Got a Storage Adaptor attached to a box? You’ll now find it has a power input and some new box sorting settings available when you open it. You can sort items alphabetically (and change what language you use), condition, count, category (matching the conveyor filter) as well as a custom snapshot mode.

The custom snaphsot mode allows you to set a container up with the item layout that you want, take a snapshot of it and then the sorter will attempt to recreate that snapshot as best it can. Sorting is applied automatically 1s after an item is added or removed from the container.

Box sorting is enabled on the Large and Small Wooden Boxes, the Coffin and all DLC storage items (barrels and box skins).

Last month’s Meta Shift update caused quite a lot of activity around monuments due to the new blueprint fragment system. While these fragments are designed to be scarce, we observed some undesired behaviour due to how monuments would reset to refresh their loot that was contributing to the fragments not spawning as quickly as intended.

Due to the value of these fragments, camping around monuments to ambush players became a popular playstyle. While that’s a classic strategy in Rust and not something we would want to disallow, we noticed that some players were camping so close to monument puzzles and loot rooms that they were inadvertently preventing the loot from respawning. This would lead to fragments becoming even more rare, which would encourage more players to camp the monuments, which would make the problem even worse. It would also lead to long periods of pointless camping, as no new fragments were being generated.

This is how monument puzzles used to work:

• Start a timer for 30 minutes
• If a player is within range of the monument pause the timer until they leave
• Refresh the loot once the timer finishes

To resolve this we’ve made several changes to how most keycard monuments reset and refresh their loot:

• Monument refresh timers will now only start once a player loots a container in the puzzle rooms, rather than constantly refreshing every 30 minutes even if no players have visited.
• Monument refresh timers will now tick down even if players are in range.
• Monuments will now start generating radiation around their loot rooms and relevant puzzle elements (switches, fuse boxes, etc) 10 minutes before they are due to refresh. This radiation is severe and unsurvivable, although it has a small radius around it of milder radiation to communicate that you should stay clear.
• Once radiation is active, the puzzle can only reset once it has been clear of players for a total of 5 minutes.
• We’ve adjusted and shrunk the areas that we check for player presence across most monuments in order to make them as forgiving as possible and still allow general movement and looting around the monument while this refresh is taking place.

These changes should hopefully preserve the importance of monument PvP combat while making sure that the presence of combat doesn’t make blueprint fragments artificially harder to get.

This should help prevent tragedies of your noble steed succumbing to the various dangers of the island, with the speed boost also giving a better chance of escaping dangerous situations. Horse jockeys may also find this interesting in achieving the maximum possible speed with horses (please gallop responsibly).

We’ve given the player placed elevator a bit of love this month. One recurring annoyance was having to replug the elevator power every time you add a floor, which was difficult since you often couldn’t easily reach the top. Now there is a power input plug on each floor (separate to the call button) and if any floor has power the whole elevator will be considered powered.

We’ve also increased the speed significantly (3m/s to 5m/s) and reduced the delay between when the elevator can be used again after it comes to a stop.

There's no question that attack helicopters are at the apex of offensive vehicles, but with that strength there still has to be counter-play and ways for defenders (*cough* victims) to fight them off. With this balance pass we took a look at one of the core-problems, that the attack helicopters are too hard to take down with the homing missile launcher, which was intended to be the primary counter-play solution.

The first change is that we have completely removed the ability for thrown flares to interact with homing missiles. Passenger's shouldn't be able to avoid the 30s cooldown of the helicopter flare launcher by manually throwing a flare. Now when the flare launcher is used and is reloading, subsequent homing missiles pose a legitimate risk to the helicopter and the pilot needs to choose whether to fight or flee.

To couple with this change, we have also removed the ability to repair helicopters that are in-flight. If you are taking heavy damage you will have to find a safe place to land to be able to repair your vehicle. This further reduces the ability for attack-heli passengers to mitigate all incoming damage.

And finally, pilots should be taking a risk when flying the helicopter, and to keep a steady grip on the controls they will need both hands. Currently healing items like the bandage and syringe aren't usable, but other items that act more like food still function (i.e. large medkit, and healing teas), meaning a quick-fingered pilot can heal from their inventory menu while flying. With this update we are bringing this more in-line with the other consumables, disabling the ability to use healing foods while piloting a vehicle. This applies to all vehicles, not just helicopters.

With these systematic changes, we don't want to hit the other player-driven helicopters too hard. So to compensate, the minicopter and scrap transport helicopter have been retro-fitted with their own flare launchers. When purchasing one of these helicopters from a vendor they will start with flares already loaded in the flare compartment accessible from the fuel tank(s).

For hot air balloons (HABs), you will be able to dodge homing missiles by turning off the engine for 4 seconds. But just to be clear, homing missiles by default do not target the HAB, this is only if  the server ConVar has been toggled that enables the HAB to be targeted.

We've rolled out improvements to several entities this month that we found were having a detrimental effect on performance. 

We noticed Slot Machines and the Chippy Arcade machine while evaluating performance on next months Floating City casino. The Chippy Arcade machine was rendering it's on-screen image several times a second, even if the machine was idle and not being used (ie. a still image). This is now fixed, it will also not render the screen if the camera is facing the back of the machine as the screen would not be visible. In a test case when looking at 14 machines this has improved performance by 20-30 FPS.

Slot Machines use a small world space UI element to display the current payouts. This had several issues - the UI elements weren't properly using Pooling and they would be spawned in as soon as the player entered network range. Fixing the pooling and moving the UI creation to when the player actually comes close brings the time it takes to spawn a Slot machine from 2ms->0.13ms. This should mean less of a hiccup when entering range of Bandit Town. It was also using a skinned renderer despite it's moving parts being quite simple, so we modified the model and it's now made up of 3 static meshes. This will slightly improve rendering performance and allowed us to delete a mb of unneeded assets.

Like Garage doors last month, Sprinklers now switch from their skinned version to a static version when they are idle, allowing them to batch together and render more efficiently. It's common for bases to have quite a lot of these entities so this should help rendering performance.

Finally we discovered some lighting that was being incorrectly disabled at distance on the static phone booth. This is now fixed which should improve rendering performance when within network range of monuments with a phone booth.

Given how much content is in Rust finding gains like this is a bit like finding needles in a haystack, but our tools and processes for profiling the game has improved in leaps and bounds over the last year and we're now better able to drill in and find these issues.

From November 13th-23rd, players can earn the exclusive KICK Hazmat and more skins from their favourite creators, just by watching an explosive PvP event!

Tune in for a chaotic base raid session to get your hands on these unique cosmetics!

Drops include skins from CoconutB, Oilrats, hJune, Spoonkid, Panpots and more!

Get your accounts synced so you can claim your drops and see who to watch!  

https://kick.facepunch.com/

Thank you!

Last month, Rust is partnered with both Ronald McDonald House Charities UK and Cancer Research UK to raise over £172,000 ($225,125) through the sale of two in-game charity plushies!