What's New in Rust's "Devblog 97" Update

Devblog 97 arrived in February 2016 and is mostly a balance and security patch. A code lock brute-forcing script doing the rounds in the cheating community got shut down hard, two badly out-of-line pieces of gear got corrected, and a batch of performance work - prefab pooling, culling, deployable placement - landed alongside it.

Code lock brute force, closed

Brute force code lock guessing scripts had spread through the cheating community and caused a lot of noise. Investigating turned up several exploitable problems, all now sealed. Two changes do the heavy lifting: you can no longer do anything with locks while dead, and every wrong guess deals escalating shock damage - five, then 10, then 15 and upward. Stop guessing for a while and the damage decays back to five. Between them, brute forcing a combination in any reasonable amount of time becomes effectively impossible, with the values open to further adjustment if needed.

Metal facemask nerf

When the skeleton damage multipliers were adjusted in the damage predictability pass, armour wasn't fully accounted for - which is how players ended up surviving six headshots. The Metal Facemask had its bullet protection lowered by about 20% to bring it in line with the chestplate. This was explicitly a stopgap until per-attire health values arrive.

External walls and gates rebalanced

External gates and walls turned out to be completely out of whack. They had no building shell protection, and their health had been artificially inflated with temporary numbers to compensate - to the point where destroying one took eight C4 or 16 rockets. Their entire purpose is to let you build a compound without laying foundations and walls, not to be the toughest thing on the map.

So their health was drastically reduced and building shell protection added. In practice that means you can't pick through them as effectively, but stone external walls now take three C4 and wood takes 1.2 C4. The cost of wood gates was also slightly increased. Their LOD ranges got a tweak, and invisible external wall gate doors at distance were fixed.

Traps stop littering the world

Traps were spawning commonly in barrels and radtowns, so new players would deploy them at random and leave the map covered in useless traps and frustrating deaths. Now only the trap blueprint drops, not the deployable - if you want traps, you pay the resources to craft them.

Decay and building systems

Decay had been unreliable for a while: the decay points meant to disable it on internal foundations didn't work consistently and were slow to check server-side. That's fixed, so foundations decay slower when other foundations are attached to them. It uses the same entity socket linking backend built for the new stability and conditional model systems, which is now paying off across a range of building features.

Conditional Models 2.0 is finished - a lot more fiddly than expected, mostly around performance and memory - and now runs on the server as well as the client with good performance on both. It was held out of this patch for lack of testing, with a full write-up promised for the following week.

Performance work

Prefab pooling was re-enabled. It had been added months earlier and disabled after sound system problems; those were fixed this week working with the audio side. It's a major contributor to frame rate consistency.

Culling also improved. Rust had always had to cull objects very early because the per-object overhead was significant regardless of poly count. The batching improvements from a few weeks earlier removed almost all of that overhead, so the super-early culling of barricades was removed - you can hide behind barricades from distant observers again. Invisible barricades at distance were fixed, along with culling not working properly on some objects.

All deployables were converted to the newer object placement (planner) system. Besides the quality-of-life gains and several fixed deployment exploits, the practical improvement is that deployable placement guides no longer snap to red when they get too close to another object - they stay at the last valid position found, which makes lining up boxes far easier. It also clears the way to delete a pile of ancient code.

Anti-cheat

Automatic kicking on high anti-hack violation scores is now enabled by default, after a long test period on official servers with no unresolved false positives. Server owners can still configure the behaviour through the anti-hack convars. EAC was updated, a DDOS amplification exploit in the Steam query was fixed, and calling certain RPCs while dead was blocked.

Skins are back

Skins were added with this patch, and the set from this era includes pieces like Argyle Scavenger and the seasonal Valentine Balaclava. Weapon mod icons were updated at the same time.

Graphics and rendering

• Improved anti-aliasing and an improved, optimized rainfall shader
• Improved skin shader, now being used on the reworked player models
• Shore wetness brought back and improved
• Important textures tweaked to work with trilinear and anisotropic filtering
• Increased resolution on props that had extremely low resolution textures, and fixed low resolution terrain rocks
• Fixed shader bugs in large monuments and runtime shader errors causing invisible objects on Linux
• Helicopter windows and rotors, and horse hair, now fade into fog properly
• tree.quality and mesh.quality can now exceed 100, pushing back billboard and cull distances

Art, audio and concepts

The flamethrower was rigged, animated, and given sounds and special effects - close to in-game but not shipped yet. Dungeon art moved quickly: brick and plaster wall sets, concrete ground slabs, rubble pile sets (junk, concrete, brick and coal in various sizes) and dirt accumulation textures for where walls meet the ground, all held for the next wipe cycle given how much the dungeons themselves are changing. The Powerplant layout was reworked to be more compartmentalised - instead of seeing straight through it, pockets reveal themselves as you progress, which also sets up occlusion culling volumes later.

Melee concrete and rock impact sounds went through several revisions before landing somewhere satisfying, given how often you hear them, with more recording underway for item physics, pickup and place sounds, more varied footsteps and more birds. The reactive target was simplified from the self-resetting concept into a version players reset manually, then modelled. More placeable object concepts using tyres were sketched, and another racial variation - an Asian female head - was completed.

Admin and console additions

New commands: ent who echoes an entity's creator for admins, clear clears the console, and copy copies the console to the clipboard. pool.prefabs and pool.assets now take an optional filter argument. Rust also updated to Unity 5.3.2p3.