What's New in Rust's "Friday Devblog 21" Update

Devblog 21 arrived in August 2014, and its own one-line summary was "Doors, Keys and Fur." That undersells it a bit - this was the week Rust's experimental branch got the lock-and-key system that would define base ownership for years, along with the monuments framework that eventually gave procedural maps their landmarks. Garry also took a moment to remind readers that everything being written about was already playable on Steam right then, not a roadmap of things that didn't exist.

Doors and keys

You could now place doors in your doorways. Doors only opened one way, so the placement guide tried to make the swing direction obvious before you committed. The design was admittedly very "loggy" at that point - all the building components were due another art pass, and the priority was just making everything fit together.

The key system was a deliberate divergence from legacy Rust, built on the principle that nothing is owned. A door doesn't belong to you just because you placed it; it has no concept of an owner. Any unlocked door can generate a key: walk up, press use, choose create key, spend some wood, and 60 seconds later a key appears in your inventory. Lock the door and it can only be opened by that key or any copy made from it.

Garry laid out three points behind the design. First, it's emergent - the whole point of Rust is handing players tools and letting them make the game themselves. Why is a house yours? Because you built it, or because you hold the key? If someone kills you and loots the key, they can walk into your base, and that felt correct in the same way looting a corpse does. Second, password locks, number locks and fingerprint scanners weren't being scrapped - they were meant to arrive later as upgrades you'd pay for. Third, the whole thing was explicitly a process, not a finished design; exploitable edge cases would be evaluated as they surfaced, with the option to let players remove a lock from a door entirely so no keys could ever be made for it.

Monuments

The other structurally important addition was the monuments system. A script converts a hand-built scene - which can contain other prefabs like campfires and loot stashes - into a single prefab, which the procedural generator can then place on the map. It was a direct answer to the worry that procedural maps would have no landmarks. Statues were only the obvious use: waterfalls, power stations, airports, craters and volcanoes were all floated as possibilities. There was also an early hope of opening the system to modders, with servers picking community-made monuments from the Workshop to seed their generated maps.

Building, models and clothes

• Building on rocks now works, which makes bases feel more like castles.
• Bill remade the furnace model following the concepts from the previous week.
• Petur finished the lantern and got it into the game. There was no viewmodel yet, so it was deployable like a campfire. The team struggled to justify its place in the crafting tree and floated making it a rare loot-only item.
• Tom held off on holiday long enough to produce burlap clothing, part of the push to get a basic clothing set into the baseline.

Animals and the fur shader

Stag, wolf, boar and bear were all on the servers with their walking animations working correctly. The catch was that every one of them ran the wolf AI, so regardless of species they either wandered aimlessly or followed you aimlessly.

The team also played with a fur shader, and Goosey applied it to all the animals - with experiments on the player model too. Separately, ragdolls became able to inherit things attached to the living entity. So far that meant effects only, specifically blood, which means corpses keep bleeding after death.

Combat and interface

Weapon lowering went in: your weapon drops while running, jumping and swimming, Battlefield-style, which naturally means you can't shoot during any of those.

The F2 menu was fixed on OSX and Linux, where it had been broken for a long time. The cause turned out to be the JavaScript onmousedown hook firing twice on those platforms, so every click toggled an option off and straight back on. Non-Windows players could finally make the game look worse in exchange for framerate.

Icon rendering and website integration

Two tooling wins closed out the week. Garry wrote an item icon rendering system on a whim, tired of the placeholder icons - essentially the same approach he'd built for Garry's Mod years earlier. Unity's alpha handling was unreliable, with some shaders writing alpha when they shouldn't and others failing to when they should, so he brute-forced it: render the item against red, green and blue backgrounds, then compare pixels across the three. A pixel that differs is transparent, and comparing the colours yields both the transparency level and the colour of whatever overlays it, producing perfectly rendered icons with perfect transparency.

He also wrote an editor script that talks directly to the item admin website, downloading all item definitions, icons and phrases and dropping them in the right folders while deleting stale ones. The old process - export, download a zip, extract each folder to a specific place - only took two minutes but was pure robot work, and it had been pushing him toward hand-editing JSON item definitions and backporting changes instead.

Concepts and what came next

Concept Corner had Howie imagining how buildings would progress through their tiers, and Meg working on sleeping bags. Looking ahead, the plan was to flesh things out by porting more items that already existed in legacy, implementing a batch of Dan's earlier creations, and starting on the building upgrade process - using programmer art until Bill was back. The door work had required a fair amount of internal restructuring, and with that done the item system came out considerably more useful.