Boat Vendor Update

The Kayak and Paddle are two new craftable items that will allow you to take to the seas in a more primitive fashion. Once crafted, the Kayak can be placed in the water (similar to the Sunburn DLC boogie boards). Once deployed, you can sit on the Kayak and use a Paddle to move. LMB will paddle left and RMB will paddle right, so to travel forward you’ll need to alternate between left and right paddles. You can also paddle backwards by holding the back key (S by default) and paddling to slow down or reverse. The Paddle is a new weapon that you will need to craft in order to operate the Kayak. While not on the Kayak you can also use the paddle as a melee weapon, including using it as a thrown weapon.

Long gone are the days of having to roam the shores of the Rust island in hopes of finding a seaworthy vessel. You'll now be able to acquire a Rowboat or a RHIB at one of the three new fishing villages we've added to the game. Here's the run down:

• You'll now find 3 Fishing villages around the map varying in size.
• Boats are no longer procedurally spawned along the beach and ocean and instead can be purchased from the Boat vendor found at the Fishing villages, 200 for rowboat / 400 for RHIB.
• Fishing villages are safe zones and hostile action will result in a swift death.
• If you're unable to afford a rowboat, you can opt to purchase the blueprint for a Kayak & paddle which you can then craft yourself any time.
• You can also purchase each piece of scuba gear at the fishing village

Moving forward, you can expect to see some more NPC Villages added to the game (stables anyone?) as well as seeing the impact of these micro monuments have in the game increasing. We're working on a mission system which will allow players to acquire items and blueprints from means other than simply farming scrap, and you'll likely find the mission providers here first.

The Storage Monitor is a new electric deployable which integrates with Rust+. It can be deployed onto the Tool Cupboard and Large Wooden Box to show you how much upkeep you have left and the items inside of the inventory. The Storage Monitor also detects when items are added or removed from the inventory and will output a pulse of electricity so you can hook it up to traps and alarms. Please make sure your Rust+ app is up to date to make use of these changes.

The Door Controller has been updated to include a passthrough electric output. This should make wiring up circuits for multiple controllers a breeze and cause less headaches for your base electrician.

Searchlight

Having been in the plans for a long time, the searchlight deployable now takes electricity instead of low grade fuel. It currently consumes 10 units of power.

Reactive Target

Reactive Targets still behave the same as always, but they now have four optional electrical connections, acting similarly to a pressure pad:

Type	Name	Function
Input	Lower	Lowers the target if it's raised
Input	Reset	Raises the target if it's lowered
Input	Power In	Power that will be passed through if the target's lowered
Output	Power Out	Passes (Power In - 1) if the target's lowered

Lowering the target will also send a brief pulse of 1 power even if there's no power input - this is the same way the pressure pad operates.

Modular Car cockpits now have glass which provides additional protection, particularly in the armoured module.

Work Benches can now be picked up and moved. This is likely to impact gameplay in a variety of ways and we will be monitoring this change and how it affects gameplay. Tier 2 and 3 Work Bench health has been reduced.

We've upgraded to Unity 2019 LTS, which stands for Long Term Support. The official policy is that you should only ever be using LTS versions of Unity in production and all other releases are expected to be unstable. Since 2020 LTS is supposed to be released in Q1 2021 and we're currently not really waiting for any major new features there's actually a chance we'll manage to stick to this policy for once.

All the newly added farming, electricity and fluid entities were really taking a toll on performance when lots of them were loading in at once. To fix this I added pooling support to all of their scripts and enabled prefab pooling on their prefabs. This should significantly reduce frame rate drops when moving around a high population server.

I’ve done a pass over a variety of different things in the farming systems this month.

• Server performance for large farms should be greatly improved.
• I’ve added support for Electric Heaters to add warmth to nearby planter boxes, this should make farms in cold biomes a bit more viable.
• You can now hold Attack2 (RMB by default) to access the clone option when mousing over a valid plant. This should make it a bit easier to quickly clone a large number of plants without having to repeatedly open the menu.
• The water flow system has been modified to split evenly between multiple outputs, so if you connect a Water Barrel to a Splitter that then connects to three other Water Barrels, water will evenly be distributed to them.
• The maximum range that water can flow between different entities has been extended, so long chains of water entities should now work.
• The Powered Water Purifier will now stop converting water if it’s output container is full and will automatically resume when space is made.

I’ve spent some time over the last few months working on reworking our gib system to be more performant and use less memory. In case you’re not aware, a gib is a small chunk of something that we spawn when you destroy an object - if you destroy something like a twig wall we spawn 20 gibs that then crumble to the ground and are destroyed. I’ve reworked this to use pooling so we use a smaller number of reusable gibs instead of creating and destroying them every time you destroy something. While I was at it I also reworked the system to allow us to start using simple collider shapes instead of more complex mesh shapes. In this month's update every gib in the game is now being pooled, and almost all of the gibs that are spawned when destroying building blocks are now using simple shapes. In our tests we’ve seen that this new system spawns objects twice as fast and uses less memory since we don’t need to include the physics mesh, hopefully this should reduce the number of frame hitches when destroying lots of objects (during raids in particular).

There have been a few more small improvements to performance again this month. Most people should see a small increase in performance, but keep in mind that it's system and situation dependant.

Flares

Flares (the bright light effect) have been overhauled and optimised. A lot of the effect is now performed in the shader instead of on the CPU. I've also added some LOD functionality to the system so that distant flares won't effect performance. From our benchmarks we saw a small improvement which should add a few FPS for most people in most situations. As an added bonus, all light sources will now illuminate the mini game marker on ores at night, not just the miner helmet.

Animator optimisations

A lot of the static animators now have a LOD component attatched to them now, there were also a lot of prefabs that had useless Animator components attatched to them that the Unity importer added. In our benchmark demo, the active animator count has been reduced from between 150 and 350 to 30 and 150, and we've seen a modest but noticable improvement (a few FPS depending on situation).

UI (Text)

Unity's text rendering system was spending an unneeded amount of time managing text from UI elements that weren't displayed on screen. The benefit to performance we got from this was pretty small but it all adds up.