QoL Update

The Large Oil Rig is now spawning on procedural maps. while similar to the Small Rig the Large rig has two extra decks and a larger footprint. The layout is also more complicated with many rooms and pathways to explore. You'll also notice many more Scientists onboard. The CH47 landing event will also drop off more heavy scientists to prevent you from accessing the contents of the locked crate.

The launch of the Oil Rig last month resulted in the deaths of many players in deep water. When the player corpse would despawn and leave a backpack, it would fall to the ocean floor as if it was dropped off a balcony, never to be retrieved. I've added a Buoyancy element to the backpacks so that they now float on the surface of the water the same way corpses do.

A new weapon is now available from the heavy scientists. the MGL is a 6 round semi automatic grenade launcher featuring 3 ammo types and fractional reloading! Itself, along with it's ammunition is uncraftable but the Shotgun ammo is available for sale at the Bandit Town. There wasn't enough time to implement its usage by the heavy scientists but expect that in the next patch. For now they'll rarely drop it along with various ammo types for it. Smoke, High Explosive, and Buckshot rounds behave exactly how you'd expect them to. I did my best to balance the weapon in terms of damage vs rarity of ammunition but chances are it is still way OP. Expect a balance patch.

SAM Sites now require 25 electricity to function. While this is somewhat of a nerf, what it really does is address all the issues people were having with being able to 'Authorize' on them. You can now use the electricity system to turn the site on or off however you would like to design it. I personally use a memory cell, RF Receiver, and Detonator so that I can remotely toggle it on and off. I've also gone through and fixed some targeting bugs such as shooting at vehicles even without line of sight, and never forgetting targets even if it lost line of sight to them

I've made some pretty big improvements to muzzle flashes. What most of you will care about is that there should be a much smaller performance impact from firing of weapons. I've reduced their shadow radius from 10 units (20m across!) to 4. Their starting size is now randomized and their lifetime is much shorter. Also, a bug was fixed which caused them to count as an active light for the duration of the effect (including the sound) In general you should notice better performance during gunfights, especially around monuments as they no longer have to re-render half the monument 6 times per muzzle flash, per frame. You'll also notice the visuals themselves are much improved. Oh and you should now also see visible casings being ejected both from your local weapon and from other players. This is not exactly new, it was just blurred so much you couldn't see them. I did disable collision on them so perhaps we'll see some more framerate improvements during gunfights from that.

I've added a combat knife to the game. It really kicks ass because you can attack while sprinting with it. The idea was to let people use it to untie underwater crates faster but I ran out of time, next patch. p.s. you can also sprint with the chainsaw and cut people down like you're in a horror film.

I've edited the collision model of the minicopter and brought it in line with its visual representation. This means no more random forcefield like effects around the tail and engine. We've also removed the hit marker sound so that it is much more obvious when you're hitting the passengers. The fuel storage can only be accessed by the pilot with alt-look or when the engine is off and the pilot has dismounted. This should prevent people from stealing your fuel when you're just trying to pick them up. Due to the amount of hoarding going on we've had to change how minicopter decay works. They will now decay even when indoors. The rate they decay at is half the speed of decay when outdoors. Eventually we'll come up with a better solution. Lastly, I've decreased the bounding box around it so it does not include the rotors - This means SAM sites will not shoot it through a wall if part of the blades were clipping it.

Underwater crates untie in 8 seconds instead of 15. Yay! Eventually we're going to do something with some visible vines and let players use the combat knife to untie them much quicker but making games is hard.

The only reason the Thompson was ever in the game was because in the early days of rust, some concept artists were doing paintovers of post apocalyptic style weapons and I guess googled for some guns as a starting point and picked that one, unbeknownst to them is the fact that it is a 1918 Prohibition era gun. I always planned to remove it which is why I never improved it and never approved skins for it. However it kind of kicks ass and is a solid part of the game so whatever. I've approved some skins for it and I've added slots so that it can take a laser sight or flashlight attachment. Enjoy!

