Elevator Update

The Elevator is a new deployable object that allows you to easily travel between floors in your base. Simply place an Elevator on the ground floor and then stack additional Elevators on top of that to add floors. Once you power the Elevator by plugging in a power source at the top of the shaft you can use the Up and Down buttons to move a floor at a time or directly to the top or bottom of the shaft. There is also a power input on each floor that will call the Elevator to that floor if it receives power. To help make this setup easier we've also made the Push Button send a small burst of power when pushed even if there is no power connected to it. Be careful to not get stuck underneath the lift while it's moving as this will instantly kill you.

One of the main problems with our road network has been that many of the smaller monuments weren't really designed to have road connection points in mind, or would look ridiculous with a massive road going up to them to begin with. As an alternative for those monuments I added smaller dirt trails that suit them a lot nicer than a road ever could.

The second main problem with our road network was that it would always represent a minimal road network with the least amount of road that would still manage to connect all the monuments. This was simply because the underlying algorithm optimized for the shortest possible road, as path finding algorithms tend to do. Adding redundant road connections to this that still looked realistic and like something a human would design wasn't exactly trivial since it sort of went against the fundamentals of what the algorithm was designed to achieve. I ended up with a fairly elegant solution that uses force vectors to push secondary road connections away from the monument they originated from, while still connecting to the main road network in a natural looking way once far enough away from their origin.

I've been secretly working on a networking replacement for RakNet. There are many reasons for this, most of which boil down to RakNet no longer being maintained at all and having lots of exploits in it that we had to patch ourselves. As a solution for this we now support Steam Networking as an opt-in alternative. Server owners can enable Steam Networking by specifying the -swnet server startup parameter. Clients will automatically choose the correct protocol when connecting to servers and we're planning to keep maintaining the RakNet networking protocol for a long time until we're 100% confident Steam Networking is superior in every single way. We recommend community servers stay on RakNet until we make Steam Networking the default protocol, but if you want to give it an early try feel free to do so. One limitation of Steam Networking is that it does not support the Steam query packet passthrough that we added to RakNet, so servers that use Steam Networking will need to specify a -queryport and make sure that port is open.

Server owners can now record demos from the perspective of any player that is connected to the server:

• demo.record [steamid] start recording a demo of [steamid]
• demo.stop [steamid] stop recording a demo of [steamid]
• demo.splitseconds after how many seconds to split the demo file
• demo.splitmegabytes after how many megabytes to split the demo file
• demo.recordlist a list of Steam IDs that will automatically be recorded whenever they join the server

Demos are written to the "demos" server folder into a subfolder with the Steam ID of the player that is being recorded.

There were a lot of reports of accidental item pickups, especially relating to electrical circuits, This was a massive pain as it would require people to rewrite entire setups. To combat this, you'll now have to press and hold your use button for a short duration to pick up objects instead of a single frame press. The downside of this change is that the sleeping bag now requires a hammer to be picked up. We may revisit this in the future.

Over the course of the month we've noticed a numbers teas were been neglected and thus I have made the following changes:

• Healing Tea - Advanced and Pure versions now provide a small amount of instant health, As well as greater healing over time
• Wood Tea - Basic +50%, Advanced +100%, Pure +200%.
• Scrap Tea - Basic +50%, Advanced +100%, Pure +200%.
• Max Health Tea - Duration increased to 20mins.

We'll be keeping an eye on these changes and adjusting accordingly. We believe these changes will drastically increase the usefulness of the more refined versions of teas. We've also updated the tea icons to make it easier to differentiate between teas as well as their tier.

We've taken steps to address the over the top cloth farming. Here's how it works. NPC vendors now refill their stock slowly instead of having an infinite amount always available. This means you can no longer take 5000 cloth to a vendor to sell it for scrap. You can sell some, but then you'll have to wait. Selling cloth and other farmed items for scrap was never intended to be the go-to method of progressing in the game so this change needed to happen. It's important to note that the rate of replenishment will likely only affect the abuse of the cloth trade at the Produce Exchange, all other items fully replenish their stock much quicker. Extremely large farms were poor for client and server performance, and we don't think players should get endless amounts of scrap and in turn resources for sitting in their base. Players will still be able to farm and sell cloth and other produce but at much lower volume. Hopefully this switches the farming demographic more towards low/medium tier players or those less PvP savvy. Maybe now people will farm berries and sell Pure Teas for a profit? Just an idea.

This is a small but long overdue change to the ingame map. From now on map colors should be more faithful to the actual terrain and, we hope, easier to read while providing a more realistic look.

We've teamed up with the folks at Secretlab and are excited to announce the Secretlab Rust Edition chair! Now available for the Secretlab OMEGA and TITAN, the Secretlab Rust Edition is outfitted with all the features of the award-winning Secretlab 2020 Series. The chair comes bundled with an exclusive in-game Secretlab chair skin, only obtainable by purchasing the official seat.

The urgency of what would later be known as Project Nova required Cobalt to bypass the design phase of an EVA suit - something that would normally take years when they had weeks. Using early Soviet designs (acquired by costly industrial espionage), Cobalt managed to produce a limited number of protective space suits. The whereabouts of most of them are unknown, but some were retained for terrestrial applications, given their radiation protection properties. Available on the Item Store now.