BREACH AND CLEAR

Monument blockers are a new obstacle we're adding to monuments with red keycard puzzle rooms. They’re intended to slow down early access to the loot at these monuments. They require a significant amount of damage to destroy but once destroyed they won't respawn. You may also find a handful of weaker monument blockers which can be destroyed by melee.

We don't think this will have an enormous impact on progression speed but it might make the early wipe a little more interesting for the first joiners.

In the event they aren’t destroyed within the first 24 hours, they will start to decay.

Starting this month Tool Cupboards will now apply an additional upkeep tax based on the number of players that are in a base. When calculating that number we consider a few things:

• Any players directly authed on the TC

• Any players that have been deauthed from the TC in the last 24 hours

• Any players that are authed on a code lock in the base (including guest code access)

• Any players that were deauthed from a code lock in the last 24 hours

The upkeep rates are tiered based on number of players:

• First 4 players incur no tax

• Next 6 players incur 2% tax per player

• Subsequent players incur 4% tax per player
  This means a TC with 6 players authed will have +4% upkeep, a TC with 12 players will have +20% upkeep. There is a maximum tax amount of 300%. You can see the current tax rate being applied by hovering over the upkeep cost while the TC is open.

Large player groups are a tricky game balance problem to tackle as they essentially bypass most difficulty mechanics in the game via sheer numbers. We don't want to make this an unviable playstyle - Rust is a sandbox best played with friends and we believe you should be able to play it as you see fit.

We're hoping this adds an interesting problem for large groups to solve that doesn't come at the expense of small groups and solos as we believe these groups don't really have many interesting gameplay problems to tackle.

As usual, we'll monitor this over time and make adjustments as necessary. Server owners will find a set of ConVars in the Decay class that can be used to modify these behaviours, including disabling it entirely.

High quality metal ore nodes and collectables can now be found across the island. They're extremely scarce, but you'll have more luck finding the HQM node in the Jungle.

The Drone marketplace is now connected to last months Power Plant system[rust.facepunch.com], requiring the server to keep the power plant up and running in order to operate drone deliveries. The marketplace now has a built in power level that slowly increases when 4 or more fuses are active in the Power Plant.

Once the battery hits 50% it can start accepting purchases. As long as at least one fuse is inserted into the Power Plant the battery won't decrease, but if it drops below 50% then the marketplace will deactivate again.

You can see the current charge level from the marketplace map screen.

The Medical Honey Bandage is a brand-new healing item on the Workbench Level 1. Designed to bridge the gap between the regular Bandage and Medical Syringe, it gives aspiring beekeepers another way to put their honey reserves to good use. Players with thriving bee farms often end up with more honey than they know what to do with, so we hope this new item makes the surplus feel a little sweeter.

We’ve heard your feedback - the Attack Helicopter is too difficult to counter. 

Attack helicopters' existing cockpit armour will now fall off in stages as it becomes damaged, exposing both the pilot and gunner. Pilots will now have to be more careful with how close they fly to the sun.

Attack heli armour conditions 

• 80% Left panel - 680hp

• 70% Right panel - 595hp

• 60% Front panel - 510hp

We can't forget about the armoured HABs though, these will also have conditional armour.

Armoured HAB armour conditions 

• 90% Left panel - 2250hp 

• 80% Right panel - 2000hp 

• 70% Back panel - 1750hp

• 60% Front panel - 1500hp

We'll being monitoring your feedback as always.

We've given a little bit of love to how modular cars handle. The steering, turning and suspension have all been tweaked to feel better. We have hopefully also improved how well they drive for players with higher latency.

As well as that, we have also added a handbrake mechanic, you can activate it by pressing your CTRL key. Now you will be able to do hairpin turns, take tighter corners, drift, and even do some doughnuts.

Yes: we are buffing Radwater again. This time we've given it a large buff when used in Sprinklers, specifically against those with armour.

Radwater will now seep through more armour types, causing significant radiation to those in full kits, or lower radiation protection gear. Hazmats are still an effective counter.

The SAM site will now do a much better job of destroying hostile drones.

Missiles will fly faster vs drones and have a larger detonation fuse area, meaning drones get taken down much more reliably.

We've made several smaller balance changes across the board this month, some addressing community pain points.

Heavy Plate Helmet

The heavy plate helmet now suppresses noise when worn. We've also increased the crafting costs.

Heavy Plate Armour

Players wearing the Heavy Plate Jacket or Pants will now make noise when moving, audible to other players.

Swamp Trees

The wood harvest from swamp trees has been significantly increased to be in line with other types of trees.

Semi-Pistol

The damage falloff has been increased, meaning less damage at range. We've also increase the crafting cost.

Pies

Various pies have had their durations extended and recipes adjusted. The Hunters pie bleed reduction has increased.

Grenades

Stack sizes have been reduced for the F1, Bee Grenade, Molotov, Flashbangs and Beancans.

Homing Launcher

The homing launcher lock-on duration has been reduced, allowing for earlier firing.

SMG & Rifle Bodies

SMG bodies are now minorly more common, whilst rifle bodies have seen a slight reduction

Large Medkit

The Large Medkit now remove radiation to match the behavior of Medical Syringes.

