1:00pm EST - Although there have been no updates pushed to main this week, there are a lot of cool changes live on the development branch. Loot is getting balanced and the terrain is looking a lot better. The UI Reboot hasn’t been merged in yet, even so, I’m hoping we at least get to see these dev branch changes go live tomorrow.

Updated loot

Maurino has been working a lot on the loot system. He’s made it so loot in rad towns is better than the loot you find in barrels around the map. With this, he’s also tweaked the balance of the drops in the loot tables a bunch and made it so rad towns aren’t full of loot on server load. There’s still a bunch more balancing to do, but here is a sampling of what the loot drops are currently like on the dev branch:

Rad town after server restart (half the crates were there)

First 5 barrels, one was empty and one had three items in it

Second 5 barrels, the rusty barrels take less hits to open

Second pass in Rad Town, collected every crate, garbage can and barrel that had spawned

First Airdrop

3rd group of 5 barrels

4th set of 5 barrels, one was empty

5th set of 5 barrels, one was empty. the barrels seam to avoid spawning near other entities(eg: trees) the desert and open fields are the best place to find these

3rd pass in Rad Town

6th set of 5 barrels, one was empty

2nd airdrop, disregard the medkits. The airdrop landed in the water, on that note Medkits heal you from drowning

7th set of 5 barrels, 3 where empty

8th set of 5 barrels, one was empty

3rd airdrop, again disregard the medkits

A big thanks to Grug for collecting all these shots!

Tool cupboard no longer blocks building

Maurino has made a huge change to tool cupboards: They no longer block building. They will still allow authorized people to rotate and demolish, however, anyone will be able to build anywhere. This is not set in stone, more of a trial to see how it goes. One thing is for sure: It'll shift the dynamic of raiding in a huge way.

Edit: Maurino has reverted this change till he has time to put some other things in place.

Terrain improvements

Andre has been making a ton of changes to the procedural map generation and terrain. Overall, the maps are generating much different than previous builds. The landscape looks much more interesting with much less flat, plainness. Here's a gallery of images Andre posted to trello:

Bushes everywhere!

One of the ways Andre is sprucing up the environment is by adding bushes everywhere. By everywhere, he means everywhere! Along with being much more plentiful, bushes now scale in size. As a result, many bushes are now twice the height of a Newman. I imagine this will be toned down a bit shortly, but for now, it’s pretty crazy seeing all the huge bushes around everywhere.

UI Reboot

Garry is still trucking along on the UI Reboot. No cool visuals to show you all today, however, we’ll hopefully be seeing it in action for ourselves tomorrow. Don’t get your hopes up though, this is a big update and we haven’t seen it merge into main yet...

Cave exploit fixed

There was an exploit which allowed you to basically get inside a mountain by going to a certain part of a cave entrance. This has now been fixed.

Hazmat damage

Maurino made it so hazmat suit amplifies the damage you receive. This had been the case prior to a big update in December, but for the past several weeks, hazmat gear has protected the same as other clothing. This initially didn’t make sense to me, however, I rationalize it like this: Hazmat gear has metal in it. If you get attacked, that metal could fracture and create shrapnel damage. I’m not sure if this is Facepunch’s thought process or not. Either way, we will be testing how big of an impact these changes have and will update the numbers on our damage, armor and you guide.

Edit: Got clarification from Maurino - He amplified hazmat for now to see how it plays out with people raiding radtowns and being more vulnerable when wearing it...

When we have a good tier system of clothing set up I'll make it offer no protection so then it'll be a tradeoff between having protection or not by wearing real clothes or radsuit ... but seeing as its all fucked up right now I just decided to amplify it so you have to fear someone with a spear.