What's New in Rust's "Gestures Update" Update

The Gestures Update landed at the start of April 2021 and did two things people had been asking for: it gave players a proper way to communicate without typing, and it finished off the Bandit Camp casino with poker tables. Around those sat the Easter event, a pile of server optimizations, a Unity upgrade, and a candid post-mortem on both the abandoned HDRP move and the OVH datacentre fire that took 25 European servers offline.

Gestures

The headline feature was a new selection of gestures available to everyone through a popup wheel, opened with B by default. Crucially they were built for first person, so you get properly animated hand movements rather than watching your own shadow mime something.

The design goal was to make gestures safe to use in tense moments. They no longer unequip your weapon, and they can be cancelled at any point with only a small delay - roughly 0.2 seconds - before your weapon is fireable again. Facepunch's own suggestion was to wave at your victims while roof camping. The new system was also more flexible than the old one, already supporting future additions like looping animations and third-person gestures.

A fun detail: all the gestures are left-handed, because they were originally meant to be performed while still holding a weapon in the right hand. That constraint was dropped because it limited future options - clapping with one hand being the obvious problem. The trade-off was that the legacy gestures, judged not up to the quality of the new animations, lost playback support entirely. You can still bind the new gestures to the same commands and keybinds if you'd rather skip the wheel.

Poker tables and slot machine rebalancing

Poker tables arrived in Bandit Town, completing the casino barge overhaul started the previous month. There's a range of tables seating anywhere from two to six players. Deposit at least 100 scrap into the storage at your seat to buy in, then use the button prompts on the right of the screen to play - standard Texas Hold 'Em rules. A dedicated poker chat window is available while you're in a game, and mic use works too. The obvious warning applies: take your winnings before you leave.

The slot machines added the month before had proven popular but felt flat, largely because most scrap was being paid out through wildcard symbols. The payout scale was rebalanced to have fewer possible rewards but a much higher chance of hitting a proper payout - three matching symbols. A multiplier option was also added, letting you raise your bet and scale winnings accordingly, set when you deposit scrap. Spin costs vary by machine, so check before pulling.

Server optimizations

A batch of server-side work aimed squarely at performance with high player counts:

• Floating junkpiles no longer process buoyancy when no players are nearby
• Better balanced server load when large numbers of turrets are scanning for targets
• SQLite upgraded, with many GC allocations removed from the connector code
• Facepunch.Steamworks updated with buffer pooling for swnet (Steam Networking only)
• NetWrite rewritten with less CPU overhead
• Caching added to TechTreeData, which had been causing short CPU spikes
• Assorted small per-frame GC allocations eliminated

Engine, Mac and the viewmodel jitter fix

Rust moved from Unity 2019.4.4 to 2019.4.22, mostly for fixes the team had been waiting a long time to see backported to the LTS branch.

macOS players got the better end of that. A bug report filed over a year earlier - Unity's graphics jobs feature crashing on macOS after a few minutes of play - was finally fixed and backported, so graphics jobs were re-enabled on macOS, with a substantial performance improvement expected. Incremental GC was re-enabled there too, to cut garbage collector stalls, though with a caveat that this feature had previously caused enormous stalls and players should report any second-long hitches.

The most satisfying fix was the viewmodel jitter, an issue as old as Rust itself and, for the record, never intentional. The cause is floating point precision: the further from zero you get, the less precise things become. Nearly every game with viewmodels uses some kind of hack to work around it, and Rust historically hadn't thought it worth doing. HDRP was supposed to solve it - but with HDRP off the table, the fix was implemented using Unity features that simply hadn't existed when Rust started development.

The HDRP backport

This section is the honest one. In May 2019 the team set out to move Rust to Unity's HDRP pipeline, drawn by better visual fidelity, new tech and - supposedly - better performance. Converting and updating all the assets took months. The result, after months of testing and profiling, was that the expected performance gains never materialised; performance was in fact worse. So all HDRP progress was halted and the updated assets were backported to the existing pipeline, which took many more months.

By this update the backport was approaching final stages. Public testing opened Wednesday, April 7th via the "Rust - Staging" client by opting into the Aux01 beta branch. The backport updated nearly all world objects, rocks, foliage and trees, with many monuments getting attention too. Wipes were expected to be frequent and regular play wasn't recommended until later in the month, and mapmakers were warned that removed or updated assets could affect existing designs. If feedback went well the target release was Thursday, May 6th, with expectations set carefully: performance shouldn't be better than release, but shouldn't be worse either.

The OVH fire

In the early hours of 10th March, two Facepunch servers went unreachable, and over the following hour a total of 25 European servers went down. The cause turned out to be a fire at the OVH datacentre in Strasbourg, France. Server saves were backed up to a separate machine - but all of those backups lived in the same building. Losing one machine was planned for; losing the entire building was not. Dedicated servers were bought elsewhere to bring things back online quickly, but no saves could be restored. It was only a week into the wipe cycle, which Facepunch acknowledged was still a week of players' work gone, and they apologised for it. Going forward, saves are backed up to separate locations.

Hapis and other changes

Hapis Island got its Red Keycard shortage addressed, with keycards available across all corners of the island again, plus a marketplace and gambling den added to the Compound. Elsewhere across the patch:

• Blood can now be disabled through the options menu
• Fixed projectiles fired at player joints not registering an impact
• The News menu now displays the full content of blog posts
• Safezone hostile timer cut from 30 minutes to 5
• Heavy armour now prevents mounting horses, on weight grounds
• The L96 became skinnable
• Team members can now mount vehicles after purchase without the owner departing first
• Vehicles are repossessed after 5 minutes instead of 2
• Tightened recoil response on the revolver and semi-auto pistol, animations included
• Player view angles now reset on dismount, so remounting starts from that mountable's default

Easter event and Twitch drops

The Easter event ran for the following week, with an egg hunt beginning every 24-38 in-game hours. You get 3 minutes to collect as many eggs as possible, and the top 3 players receive special eggs that crack open for loot ranging from scrap all the way up to an M249. Miss the podium and you're still fine: 10 painted eggs upgrade into a Bronze egg, 10 Bronze into Silver, and onward to Gold. The Easter Basket grants instant egg pickup, while the Bunny Onesie and ears provide Egg Vision.

New items for the year included a workcart-themed Rustigé Egg - Green and a Bunny Hat with wobbly ears and eyes, alongside the returning Nest Hat with its famously googly eyes - all on the Item Store.

Twitch drops also ran from launch day until April 8th at 18:00 UTC, with unique skins earned by watching participating Rust streamers: Dairygold, Tesla, xguiry, suspect, NoraExplorer, Picco, PyrooTV, etoleto and 6zdenko. Those channel-exclusive items - the Tesla Rocket Launcher among them - are the sort that hold value long after the drop window closes; you can check where they've settled in our skin tracker.