Composter

You can now see how quickly things will take to turn into fertilizer, your crops will thank you.

Let there be light! 

This month, the flashlight has received a new update - featuring a brand new high quality model, high resolution textures, and new animations.  We've also updated the functionality, r/click to turn on/off, just like the torches. You'll even get a different admire animation, based on whether it's on or off!

Arrows have had a facelift. Wooden arrows have now been updated to have more visual interest (complete with new fletching) and to feel more "RUST".

Under the hood, it's been a fiddly one, as each existing weapon contained the arrow mesh directly, so updated rigs and prefabs were required.

If this felt like dejavu, you're right. We accidentally left it in the last dev blog. It's in-game this time, we promise.

This month’s workshop skinnable is all four pieces of Wood Armor:

• Wood Chestplate

• Wood Armor Pants

• Wood Armor Helmet

• Wood Armor Gloves

Branching out to all four Wood Armor pieces this month we’re pining for the community to spruce up the workshop!

To make your own Wood Armor skins, head over to the in-game workshop and leaf through the Wood Armor attire items listed above. From there, you can download the model files and add your own materials and make something tree-mendous.

Machined from the toughest gemstones, this Assault Rifle skin will show each and every shot you take.

Coming in 5 unique color variations, the Crystal Assault Rifle shows ammunition in the magazine as well as inner workings of the internals as you fire. 

The Crystal Assault Rifle can be purchased in-game or from the Rust Steam item store[rust.facepunch.com]

It's about time world models have a bit of love. This month, we're introducing over 70 new world models to replace the burlap sack. 

We went to effort to make sure they were more or as performant than the burlap sack. Dropped items from electrical components to clothing.

Lots of the entities in the world are usually networked way before they can be seen by players. Sometimes this happens too far out, so if a player was running through a specific grid: they may be getting network data about entities which they likely won't be super close to. These all add up: resulting in extra network overhead for the client + server. 

A few months ago we rolled out a system that would allow us to have custom network ranges for specific objects: close, standard, far. This has only been setup for the very worst offenders, but now I've had a proper audit of most of our entities and set a huge amount of entities (around 300)  to that 'close' network range. This affects things like signs, mushrooms, driftwood etc, greatly reducing our overhead.

This won't affect gameplay, and nothing has been reduced which is rendered very far in the distance. We hope to be able to better use this system in the future, but this is a great start.

There's a new "random" skin option at the start of the skin list. With this selected, each craft of that item will get a random, unlocked skin applied.

This is saved per item, so you can have it activated for some items and keep other items with a specific skin selected.

We introduced a completely new navmesh in a previous patch, disabled by default, accessible by booting servers with the -useNewNavmesh command line parameter.

We since improved performance a lot, reduced the save sizes, and squashed a lot of bugs.

This patch we are going to enable it on some of our servers and monitor how it performs.

The goal is to make it the default as a hotfix or as part of next patch if everything goes well.

What you can expect as a player:

• maybe some animals will enter your base or get in monuments

What you can expect as a server owner:

• navmesh is saved to disk and loaded when the server restarts, potentially leading to faster boots

• the continuous runtime cost of NPC navigation is lighter on the main thread but uses more background threads

This is part of a push to improve performance and stability of NPCs in the long term, but also to have the option to have various NPCs navigate player bases correctly.

Most Rust servers follow a daily restart schedule, to help with server stability and performance.

These restarts should ideally be fast and not affect gameplay in any way, so players can just keep going about their business after rejoining.

Until now, this wasn't the case with some of the game's biggest events, such as oil rig - if you happened to be taking rig at an unlucky time and got interrupted by the server going down, all of the loot crates and most importantly, the hackable locked crate would just disappear.

This month I've been working on fixing these kinds of issues by improving the way the server saves and loads the state of these events. Affected are the oil rigs, cargo ship, patrol helicopter, Bradley and satellite crash sites.

A new option has been added to the painting UI that projects the current paintbrush onto the object you are painting! This should help out a lot when you're painting with different brush sizes and textures at varying zoom levels.

The pressurized tank and gearboxes in water treatment plant have received a mini rework for simplification.

Each gearbox turned fully will provide 3 hours real time of water flow to the pipes. The maximum pressure of the tank when both gearboxes are turned is enough to keep the pipes operational for, you guessed it, 6 hours.

In addition, the amount of water produced by the pipes now scales linearly with the amount of pressure in the tank. You can check the pressure at the maintenance hut where the ground-floor gearbox is.

When the tank runs out of pressure and no water is being produced, the pipes around the map will now start to lose water as well.

To compensate for some losses, the IO output has been increased. The numbers should balance out to be one water pipe being roughly equivalent to 2 pumps, with better IO push rates. The amount of pipes on the map has also been increased and should be more consistently placed.

We've customized the physics engine (PhysX) further this month, tailoring it more and more to Rust. We've added an entirely new broadphase mode, using a BVH structure that we've also applied to the underlying structures used for physics queries.

In simple terms, the old implementations for these used to scale with the number of colliders in the world which is constantly growing during a wipe cycle. Now these scale more with the number of changes that are being made which scales more with the number of active players and at a much better rate.

