What's New in Rust's "Friday Devblog 22" Update

Devblog 22 shipped in late August 2014 under the banner "Crafting, Cursors, Clothes and Caves." It was a week of loose ends rather than one headline feature: the lock system got split out into a proper craftable item, the crafting menu and interaction tooltips were rebuilt, network view distance was cranked way up, and caves appeared for the first time. It also closed with the announcement that the whole project was about to move to Unity 5.

Building changes

Walls on walls was the big structural change. Previously a wall could only sit on a foundation or a floor, which meant that if you built a staircase up the side of a wall you couldn't put a second wall on top. Now you can, opening the door to warehouse-sized buildings.

Going the other way, frames on frames was restricted under certain conditions. You can no longer skeleton out an entire base in frames and then wander around filling it in - you have to place foundations, build them, and only then place wall frames on top. The blog's own prediction was that this would seem obviously correct to everyone and still end up cited as the single reason someone was quitting Rust.

Locks become items

The lock and key system from the previous week was reworked. Rather than every door automatically having a lock built in, the lock became its own craftable item - equip it in your belt bar, aim at a door, and use it. Making it modular was groundwork for having different lock types later. The implementation was described as raw and due plenty of refinement.

Crafting menu and cursor UI

The crafting menu was rounded off with many more categories down the left-hand side, and hovering over an item now shows its ingredients. It was explicitly a checkpoint rather than a finish - the UI was earmarked for periodic review as more items arrived and as blueprints stopped being handed out automatically in favour of research.

A new cursor UI gave you tooltips when looking at anything usable, in three forms:

• A single-action tooltip, where pressing use performs that action immediately instead of opening a menu.
• A pickup tooltip that tells you what the item is before you take it.
• A multiple-option tooltip, which opens a menu on use.

The result made general interaction feel considerably more polished, though the visual design itself was still placeholder.

Clothing and armour

Clothes slots now function, so you can't wear five pairs of trousers at once. The slot system was built with the future in mind, using bitmasks and supporting multiple layers - at this stage, under and over.

More significantly, Tom's Metal Chest Plate went in as the first piece of real armour: it stops bullets killing you, because it's made of metal. Clothing with actual mechanical purpose was flagged as something the team was excited about and wanted much more of.

View distance, caves and items

Network view distance was increased dramatically. Entities are only sent over the network when you're near them - there's no point transmitting a player running around four miles away with no way to interact. Pushing that radius much further means looking into the distance now shows trees, buildings, fires, players, resources and animals. The obvious cost was client performance, which the team acknowledged and was working through, treating the expanded distance as a useful stress test for optimisation work they'd have needed to do eventually anyway.

Andre implemented caves. They weren't fully procedural yet - they used the monuments system introduced the week before - and the immediate goal was verifying that terrain clipping behaved correctly.

On items, a batch got blueprints and became craftable, skulls were added, and animals started dropping cloth, which finally made sleeping bags craftable. Censorship also got fixed: players were being censored even with trousers on, a censornudity 1 console toggle was added, and censorship was turned off by default.

Concept art

Paul concepted a new torch - third attempt - and Dan started modelling it. Howie worked on building parts. Meg drew meat, exploring the idea of meat models that visually identify which animal they came from, plus helmets and masks; the team wanted masks to actually obscure your vision when worn and were hunting for a design that made that interesting. She also produced an in-depth sleeping bag concept. Both artists' images carried the Rust logo, after apparently too many people assumed concept art posted on the Rust Trello and the Rust devblog was for some other game.

Unity 5

The week closed on the move to Unity 5, targeted for completion within a week. The framing was deliberately cautious - an engine upgrade doesn't automatically make everything look and run ten times better, so nobody should expect visible change. What Unity 5 did bring was a list of things the project badly needed: a 64-bit editor, ending the cycle of closing and reopening to dodge out-of-memory crashes; a PhysX update lifting the 65,000 collider object limit, which meant servers wouldn't need wiping anywhere near as often; and physics reported by many as more than twice as fast. On top of that, the physically-based shader removed the need to write custom shaders for many things, and SpeedTree support promised the best-looking and best-performing trees in the industry.

Unity 5 had only entered beta two days earlier, so the honest warning was to expect crashes and unresponsive servers. The reasoning was simple: they were in development, and jumping on the beta is what they'd do regardless of being in early access.