What's New in Rust's "Friday Devblog 12" Update

Friday Devblog 12 went out in June 2014. It was light on art, as Garry noted up front, but heavy on programming - and one of those items turned out to matter enormously, because this is the week the frame-and-hammer building system got its groundwork laid. Anyone who has ever placed a foundation frame and beaten it into existence with a hammer is looking at the direct descendant of what was built this week.

The building system

Rather than sprawling across the whole building set, the week's work laser-focused on a single block - the foundation - and got everything programmed that the design called for. The full loop as described:

• Craft or obtain a foundation plan item in your inventory.
• Drag it to the belt bar and equip it.
• Place a foundation frame in the world, with snapping.
• Place an unlimited number of frames from a single plan - no crafting each one.
• Frames cost 10 wood to place.
• Bash the frame with a hammer to make it real, needing 500 wood in total.
• Once built it can be damaged and destroyed, for up to +500 wood.
• Damaged blocks can be repaired, again up to +500 wood.
• Frames can use multiple models reflecting build state.
• Blocks can use multiple models reflecting damage state.
• Blocks support unlimited model sets, to avoid visible tiling.

The stated benefit over the old system - where players hauled finished walls and foundations around - was that this is a much more social way to build. The devblog was clear that everything shown was programmer art while dimensions were still being played with, and linked short videos of building, smashing and fixing in action.

Resource rescaling

The 500 wood foundation cost sounds enormous against the old numbers, which is why it came paired with a change the team had been considering for a while: a single tree now yields 1000 wood.

The plan was to apply the same rescaling across essentially all resources, because bigger numbers allow much finer granularity. With that headroom you can make hitting a tree with a Rock give 10 wood per swing and hitting it with an Axe give 50, or make demolishing a frame that cost 10 wood return 9 wood. None of that is workable if a frame costs 1 wood. As Garry put it, don't worry about the big numbers - everything balances out, and you can think of it as the same values with decimal points shifted.

UI and art

Some placeholder UI started appearing. Players were confused about not being able to move when they first joined a server, so a spawn screen was added to explain it, with the possibility of showing stats there later - how long you'd been asleep, your health, that kind of thing.

Bill built the menu screen, featuring a Rust character who, the post reassures us, is merely asleep. Petur was working on "Forest type 4", Dan was making models, Minh was animating, and Xavier and Meg were both deep in concept drawing.

Closing thoughts

The summary was reflective about the building system in particular. It had bugged the team for a while and had been the subject of long discussions that kept ending in disagreement and dissatisfaction with every proposed solution. The conclusion drawn was that sometimes it's better to make a decision than to dither and do nothing - if it turns out to be bad, it can always be changed later.

The post closed with the standard reminder of how the experimental branch worked at the time: every commit was live-tweeted, then automatically built by the build servers and pushed live to the experimental branch on Steam immediately. Everything described in the devblog was already playable the moment you read about it.