While messing around with our lighting I noticed a few ugly artifacts with both of these attachments and have addressed them. You'll notice that flashlights will have a lot less light bleeding ( this is when the light is obscured by something like a wall, but it comes through anyway ) I've also adjusted the brightness and flare intensity of the laser sight giving it a nicer and more visible look.

It's kind of lame people figured out they could use explosive bullets and silencers to break into peoples bases without being heard. To combat this, I've made it so the silencer reduces the damage done by the explosive rounds and damages the silencer and weapon slightly more than regular ammo. Also, The explosion created by the ammunition creates a sound that can be heard from farther away

I've tightened up the tracer effect so that the visual effect is much thinner and shorter than it was before. I've also added a texture to it. There are some issues with how they are being drawn resulting in the first frame tracer being way longer than it should be and the texture being repeated in an odd fashion that can sometimes make it look like a lighting bolt. This will be addressed in an upcoming patch. I've also re-enabled the tracer 'spheres' which were disabled some time ago due to a bug. This means in first person it is a lot easier to see where your bullets are going.

When I first implemented the compound bow I thought it would be overpowered, but seeing as no one is using it anymore I guess that isn't the case. I've changed it's behavior so that when you aren't charging it, it behaves exactly like a regular bow, with the same rate of fire and damage ( it used to be 80% damage and 20% longer charge time). In addition, I've decreased the crafting cost from 75 Metal Fragments to 25.

I've been playing some Rust BR on the Intoxicated servers and I noticed that with some weapons I couldn't see that much of a difference in recoil with the muzzle brake. It turns out the calculations were all screwed up for non semi automatic weapons and it was basically doing nothing. I've fixed the offending code and did a balance pass of reducing damage output by 20% when used. the tl;dr is the thing actually works now and when used, makes the gunplay in rust feel closer to any other first person shooter you've ever played.

A lot of people were exploiting the game by jumping out of a Minicopter and disconnecting before they hit the ground. This meant that their sleeper would hover in mid air at their disconnect point and when they reconnected they would not take any fall damage, allowing them to bypass compound walls and SAM sites. you may also have noticed that people who were wounded in mid air would float there in that state until killed. I probably should have done this a long time ago but I've added server side falling to the game so that when you disconnect or are wounded the server will take over and simulate falling as well as fall damage. Find another way to get into compounds.

How lame was it that people would sit inside the deflated hot air balloon canvas and shoot people who couldn't see them inside it? Oh well I hope you guys had a good time while it lasted because this is now fixed. First of all you can no longer even use your weapons when tangled in the canvas, and secondly I've made the canvas material render on both sides so that you can't see out when inside.

I've added the much requested Fractional Reloading. What this means is that when using the Pump Shotgun, Spas-12, Bolt Action Rifle, or MGL, you only need to reload as many shots as were fired. You can also cancel the reload at any time by pressing attack and begin shooting with however many shots you loaded into the chamber. This has some pretty significant implications for shotguns and their feasibility in the game as they had some of the longest reload times in the game and now you can get back into the fight much quicker. GLG

Ever notice how when you used ADS on certain weapons the zoom level was ridiculous and the weapon models were way too large? I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out why the 8x scope was behaving like a 200x microscope. It turns out this was a design decision so that you couldn't get a technical advantage by lowering your FOV to zoom in even more. The problem is this meant if you played with a FOV of 90, zooming in with ADS offset your FOV as if it were already at the default 75, so you'd zoom in way more than intended. People who play with default FOV won't notice a difference but if you do use a higher fov you'll notice the zoom levels are significantly decreased on most weapons without a sight, mainly on pistols. I personally find them way easier to use now. I ended up calculating the zoom factors from the FOV offsets specified in the weapon attachments and it turns out the 8x scope was actually magnifying everything by 24x and the 4x scope was Magnifying everything by 8x. Oops. I've reduced the "8x" scope magnification to 16 instead of 24 and renamed both of them accordingly. I'm considering adding a bunch of sensitivity options to the game or atleast via config so that you can have finer control over what happens to your sensitivity when using different weapons. Right now it modifies the sensitivity based on a scale calculated by the field of view which isn't great because each weapon and scope means you need a new muscle memory pathway to "git gud". I'll come up with something.