The data above is comparing the weekend before updating the physics engine and the weekend after, on this particular server it doubled performance. 

As always, the server will get the most benefit from these changes as it's generally just doing a lot more. However, the client will always get a benefit from these changes as well.

One of the core rules of Unity is that you have to call scripting APIs from the main thread. So things like accessing a gameobject's transform or even accessing current time (Time.time) has to be done on main thread. This makes it very awkward and sometimes limiting to push parallelization into the game code. 

But Unity enforces these checks only in Editor and debug build environments - Release builds strip out these checks for performance reasons. So we could technically write code for editor that plays by the rules, while in Release plays fast-and-dangerously, but that would be a giant headache to validate and debug.

This month me and octo found a way to trick Unity into thinking any thread to be a main thread. This allows us to unify implementations and test things in editor with confidence. This opens the door to speed up parts of code that weren't available before - but this isn't free lunch, Unity can have internal synchronization or design that doesn't assume that it'll be interacted with concurrently (which can lead to bugs). And we still need to amend code to benefit from it.

For technical details to other unity devs/users, it's a 2 step process - there's an editor-only managed code side check (Object.EnsureRunningOnMainThread) that can be replaced with a dud, and there's a native memory TLS variable that can be set from 0 to 1 to tell unity "this is a main thread" (which one can identify by scanning all TLS variables on main thread and looking to ones storing 1). Different builds and platforms will have different TLS locations, as well as memory protections to modify memory directly.

To test it, I trialled it out on Server Occlusion generation - there's a couple phases that the process goes through, and certain steps are easy to parallelize. Those are: sampling unity's terrain mesh heights and filtering physics query results if they have a component. In both cases it's 2 single line loops.

Before: 44s for 4.5k world - only the orange blocks have native thread parallelism, so I didn't include managed worker threads display

After: 22s for 4.5k world - the blue scatter plot bellow are all managed worker threads being busy

To be fair, it's not exactly apples to apples comparison - I've tweaked a couple things that gave 8s of speedup on it's own, so the actual speedup we got from using async tasks is 37s -> 22s.

Also, that whole "no free lunch" line - Unity, sadly, has a bunch of synchronization in play that strangles performance:

In the future I hope to engage it in more places, but it'll be a gradual process.

While working on a new Pool implementation I've kept around original Mutex pool as a fallback. I haven't heard of any issues this month, so with this patch I'm treating it as deprecated and it will be removed in the next patch.

The hammer was another model looking very dated, so we've given it a refresh. The new high-quality model features high-resolution textures, and a new set of animations.

We've made a variety of memory improvements this month across many parts of the game:

• Reduced the memory usage of a lot of objects in the world, by very small amounts on each object but it adds up to about 15k less objects/10mb of memory

• Reduced the texture size of many ambient occlusion textures resulting in a reduction of ~630mb, with almost no visual difference, this would affect VRAM usage.

• Reduced the texture size of distant objects, more VRAM saving

We've also identified a few more areas to improve that we should be able to implement next month.

Early testing is showing a healthy memory saving of over 0.5GB but this will vary between machines. 

Vehicles cause a lot of stutters when you're just roaming the world, unlike other entities - vehicles currently get fully destroyed and recreated whenever they're outside of your network range, this can cause really bad stutters somewhere in the range of 20-30ms which is longer than a couple of frames depending on your framerate. 

Pooling is used on most other entities, instead of fully destroying an entity and recreating it, we just disable them and re-use them as needed. With the complexity of vehicles, especially the modular ones, it took a lot longer to get pooling working without any major issues popping up. 

The new profiles are from me moving out of range and coming into range of all of the vehicles in the game, the left over spikes in the bottom screenshot are just from editor code.

Overall, you should see a lot less noticeable stutters playing the game, there is still more work to be done with pooling for things like player boats. That might be my next area to look into. 

The new UI has been getting a lot of fixes and improvements based on feedback from our internal trailer team as well as the community. I think it's slowly getting to a point where we can turn it on by default, until the next patch you can participate in testing it by using demo.newui 1 in the console.

As for the improvements: I fixed a bunch of UX issues with the UI, fixed undo not working with dolly camera, added a preview in dolly edit mode so you don't need to hop between the two views too often - plus a bunch of other improvements. 

I also redesigned the sandbox panel to prepare it for future improvements, one of those future improvements is parenting which is already in this update. You can parent lights to players at the moment, in the future you'll be able to parent more things to each other. 

There's also a new curve editor to allow you to animate keyframes with a lot more freedom, you can use it with dolly cameras to create speed ramping or slow the camera down as it sweeps through. 

I'm looking forward to seeing what people create!

To consolidate players, we are retiring the following servers

• EU Primitive 2

• CAN Primitive 1

• US West Primitive 1

If you were playing on any of the above, don't fear. There will still be Facepunch primitive gamemode servers in these regions.

We are reducing the map size from 4250 to 3750 on the following servers

• EU Hardcore 1

• US East Hardcore 1

Full devblog here: https://rust.facepunch.com/news/breach-and-clear