11:45pm EST - The team is working hard today and we have some fixes on the horizon. No client update has been released yet but I have my fingers crossed we see one later today or tomorrow. See below for details.

12:59am EST - It was a rough weekend for Rust. We saw a much anticipated update on Friday, and, although the new building system is pretty sweet, the issues introduced seriously impact playability (see Friday post-mortem for a detailed list of bugs).

State of the game

Server performance is dipping dramatically over a short period of time. The longer since the last wipe, the farther south it goes. As this happens, pretty much every aspect of the game gets extremely lagged.

Crafted items don't enter your inventory for minutes, every player you see jumps 20ft at a time, chat messages take seconds to send, night starts lasting a lot longer and the time of day shifts 30+ minutes at a time, wood even burns slower. Basically, the game gets totally unplayable. This is happening in as little as 6 hours since the last wipe (Note: I think this number is slightly longer when the server is less populated). Restarting the server and loading the save doesn't fix it. The only fix is wiping.

On top of that, servers are experiencing random mass drops. This was happening the other week, died down for a bit and started again on Friday. Basically, everyone in the server gets kicked in one go. They can join again, however, after another 10 minutes or so, it mass drops everyone again. This continues happening frequently till the server is rebooted. Compounding this, items in wood storage boxes are disappearing after server restarts, so many people lose a lot of their items each time this happens.

Garry did some debugging of the building system yesterday, and I know he’s on top of this shit, so hopefully we'll see some relief soon. In the mean time, I recommend playing small. Don't bother trying to gather 100k wood or crafting 500 bullets because those things will likely be gone within a matter of hours. Multiple wipes each day are the pits, however, it’s the only way to ensure any semblance of smooth gameplay at the moment.

Server performance

Garry is working on performance enhancements and bug fixes today. His commits basically all start with fixed, tweaked, optimized or debug. Andre has also made a couple commits around performance. This is exactly what we need to help bring some stability back into the game.

Unity beta 14

Garry also updated to Unity beta 14. See details about this on the release notes.

Storage boxes saving

Maurino has pushed a fix for storage boxes not saving on server restart. Note: This will still be an issue until we see the next server update so take note of the tip of the day below.

Lighthouse monument

Daniel has checked in the lighthouse monument files. This means we should be seeing it on the map sometime in the near future. Awesome, I can't wait to see this puppy in person! See more on the lighthouse here.

Operation unsuck

Paul has posted a new paintover shot for Operation: unsuck the environment and Minh has started on some particle fx for sandstorms!

Tip of the day: Store valuables in furnaces or campfires.

Storage boxes are losing items on restart. I've reached out to Maurino about this (he was working on the storage box code last week) and he's implemented a fix in the next update. Until then, given this mass drop forcing server restarts, store your high value items in campfires or furnaces because they aren't affected by this issue.