What's New in Rust's "Friday Devblog 27" Update

Devblog 27 landed in late September 2014 - "Building upgrades, T-Shirts and Bug Reporting." The headline was the first working version of upgradeable building blocks, the system that still underpins how you tier a base from twig to armoured today. Alongside it came name tags, a bug tracker, an early modding SDK, and a batch of triangle-foundation fixes.

Upgradeable building blocks

Garry rewrote the building block system - walls, foundations, floors, windows - dramatically simplifying the code and making blocks upgradeable. The flow it established should be immediately recognisable: you place a frame, hit it with the hammer while feeding it wood to reach level 1, keep hitting it for level 2, switch to stones for levels 3 and 4, then metal fragments for level 5.

The design intent was explicit. Rather than placing impenetrable walls straight away, you'd have to work at it, and realistically you'd only fully upgrade the ground-floor walls. Plenty of balancing remained to be done. There was no art at all at this stage - literally just coloured versions of the old meshes, which looked terrible - but the plan was a distinct mesh and texture per level so upgraded buildings visibly become stone and metal. Garry put together a slideshow of how the transitions would probably work, and hoped to finalise the building-level designs over the following couple of weeks.

A Foundation Steps building block was also added, enabling multi-level foundations and, more immediately, meaning you no longer have to jump up to get into your own house.

Name tags

Name tags returned so you can see who people are. The team had wanted something more interesting - clicking on a person to name them yourself, so your friends and the sleeping guy you robbed carry your labels while a stranger sneaking up on you shows nothing. That didn't get built, so they went with the conventional approach as a starting point.

Some changes did make it in. The tag colour shifts with the ambient light, making it darker and harder to read at night, and tags don't draw from nearly as far away as in legacy. The goal was avoiding the situation where you spot someone purely because their name is floating above their head - a tag should only appear when the player's presence is already obvious and you can see their face clearly. Longer term, the plan was to tie visibility to clothing, with something like a balaclava suppressing your name tag entirely.

Fixes and performance

• Several triangle foundation bugs: walls were being placed the opposite way round compared to normal foundations, which made railings look bizarre, and you couldn't place campfires or other deployables on them.
• A dupe exploit where cancelling a craft repeatedly in quick succession refunded twice the materials.
• Sleeping bags weren't saving their owner when a server loaded from a save, which rendered them useless.
• Player LOD groups: player components were being LODed separately, so a player's hands could be on LOD2 while the body was on LOD1 - producing players with missing heads, hands or feet at certain distances, and probably costing more processing than doing it once. The player model now shares a dynamically created LOD group.
• Andre made terrain generation at least twice as fast by moving a chunk of code into C++.

Two more F2 menu options arrived: a PVT toggle, which gives some people a significant framerate boost when disabled, and a draw distance adjustment.

Animals

Andre continued pulling the AI closer to legacy behaviour. Animal ragdolls bleed properly when attacked, animals have colliders so you can no longer run straight through them, and - crucially - deer and boars now run away from the player instead of toward them.

Bug reporting and the SDK

A Bugs and Suggestions section opened on the support site, and it proved useful almost immediately. Players were encouraged to vote up bugs they were also experiencing, since that directly drives attention.

Garry also started work on an SDK, published on GitHub. At that point it contained a player model scene and a few sets of clothes, and was near-useless without Unity 5. The open question was distribution: the TF2 marketplace and trading model was tempting, but they also wanted Garry's Mod-style map and mod downloads via the Workshop, and it wasn't clear both were possible. That question eventually resolved in favour of a full workshop skin economy - the kind of thing you can browse today through our skin tracker.

Art and what came next

Xavier's clothes went in - a t-shirt and a snow jacket. Tom modelled a box, Dan finished his bow, and Goosey animated the salvaged pickaxe and the spear while producing third-person animations for the Thompson.

Confidence was high enough that reboot screenshots went onto the Steam store page. The stated focus for the following week was the survival side, which Garry felt the reboot was missing: there wasn't much fear of starving, of being killed by an animal, or of getting too cold, and the game needed to make those threats obvious. He also wanted to make it clearer how building actually works - specifically that you right click while holding the foundation.