Some minor changes to the Heavy Plate Armor include much higher explosive protection and a larger viewing portal for the helmet.

Some minor changes were made to some inventory categories and you can now put water jugs into fridges. You can also recycle empty bean and tuna cans at a recycler Also, the salvaged axe harvests a lot more animal flesh than it used to.

Many people have been complaining about the ability to immediately replace walls and doors during a raid as this made online raids even more difficult and provided yet another reason to prefer offline raids. To counteract I've added a debris system that will block wall and door placement for 30 seconds (debrisdespawn server convar) or until the debris is destroyed. The values for debris health and despawn time are of course subject to change as we receive feedback on the new system.

A surprising cause of performance issues during gunfights was the player bone lookup when muzzle flashes got attached to the player model. This was happening for both third person and first person, which meant the larger the gunfight the more problematic it would get. I added a fast player bone lookup and optimized pooling on projectiles which helped quite a bit.

There were a couple of problems with the projectile trajectory verification that caused it to incorrectly reject projectiles that had previously been reflected or refracted by an object on their path. This most commonly meant ricochets but could also affect projectiles that hit someone behind an object that could be penetrated. Having combat log spammed with those messages understandably caused some concern that should now be put to rest. There is one more relatively rare known issue with these messages being logged when projectiles hit ragdolls as the detailed ragdoll does not exist on the server, these should however be relatively easy to identify in combat log and will be fixed in a future update.

There've been a number of exploits throughout the game, most of which were primarily exploited by hackers, but some of which could be exploited by everyone. The fixes reach anywhere from explosive ammo to vehicles and elevators, check the changelog for a full list.

The player model rebuild has been one of the primary causes for frame rate drops during combat. This was caused both by some game objects not supporting pooling and by the overall mesh rebuild logic being relatively old and unoptimized. I've profiled it all and fixed whatever I could, so things should feel significantly better.

With the addition of the heavy scientists last month it became clear that the existing scientists were beginning to show their age. They've received a visual update to match their new allies. Peacekeeper scientists are now also equipped with a new mask to further differentiate them from your run of the mill scientists. We've got more variations planned to make each scientist feel unique so watch this space!

We're aware that over recent months there has been a steady increase in cheaters. We're continuously working with Kamu EAC to improve the situation along with being active on our own Facepunch official servers. We've recently updated EAC SDK which improves data collection, in return, this should aid EAC in catching cheater like behaviour from servers. This lays the groundwork for automated tempory bans in future based on players activities - I'll post an update with more information at a later date.
Reminder tempory game bans: We take a zero-tolerance approach to cheaters and players who repeatedly play with them, ruining the game for others. Previously we only issued server bans for players who repeatedly played alongside cheaters, we can now extend this punishment across all servers with temporary game bans of up to one year.

We've added super potato graphics quality. Super Potato lowers texture quality to eighth resolution down from the prior lowest (Potato) of quarter resolution. Players who are experiencing crashes, system memory issues or excessive in-game stutters should try this new setting.

The compound has received a visual update, and should be a bit more interesting to navigate at night. In addition, as with the oil rigs and cargo ship, those lights can be seen at a considerable distance, so it will make it easier to spot at night.

Following the water revamp, rolled out last patch, we immediately started working on addressing some of the problems. The work done during for this patch was dedicated to fixing the most problematic issues related to visuals and performance on both client (all quality modes) and server. The most serious client performance issues were fixed and delivered during a mid-month patch. We also improved some of the client visuals that were most problematic (e.g. foam). Wave shape and behaviour was toned down. More visual improvements are planned for next month, along with changes in how the waves behave along the shore, in order to make them more realistic. We also boosted server perf a bit by optimizing buoyancy code a further 35%. Additionally, a few client bugs were also addressed and fixed.

We started looking into performance again, globally, for this patch. Among all the issues we identified, lighting and shadows were still in the list of worst offenders. Among issues we improved and extended light LOD (level-of-detail) processing and did some work to reduce both light and shadow overhead on gunfire muzzle light flashes, especially in large shootouts happening in geometry-dense areas (e.g. oil rig).