4:40pm EST - We’re in a fresh week of Rust development and the team is off to a good start. Hitting over 20,000 simultaneous users at the peak yesterday, player population is higher than it has been in months. Although more performance optimizations are definitely needed, gameplay is pretty solid at the moment. With the advent of loot and blueprints, gameplay has shifted drastically...

Loot spawn

There's been a lot of talk the past couple days about the content of loot drops. At the moment, it appears gun blueprints are exceedingly rare (if they even exist) and building plans are too common (among many other things). Being the first iteration of loot tables, tweaking is inevitably going to be needed. And, Maurino did just that today. I would expect to see many more tweaks to this over the next couple of weeks till a balance is found.

Blueprint wipes

A lot of people have asked me if blueprint knowledge is going to wipe when the map does. Thankfully, server owners have a choice to keep or delete this information through a map wipe. Given the difficulty in finding blueprints and frequency of wipes, for the foreseeable future, I will be keeping blueprint knowledge between wipes. I may decide to clear them out in a month or so, however, don’t worry about losing them anytime soon.

New UI

Unfortunately, Garry has the flu. That’s not stopping him from cranking out code though. One of his main projects for this week is redoing the UI system. With over 10 commits today to the UI Reboot branch, he is off to a great start. I think we’ll be seeing some great improvements to the in game menu’s and server browser later in the week.

New sleeping bag

Maurino replaced the model for the sleeping bag. The legacy green bag has been replaced with a rugged gray counterpart. This change is purely cosmetic, the bag still functions the same way and costs the same amount (50 cloth). Here's some shots:

Map changes

Andre is working on a procgen4 branch, changing a lot about how terrain is generated. Notably, forest density, frequency and size have all increased. It looks like frequency and steepness of terrain may be increasing as well.

Torch fixes

Alex and Minh have implemented some fixes for the torch hit detection and tweaked how some of the animations work. Here’s a video posted by Alex earlier.

Connectivity issues

Over the past several days, our servers have been dropping players intermittently, requiring a restart. I’ve gotten similar reports from other owners with populated servers. I’m in communication with Garry and we’re trying to track down the specific cause. In the mean time, if the server is down, please be patient and know I am doing everything I can to get it back up.

Operation unsuck

Paul has added an image to the Operation: Unsuck the environment trello card. He suggests adding more types of grass and shrubs to provide more contrast. I couldn’t agree more.

Comments? Questions? Feel free to chat on Rustaforum.