The Electric Anniversary

Welp, that was fun. Electricty has been added to the game! I've been wanting to do this for a long time and finally decided to take the plunge this month and get it implemented. It's not totally finished, but all of the heavy lifting has been done so we'll be able to expand on it with ease in the coming months.

Electrical Components

Here is a list of all of the new electrical components added to the game:

More Information

An excellent write-up, including crafting times, and more information is available here In short, we now have a fully functional logic gate system in Rust. Right now you'll be able to do something as simple as adding a working lightswitch to your base, or as advanced as making a functional CPU in the game. The main use for this is going to be making godlike trap bases. Moving forward, I'm going to add a lot more components which will let people do things such as move inventory items around for automatic sorters or to collect loot from failed raid attempts. Factory type deployables are a must. The list goes on and on. This was a major undertaking and I want to give a special thanks to Shadowfrax, Vice, and Andre for helping me get it completed in time for the patch. I'm super excited to see all the things you guys come up with!

We've added the M39 Rifle to the game. This rifle is the military grade counterpart to the SAR. You'll be able to find it in the advanced crates (military/bradley/locked/airdrop) rarely, and it is, of course, uncraftable. We're going to be doing a revamp of the way the NPC vendors work in the coming month(s) so that the available items are no longer static, and we'll throw the M39 into the rotating loot table.

Just over 6 years ago I fired up Unity and created a new untitled project. I was going to make a survival game I wanted to play. I didn't know if it would make it past the prototype stage and I most certainly had no idea it would go on to become such a hugely successful game spawning endless memories and stories of exploration, defeat, victory, loss, and often rage. On December 11th, 2018 Rust will have been on Steam for five years. That's a third of my adult life. Words cannot express how thankful I am it has been well received and that people continue to play and enjoy it. Rust wouldn't be what it is today without the entire team of extremely talented professionals I have had the pleasure of working with at Facepunch Studios. The long hours and dedication they show for Rust makes it what it is today. There’s still so much to do, and not a day goes by that I don’t have some kind of a shower thought and run to my computer to add it to my notes. There’s still so much left to do in the game and I couldn’t even hazard a guess as to when I’d consider it “done”. Thank you all again. And, hey, maybe I’ll be writing another one of these in 5 years!

The bow had a couple of issues that made it feel unresponsive and weird. The improvement should be immediately noticeable when you try it out yourself, but here is a video of it.

I updated all the elevators in the game (both bucket and cabin lifts) to the entity parenting system that's used by our vehicles and the cargo ship. Things should feel a lot smoother and less glitchy.

Our third censorship option has finally arrived: underwear. This should be particularly useful for streamers, although we do not expect it to automatically solve all demonetization issues. You can enable it in the options menu.

Impact particle effects on the cargo ship have been updated to be simulated in local space, so they no longer look completely out of place and go crazy when the ship moves along. More importantly, you can now deploy ladders anywhere on the ship. This can, for example, be used to board it from different directions and surprise other players that are already on board.

I debugged and tracked down two anti-hack issues that could cause a "reload_cooldown" message in combat log followed by several "projectile_invalid" messages. Things should feel much more solid now.

We decided to change the storage box loot pouch: it is now dropped at the location the last damage was received at. This way raiders can control where the loot is going to be dropped to a certain degree, which will make some loot room layouts obsolete.

Just a couple of quick changes for the custom maps.

• Exposed NPC vending machines to SDK prefab list
• Added ocean_patrol_path_iterations convar
• Added tick_populations and tick_individuals convars to adjust resource spawn tick rate
• Fixed ore spawn issues on custom maps with certain biome distributions

One of the things I worked on in the past month was a barge that will eventually serve as a spawn point for new players. The idea is for these barges to circle around the island and allow players to jump off at any point and swim to the shore. They're not in the game this patch, but here's what they look like:

Now that we have a lot of functional water gameplay mechanics, an oil rig seems like a natural progression for monuments in the game. The rig should play like an event. I am currently working on this with Damian, and we are on track to release at the beginning of next year. More details will follow as we progress through it.

This month, the Junkpile Scientists and Military Tunnel Lab Scientists were moved onto the new AI system that has been running the Scientist brains at the Military Tunnel since August. This means that the NPCs should now be much faster at reacting to you, using junkpiles for cover, and generally put up a much-improved challenge to pesty scavengers that disturb their important research. Military Tunnel Scientists, in general, got better at using cover tactically during gunfights and should throw grenades more often. They stay back and wait for players to push them most of the time, but can get frustrated enough that they push the player’s position as well. Scientists will now run slower sideways and backwards, much like a player would.

I made an end of year post over on our company blog. It has some historic pondering and stats some of you guys might be interested in. For the rest of you it'll also reveal how to get this helmet.