11:28pm EST - Maurino has fixed the chicken invincibility bug. This is good news because we had to wipe this evening, not because performance dropped, but because the only animals left were invincible chickens!

4:28pm EST - No update yet today. Looking at Jenkins, it appears they are launching the updated development branch to steam, however, no movement on the Rust stable branch. If I had to guess, I'd say we're not going to see the update today.

2:10pm EST - Great news: Maurino removed the debug speed cheats and spectate ability! Word on the street is most hackers currently get their ability just by modifying the client code. This has allowed them to bypass EAC and VAC. Now that this is removed, we should see much less (if any) hackers. I do hope, however, spectate ability is kept in for people with moderatorid set (it is a valuable admin tool).

Update: Maurino to the rescue. Spectate is retained for admins.

1:15pm EST - Welcome to a new week in Rust development! We did not see an update Friday or over the weekend, however, expect one today or tomorrow. There's a bunch of cool stuff coming in this update which I'll summarize below. Also, we have some awesome things going on at Rustafied in the realm of new partnerships and team. Before we get into it, a brief recap of the current state of the game...

State of the game

The game is pretty unstable at the moment. Server performance is still dropping anywhere from 8 to 12 hours (sometimes lasting longer, sometimes shorter). When performance dips, I wipe the server. For some, this can be frustrating as fuck. Others look forward to the next wipe. Personally, I love starting fresh with 50 - 100 people in the server. That initial land grab, the adrenaline rush of battling it out with everything you own on your back. These are the things that make Rust great. Not to mention, performance (both server and client) is at its very best right after a wipe. As always, I only wipe when we have to. In time, intervals between wipes will get longer.

Oh, I almost forgot, mass drops. They are still happening. Thankfully, there is a fix on the way. Unfortunately, it won't be coming in the next update (it is tied up in the weapon refactor changes). Expect this to be fixed toward end of the week. In the mean time, I am restarting the server whenever I see a mass drop occur. This allows us to run for another couple hours until the next one happens. Some things can bug out during a mass drop / server restart. People can die, boxes can be occupied, and crafting can get fucked. I know this sucks but I request you be patient, these things will get better soon.

Update today?

On Saturday, Garry posted the devblog and commented on the subsequent reddit conversation that we should expect an update "probably on Monday." My fingers are crossed we’ll see one today. Here’s some highlights of what changes we can expect in this update:

A bunch of melee fixes
Spears are less powerful, stone spear costs more (and actually requires stone)
Storage boxes are no longer invincible, spews items when broken (loses about half)
Arrows move faster, have sound and trails
Crafting changes (see more here)
AI improvements
Large wood storage (not confirmed)
The corpse and lock stuff listed below
A bunch of other stuff, I'll note any other important things when the update drops

Corpse looting improvements

Maurino has made some great improvements to corpse looting. Specifically, corpses will no longer disappear while you're looting. Also, if you harvest a players corpse till it disappears, a small percentage of the items will spew.

Locked doors

Maurino has also made it a lot easier to tell if doors are locked or unlocked. This is so fucking needed, I can't count how many times I've been working with a team and someone (probably me) has left the door unlocked accidentally.

Spade AK

Tom has been working on the Spade AK. It's really coming together!

Zen and the Art of Rust

I'm excited to announce a new partnership between Rustafied and Grym, author of Zen and the Art of Rust. You've probably seen his kickass treehouse. We're still working out the specifics but expect to see his future work posted here.

RustEssentials

I've formed another exciting partnership with MistaD, the developer of RustEssentials. He has been working hard on the RustEssentials redux and we're partnering to open a modded server in the near future. Our goal is is to create an awesome, unique, modded server which gives our admin team ability to moderate and allows MistaD to stress test this new version. More on this later in the week.

Admin team

I've also started forming an admin team. This is a group of about 10 people who will be my eyes and ears in the server. Currently, they do not have any admin permissions (because it is all or nothing on a vanilla server). As we get our modded server up, they will start with limited permissions and be granted more as they prove their competence. I have high standards for the leadership of Rustafied and will handle any cases of admin abuse with swift justice (if they ever occur, I’m being intentional they do not). If you ever have an issue with an admin or player in the Rustafied.com server, please email rustafied@gmail.com. I am redoing the server page over the next day or two to list out team members, roles, and rules for admins. Stay tuned for more.

Tip of the day - graphics.quality 2

There is still a bug in the fast and fastest graphics quality settings where light from torches and fires doesn't illuminate anything. This makes it very fucking dark at night. To fix this (at the sacrifice of some FPS) open console with f1 and type: graphics.quality 2

Please vote for this bug here.