12:35pm EST - It is an exciting day for Rust development! Explosives are back, and like them or not, they'll forever shift the dynamic of raiding. You can test it out for yourself on the development branch (if you can find the blueprint, that is). Before we get into that, I want to discuss a new update release schedule...

New update schedule

Garry mentioned to me yesterday that Rust will be taking on a new update schedule. Rather than launching updates on Friday in conjunction with the devblog, large updates will now be released on Monday's. I can’t stress how much I agree with this decision. Friday releases have caused many weekend headaches and frustrating gameplay. The goal is to get more people playing the development branch, distinguishing game breaking bugs before they reach main.

Testing in development mode

Switching to the development branch is a pain in the ass. You have to go into properties and run an update each time you want to switch (full instructions here). Thankfully, Garry is trying to make it easier by working with Valve to see how to allow clients to have both the main and development branch installed at the same time. I’ll keep you posted on how this progresses.

Explosives are in!

Now, for what everyone is really interested in: Explosives! Garry shocked the community this morning by introducing explosives and C4. For those of you who played legacy, this will seem very familiar to you. Explosives and C4 (now called timed explosive charge) behave pretty much the same way they did in legacy: Craft explosives, use them to make C4 (you need to find blueprints for each). Place C4 on a wall or door, wait for it to explode. Here’s some details, pictures and video:

Timed explosive charge

Cost
10 Explosives
5 Cloth

Fuse
10 seconds

Damage
1000 hp (plus damage to surrounding walls)

Explosives

Cost
20 Gunpowder
1 Low grade fuel
10 Sulfur
10 Metal fragments

Video credit: Kulan. Note: the sounds for explosions are not in as of yet.

Building health changes

Yesterday, along with the introduction of the new tier 1 building blocks (twigs), health regeneration of walls was removed. Placed walls are now instantaneously at full health. Today while testing C4, I’ve noticed some changes to the health stats of walls:

Tier 1 (twigs) - 50 hp
Tier 2 (logs) - 1000 hp
Tier 3 (stone) - 5000 hp

Basically, it appears health of tier 2 and tier 3 have doubled. Expect the health and costs of all building blocks to fluctuate as the team seeks to balance these new dynamics of the game. I’ll be calculating all the numbers and updating them on our building guides this week.

Voice icon

Last week in the new UI preview, there was some speculation about the 3 icons on the bottom left of the screen. Today, the mystery is solved: That icon appears and bounces a bit when someone is speaking to you.

Legacy map

Petur has been making some miscellaneous commits to the legacy-terrain branch over the past few days. We have yet to see any sneak peeks of what the new legacy map is going to look like, however, I'm really eager to see this in action.

Sound drops

If you’re playing on the development branch you might have noticed your sound going out randomly. This is happening to everyone after about half hour of gameplay it appears. The only fix we’ve found so far is to close the game and rejoin. I’ve brought this to Garry’s attention so hopefully we’ll see a fix before this branch hits main.

Question? Comments? Join the conversation at Rustaforum.com