction a player has with it. Underwater bullet trails and underwater bubbles were both in progress, and he and Diogo were talking about fogging and reflections to make the submerged environment more accurate and moody. Diogo, for his part, moved onto improving underwater surface rendering for a submerged player - something repeatedly postponed and, in his words, in desperate need of attention. Scott also did a pass on the basic rocket and launcher effects and continued the explosion work with a basic rocket explosion.

Audio and the Ambience Problem

Alex Rehberg mostly finished the auto turret sounds, with a few details left. He also laid out how Rust's ambience system worked and why he wanted to change it. Currently a handful of ambience nodes surround and follow the camera's position but not its rotation, checking weather and biome to decide what to play. It works well enough - standing at the edge of a forest, you hear wind through leaves on only one side of you, which is a nice result.

The downsides are that playing many loops at once means added detail gets lost, and because ambience comes from the nodes rather than from in-game objects, walking up to a bush in a windy field produces no leaf rustle from that bush at all. He described these as not big problems but ones he'd love to eliminate. Elsewhere: polish on helicopter sounds, a first pass at landmine sounds, and stone tier construction sounds, with underwater sounds queued to accompany Scott's effects.

Art and Concepts

Gooseman finished the high-poly M249 and was running it through Mudbox for fine details - screws, dents, scratches - before retopologising to low poly, baking normals and texturing.

Tom chose attachments over a new weapon, starting with the AK47. He's adapting parts from Paul's alternative AK concept into swappable alternatives for the existing rifle, with good progress on a new stock and sculpting begun on an alternative grip and trigger. His argument for it was that it brings more personality to the game and encourages players to treat a specific rifle as their own.

Paul continued with the drone concepts, taking thumbnails into 3D and aiming for a "big brother is watching" feel by basing the body on CCTV camera cues. He also clarified the semi-auto rifle from the previous week: people were calling them M1 Garands or M14s, but they're meant to be their own scratch-built DIY thing - firing semi-auto, perhaps a 3-shot burst at most, but clunky and unreliable. His broader position is that guns should be rarer, and the ones most achievable should be very ghetto and unreliable. He was finalising the semi-auto design and preparing a three-quarter view for Tom.

Howie explored bicycles, imagining them working modularly like the cars, then moved onto player-made decorations and monuments. His conclusion after a first pass was that the smaller decorative items worked - a head on a pike, a training dummy - while larger totem poles, stone statues and metal sculptures took too much creativity and personal investment away from the player. So he reframed it: players earn totem pole pieces for completing specific goals and milestones, then stack those pieces into their own unique totem pole. Each one tells that player or group's history, and the rarest pieces become bragging rights. He wanted to expand the idea with more stackable pieces and consider other forms a player-made achievement monument could take.

Taylor reworked the player character's head from feedback, giving it a normally sized forehead, with the skull and brow shapes still to refine. The skin is deliberately baby-smooth at this stage to keep the mesh editable, with detail layers to come on top. Body work continued on finding a balance of muscle and fat, alongside low-poly work that lets him bake maps quickly for real-time testing.

Andre's plan for the following week was to finish footprints and shadow optimisations for dev branch testing and then move onto the building and stability overhaul, while Maurino wanted to experiment with early and mid-game improvements and clear out a batch of very old, stubborn bugs that kept getting ignored.