3:00pm EST - Our update preview stream is live! twitch.tv/rustafied

12:00am EST - It’s a fresh month for Rust development and the team is trucking along on a bunch of exciting new features.

Our update preview stream goes live at 3pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day.

Fixes and patches

You may have noticed some small updates to Rust earlier in the week. As with many times after a large update, the team released some optional patches to fix some bugs and exploits. Server owners, if you haven’t done so already, I recommend running these updates.

Halloween event next week!

There will be a mandatory update next week, October 17th, to release this years Halloween content. Although not much is known about what spooky things the team at Facepunch has in store for us this year, we can expect more to come to light over the following days. As always, we’ll post a full summary of what’s included in this years event on our post next week.

Group chat

A new branch named chat improvements has reared its head this week. Looking to be the addition of group chat functionality, this body of work appears as though it might drastically improve the way in which players communicate via chat in Rust.

Given it’s still on a separate branch, very few details are available quite yet. That said, it does look like there will be different channels of chat (based on teams maybe) which can be navigated through via a tab system. It also looks like team members messages will be tagged as such and potentially have a different color. We’ll post more details on this as they come to light.

Edit: We’re also just seeing the addition of mute functionality for individual players. Nice!

Edit 2: A teaser pic was posted on the Facepunch Instagram

Instruments DLC coming soon

There have been a ton of commits this week on the instruments branch. From drums and pianos, to xylophones and tubas, a slew of new musical instruments will soon be available in the game.

As you may recall, it has been announced that these items will be part of an addon DLC available for purchase. No word on a release date.

Images courtesy of the Facepunch Instagram.

Optimizations

Along with the HDRP branch aimed at improving performance (mentioned below), the team is working on optimizations on several other fronts. With branches for skeleton optimization, LOD optimization, and monument optimization, it’s clear the team is prioritizing performance.

Comp branch

Rohan has been working for some time on a branch simply titled, ‘comp’. The team has not released any details on what this is for yet, however, the commits certainly raise some eyebrows as to what they are working on:

Send the player token with the pairing notification
Add a command to get the map image as a JPG
Add a CPU based map renderer for the server
Send a list of monuments with their coordinates with the map image
Switch to saving the server id + token in the identity folder because there can be multiple on the same system, also planning to use replicated convar to get the server id on clients
Server now requests a server ID and token at boot, notification screen uses it but need a nice way to send it to the client first so WIP

What does all this mean? I’m not going to speculate at the moment, but it could result in some unique new functionality in the near future.

Vehicles progress

Bill continues his work on the vehicles branch. Although there still isn’t much to report in the form of specifics, we do know this work will introduce new types of modular vehicles to the game. It also appears to feature some form of vehicle lift and potentially a storage component for vehicles.

This is a huge undertaking so I doubt it’ll go live with the update in November. That said, December is shaping up to be one of the largest updates in Rust history, so maybe we’ll see it then.

HDRP

Progress on the HDRP branch also continues this week with a slew of miscellaneous commits. In case you’ve been under a rock for the past two months, this body of work aims at improving client performance while increasing the visual fidelity of the game overall.

Based on some of the sample screens posted on the Facepunch Instagram, the improvements to visuals is already very clear. Unfortunately, it looks like the performance increases hoped for are not necessarily apparent out of the gate. Thankfully the team still has time to work on optimization and improvements before this goes live. Although there has been no set time for when this will make it into the game, December appears to be the leading theory.

Other stuff

Procedural cliffs being worked on
‘Codelock default’ branch (unclear what this is at the moment)