What's New in Rust's "Friday Devblog 25" Update

Devblog 25 shipped in mid-September 2014, billed as "Animal Piles, Triangles and Reflections." The standout was the triangular foundation - a concept-art idea that solved the "every Rust base is a box" problem with almost no new parts - alongside a serious push toward basic playability: you now start with just a rock, and you can no longer reach through walls to loot someone.

Triangle foundations

Howie concepted using triangular foundations and floors to make buildings less square, and the blog was unusually effusive about it. The elegance is in what it doesn't require: you get curved buildings, wall lengths all stay at 3 meters, and the only genuinely new parts needed are the foundations themselves. It was singled out as a perfect example of the impact a concept artist can have on the game.

Garry prototyped it quickly and it worked exactly as expected. The implementation was very early but was pushed out for testing straight away, with the promise of refinement over the following couple of weeks.

Playability changes

Two changes moved the game closer to being properly playable. You now start only with a rock, with the intent that everything else in the game is reachable from that point. And using things through walls was fixed - previously you could loot someone's boxes, or loot a sleeping player, with a wall between you and the object.

The campfire also starts with a bit of wood inside to get you going, a much-requested return of legacy behaviour.

Animals and melee

Andre fixed the animal pile. When an animal died it respawned somewhere else - and "somewhere else" turned out to be the centre of the map, meaning animals existed nowhere else on the island. Anyone who happened to live in the middle of the map never went hungry. They now respawn properly.

Melee weapons got a substantial overhaul. Animations now play immediately rather than through triggers, which had introduced a few milliseconds of delay and produced situations where you saw the effect of a strike before the attack animation. The attack itself is now delayed instead: pressing fire no longer strikes instantly, with the hit landing when the weapon model reaches the right point in its animation. A bug in the effect system was also found, which had been preventing weapons from using the full range of sounds Goosey had set up.

Locks, builds and crash logging

The lock now appears physically on the door and can be interacted with - placeholder art, but a clear visual indication that a door is locked. This mattered because the lock system is modular; different lock types were planned, each with its own model and interactions.

On 64-bit Windows you're now running a 64-bit build. Mac users already were, since no 32-bit Mac had shipped in about four years. The move surfaced considerably more crashes, so crash logging was set up: Sentry was already in use for exceptions, and with some tweaking it now parses error logs for a stack trace and reports crashes automatically. Hard crashes usually trace back to a native plugin, Unity itself, or a driver - and being able to identify which without chasing players for logs helps everyone, since Unity 5 beta crashes could be reported upstream and fixed for every Unity developer.

Visuals

Water reflections weren't receiving fog, which technically made sense given how they're rendered but looked bad. Diogo built an override shader that renders the fog correctly, should be faster, and additionally fixes the black line that occasionally appeared on the horizon.

Xavier's hazmat suit went in, with all parts as individual pieces - so you can strip the helmet and gloves and head to the desert biomes for a Breaking Bad look. Andre made the trees snowy, Petur's icebergs landed, and Xavier began a new sleeping bag model.

Concept corner and what came next

Paul and Howie both worked on monuments, as the team tried to pin down what procedurally placed landmarks should actually be. Meg drew needles - a very large number of needles - because the team disliked how medkits worked: TFC-style, where a white case hits you and health returns. They wanted something more grounded.

The week was described as slower than hoped, with the rest of the team picking up the slack (Helk made his first commit, which had to be reverted). The stated priority was making the game playable above all else, with new features deliberately on the back burner to avoid feature creep. The one exception teased for the following week: SpeedTree for Unity had just arrived, so new trees were coming.