Prototype 17

Arms manufacturers contracted by Cobalt were tasked with producing a new sidearm to meet the personal defense requirements of the organization. After an exhaustive review of potential candidates, the Prototype 17 was selected. This new weapon has a magazine capacity of 18 and fires in deadly 3-round bursts with a single pull of the trigger. 

In addition, it features tritium sights for rapid target acquisition and engagement under low-light conditions. It has been noted that some survivors have scavenged and reverse-engineered the weapon, extracting some of its components and allowing them to augment their own weapons with the 3-round burst ability.

We've added a new train carriage that you might find on sidings.

Inside you'll find a poker table with four seats, two slot machines, and a brand new blackjack computer that can handle 1-3 players.

All the features of blackjack are here, and blackjack pays out 3:2. The computer hates to lose, but he plays fair. You can make an initial bet of between 5 and 500 scrap. Just keep an ear out for what's going on nearby - this isn't a safe zone!

For the past few months, I've been working on a new system to improve how we render monuments at a distance while maintaining or improving the current performance. It uses a technique called HLOD (Hierarchical Level of Detail) and involves baking the monument as it should be seen at a distance down into a single mesh. A key requirement was to make sure this didn't add any extra work for our environment artists, this process is almost entirely automated.

The final performance improvements were minimal, but the increased visual fidelity at a distance still seemed worthwhile to ship. You should notice more geometry and detail, as well as entire monuments that will now be visible when they weren't before.

We have plans in place to switch the default networking layer of Rust servers from RakNet to Steam Networking in late November or early December, further communication will follow.

This change requires servers to have a separate Steam query port set via the -queryport server startup parameter. When no query port is set, the server will default to either game port + 1 or rcon port + 1, depending on which number is larger.

Hosts of shared servers will need to ensure the query port is forwarded correctly, which is why we are making this announcement ahead of time. Servers can be switched over to Steam Networking for testing via the -swnet startup parameter, which we recommend doing ahead of time in order to ensure a smooth transition.

Halloween events have come to an end, good job survivors at closing all of Cobalt's project R.U.I.N portals! Hopefully, that's the last of them we see... 

There will be some exclusive Twitch drops for 2 days starting November 19th and some generic drops for the whole week.

Make sure you get synced up at twitch.facepunch.com to get and claim your drops when the event starts!