Bring new levels of efficiency and unlock new avenues for automation with this month's set of Industrial entities. With these new tools you can move items around your base as well as craft items automatically without you needing to lift a finger.
Storage Adaptor
The Storage Adaptor is the starting point for most of your Industrial
plans - simply attach an adaptor to an existing storage entity to make
that entity compatible with your Industrial systems. The adaptor does
not require power.
Some entities have more than one slot that a storage adaptor can be attached to for ease of placement. Typically the storage adaptor can use all inventory slots on it's attached storage for input/output, although there are some exceptions:
- When attached to a furnace the Input will insert items into the Fuel/Inputs item slots while the output will remove items from the output slots
- When attached to a locker the storage adaptor will only access one partition, to access all partitions you'll need to place three storage adaptors
The storage adaptor is compatible with:
- Tool Cupboard
- Large Wooden Box
- Small Wooden Box
- Small Furnace
- Large Furnace
- Refinery
- Electric Furnace
- Locker
- Fridge
- Drop box
- Vending Machine
Industrial Conveyor
The Conveyor is responsible for moving items from one entity to another,
generally via Storage Adaptors. Once powered and turned on the conveyor
will look for items in containers connected to its inputs and then
divide those items amongst its outputs.
By default, a Conveyor will move any item it can find, but you can also assign a filter to have more precise control over exactly what items you're moving. Each Conveyor's filter can have up to 12 items or categories (resources/components/clothing/etc). When a filter is assigned the Conveyor will only transfer items that pass those conditions. You can also assign values to each item in a filter to control quantities, by setting the Maximum amount (don't send resources if the target container has over X of that resource already) and Minimum amount (only send resources in a minimum batch of X size).
You'll also find a Filter Pass and Filter Fail electrical passthrough, these will activate based on the current state of the conveyor allowing you to control other parts of the Industrial network based on what items are being moved around.
Pipe Tool
The Pipe Tool is how you connect Industrial entities - if you've used the Wire or Hose tool before you'll be right at home. Pipes come in 4 colours to help identify what's going where. The same distance rules apply here except that the anchor points need to be a small distance apart from one another and that pipes cannot go through building blocks or Vending Machines. They can however go through deployables like doors.
Industrial Splitter/Combiner
These work as you'd expect, allowing you to funnel or split the flow of items. In the case of a splitter connected to the output of a Conveyor, the Conveyor will spread its resources across all of its connections (eg. a Conveyor connected to a splitter which connects to three boxes that want to send 600 wood will send 200 wood to each box).
Industrial Crafter
Once attached to a workbench, (any tier) the Industrial Crafter allows you to automatically craft items once provided with a blueprint and the required materials. Simply insert the blueprint of your choice in the blueprint slot, insert the required materials, connect some power and turn it on to start producing items.
The Industrial Crafter has built-in Industrial slots (so no need for an
adaptor) so that you can use Conveyors to insert materials and then
extract the finished result. There is also a Blueprint In/Out Industrial
slot allowing you to swap out the blueprint being crafted. The Crafter
can only craft items that are appropriate for the workbench it's
attached to and will take the same amount of time to craft an item as a
player would.
Electric Furnace
To complement the Industrial items we're also releasing the new Electric Furnace. It works similarly to other furnaces with a slightly accelerated smelting rate except that it requires power instead of a fuel item. This also means that it doesn't produce charcoal.
Limitations and Server options
To maintain server performance there are several limitations to prevent Industrial networks from becoming too out of control. There is a hardcoded 16 container input/output limit for each conveyor. This means that as well as the max depth limitation of regular IO, a conveyor will only be able to see the first 16 containers it encounters in the input/output network.
There is also a hardcoded limit on how many items in a stack a Conveyor can move in a single tick - 32. If a stack has a count higher than this it will be moved gradually over several ticks.
We will evaluate these restrictions in the future once we get more of a sense of how these tools are being used in the real world.
There are also several convars to control the speed and efficiency of industrial systems:
- server.conveyorMoveFrequency - How often conveyors attempt a move (default 5s)
- server.industrialCrafterFrequency - How often crafters attempt to craft something (default 5s)
- server.maxItemStacksMovedPerTickIndustrial - How many whole stacks a conveyor can move in a single tick (default 12)
Previously, doors would show "Open" as the default option whether you had the code or not, requiring you to randomly stumble upon doors you couldn't open, beeping in your face then requiring you to hold E to bring up the radial menu and select unlock.
The new default options are as follows:
- first placed = "change code" (to quickly set your code)
- unauthorized on codelock & auth on TC = "enter code"
- authorized on codelock & unlocked door = "lock door" (to prevent leaving doors unlocked)
This should allow you to see at a glance what you still need to enter a code on & open the codelock UI much easier.
Train wagons containing crates now have different variants of varying qualities. Overall, you should see wagons with higher-quality loot from crates.
Performance is always a hot topic but it is difficult to address without having an accurate image of the problem. This month I setup logging of client performance and displayed them in various graphs.
This has already proven to be useful. We noticed that exclusive fullscreen had lower FPS than borderless. Rather than guessing, we were able to query the database and confirm it.
See below for various graphs to get an idea of the insights we are seeing & some interesting data.
Overall FPS
First up is median FPS across all hardware. It doesn't give a full picture: players with 60hz monitors are included beside 144hz gamers.
A better metric may be comparing average fps to monitor refresh rate to see how many players are getting lower FPS than their monitor supports... something we will look at in the future.
Best Performing Hardware
These charts clearly shows how Rust is CPU bottlenecked (no surprise). What is interesting is how much the extra cache does: a 5800x3D is on average 50% faster than a 5950x!
Please don't use this as an excuse to go buy a better CPU as performance is subject to change... but do use this info so you avoid buying a new GPU for Rust then being surprised when it yields no performance improvement (at this time).
Hardware Capacity
~75% of the playerbase is running 16GB or less of RAM.... perhaps we should really prioritize why Unity is hogging all the RAM.
The majority of players (73%) using 1080p... yet only 2.5% of players using 4k?!
Popular Hardware
Looking at the most popular CPU & GPU we find that it is similar to steam's hardware survey but differs slightly from Rust. Here are some GPUs as % of total:
Our Metrics:
- GTX 1650 = 6%
- GTX 1060 = 2.5%
- GTX 2060 = 5.5%
- RTX 3060 = 7%
- RTX 3090 = 0.6%
- RTX 4090 = 0.2%
Graphics settings
30% of people using motion blur
