What's New in Rust's "Friday Devblog 15" Update

Friday Devblog 15 landed in early July 2014 and it's the week experimental Rust stopped being a place where you walk around and became a place where you can starve, bleed out or drown. The metabolism system went in with heart rate, calories and hydration, eating arrived, the bow was implemented, and bullets were redesigned as real projectiles rather than ray traces. As Garry summarised it, there are a lot more ways to die.

Metabolism

The metabolism system - a central mechanic that had been missing from experimental entirely - was hooked up. You now have a virtual heart rate that rises depending on what you're doing, and a fast heart rate burns calories and water. Once your calories run low you get hungry, and if you keep not eating you start to starve, which costs you health.

Bleeding was added: start bleeding and you'll slowly lose health until it either heals on its own, you bandage yourself, or you die. Oxygen came in too, so staying underwater too long means drowning. And you can now get wet, which makes you colder than normal - at this point with no real positive or negative effect, but the stated intention was for wetness to eventually affect the items you're holding in some way.

The controversial part: all of this continues while you're offline. Garry acknowledged people would be upset about that and said they'd experiment with alternatives - like a slowed metabolism while asleep - if it didn't work out.

Eating and cannibalism

You can right click to eat things. It's enabled per item, so not everything edible supported it yet. Eating affects your metabolism, and depending on what you consume you'll gain health, calories, hydration - or poison.

You can also chop up another human's body for meat and bones, exactly as you would an animal, then cook and eat the result. The devblog anticipated controversy and defended the design on consistency grounds: their body is in the world and you can eat every other living thing you kill, so meat is meat. Importantly, there's no artificial punishment attached - eating human flesh won't turn your name red, won't put a balaclava on you and won't make you evil. You're just surviving. The one caveat offered was to check they don't have Kuru first.

Weapons

The bow and its firing mechanics were implemented. Ironsights were missing, but arrows can be picked back up after being shot. Core mechanics done, polish pending.

Bullet weapons got a fundamental design change for the reboot: they work exactly like the bow. Instead of a simple ray trace, bullets are actual projectiles, which means they're affected by gravity and wind. That opens up a lot of design space for different ammunition types down the line.

Corpses and wolves

Having previously added looting of sleeping and living players, this week added looting dead ones. It's the same behaviour as the legacy version's loot sack, except now you're looting the uneaten corpse itself. Corpses are removed after 6 hours, described as a temporary measure - ideally they'd stay around forever.

If you run into a wolf in experimental you can now kill, harvest and eat it. Less tasty than a human, the devblog notes, but it puts up less of a fight.

Rendering

Andre reported that the game hadn't been using 'real' tonemapping, and that's now corrected. The game is also blending between different colour gradings across the time of day, which produced nice twilight clouds as a bonus. Petur brought back auroras - a callback to the early alpha bug where the sky went haywire and everyone screenshotted it - this time in the north deliberately.

The server memory leak

The server had a bad memory leak, and the hunt for it got a proper write-up. Garry wrote a script dumping stats to a CSV every minute, imported it into Excel and graphed it. MemUnity - memory used by Unity on the C++ side - was climbing wildly, while MemMono, the garbage-collected managed memory, was fine. That immediately ruled out garbage collection as the cause. Plotted against it were the sleeper count (players who had joined and left) and the live player count.

The culprit: each player has an Audio Source for playing their mic input. On the server these are never used and never initialized - but simply existing on the gameobject was enough to send memory climbing. The fix was a script to cull them on the dedicated server.

Animation and art

Goosey continued with the wolf animations, now with creepy sounds attached, and started work on deer animations. Alex finished porting the remaining 30% of animations to the new rig and set up an animation template and master player rig file for future work. He also started chasing down seams between parts of the player mesh - a fix that turned into a saga involving mismatched normals between the head and neck, weight differences, Tom confirming the same normal mismatch existed in Max (ruling out a Max/Maya interoperability problem), and then redelivered head files arriving with different vertex counts that broke the blendshape, followed by further deliveries with different point orders. The resolution was Alex handing his existing assets to Tom to fix the normals on directly, giving matching heads to rebuild the blend and skinning from. Dan, meanwhile, was nearly finished with the saw blade axe.

Closing

The week got noticeably closer to the baseline the team were aiming for. Garry caught a touch of flu midweek and used the time for cleaning, refactoring and fixing, which included adding all the standard admin commands like kicking and banning - the server is much friendlier as a result. The experimental server was handed to Multiplay to play with, though with a request not to start renting servers out until everyone was happier with how things fit together.