25th February Update

Information

As a happy consequence of the sky being replaced, we were able to bring you much better looking water. We expect water to play a bigger role in the game as we push forward (instead of the death plane that it currently is). So having it not look terrible anymore is a big win for us. There's an extra option in the options menu to turn reflections on/off, as they do have an effect on performance. When you turn reflections off, it'll still reflect the sky. Which has no real performance effect and stops it looking terrible.

You know how you've had to replace your mouse and keyboard 3 times since you got Rust because you've used them so much? Well now you can experience that feeling in game too. Items will now become damaged in game due to repeated usage. Items can be repaired at a workbench Repair Bench. You can keep repairing your items but eventually they'll just get that unreliable that you'll want to throw them off a cliff. Armor also loses condition when damage is taken, so you'll probably have to eventually throw your pants of a cliff too.  

The biggest most obvious change in this update is the new sky. We're still tweaking to get it looking how we want it to look. So why bother? There's hundreds of other things you want - why bother changing the stupid sky? Well I'm glad you asked. The old sky was a slow horrible FPS killer. It rendered using two cameras.. which induces a bug in Unity that meant we couldn't (without a bit of hacking around) have refraction effects in game. Everyone should see a nice framerate boost thanks to the sky being replaced. And it renders in a single camera - which means we're free to use the refraction effects again (so expect to see pixelated penises again). One gameplay change the new sky might have is the with mr moon. Depending on the moon cycle night is no longer pitch black. We think this is a good thing. There's a few rendering issues that we hope to fix as we go on. One is the tree lighting. Distance trees appear too bright. This is something we've battled with before - and as far as I'm aware it's a Unity3D bug because I've seen it happen before. I'm sure we'll be able to solve it though - so please excuse any issues like this for now. We're working towards making it as perfect as we can.

We hired the new sky's creator, André Straubmeier last week and as well as improving the sky for Rust, he's been making Linux and OSX work properly. So Linux and OSX users should now see the grass being rendered properly and be able to join the game with high graphics settings (which is apparently caused by compiling for 64bit, we're going to investigate that further).