2:22pm EST - Welcome to a new year in Rust development! Garry and team have started off the year with a bang, releasing a new client / server update this morning. This update, which forced a wipe, brings a bunch of fixes and changes. Lets get into it...

Performance improvements

Performance and playability are the top priority right now. Thankfully, this update includes some nice performance enhancements. Most noticeable, entity load times are a lot faster. We no longer can only load 100 at a time; we’re now loading on average between 200 and 400 at a time. This is good news for people who don’t like wipes, one of the main causes of wipes recently has been load times getting out of hand as entity counts rise.

Textures messed up

There appears to be some major wonkiness in some textures at the moment. Water, rock nodes, held items and more are all showing as black (and blinking sometimes). Although this problem appears to be worst on Mac clients, some Windows users are also reporting messed up textures.

New server console

Garry has added a status bar on the bottom of the server console. Giving much more insight into the status of the server, this bar shows number of players, entities, sleepers and FPS. Note to server owners: Garry said generally anything over 30 FPS is good.

Invisible building fixes

This update also includes some fixes for what has arguably been the biggest bug in the game for the past two weeks: building parts like walls and foundations being invisible for certain players, allowing them to easily rob houses blind. It’s a little early to declare this 100% fixed, however, I have yet to hear of an instance of this occurring after todays update.

New sounds

Alex has been rocking out some new sounds for the weapons recently and it is paying off. The thompson, bolt action and bow all sound better.

Day / night cycle

The cycle for day and night has changed pretty drastically in this update. Mainly, both are a lot longer than before. Also, it may just be the fucked up textures, but night looks darker now.

Fall damage

Gone are the days of jumping off your 10 story house without a care in the world. Fall damage is back with a vengeance. To give you an idea, I jumped off a rock about 3 Newmans tall and lost about 40 health (it did not cause me to bleed).

No more skybridges

The building stability has been tweaked again, making it no longer possible to build huge sky bridges. Note: You can still lay floors one after the other, however, they now fall down within about 30 seconds. Good!

Global chat

Since the addition of local chat in early November, chat has been local by default. This means you could only see text chat from people in your general vicinity of the map. Given this basically eliminated text chat completely, I’ve kept global chat on in our server. As of the update today, the game is switching also, making global chat on by default.

New animations

Minh has been killing it with new animations. He’s added some new 3rd person attack animations for the hatchet and pickaxe, along with eating animations for animals and updates to 3rd person running.

AK-47 progress

Minh has also been making a lot of progress on the AK-47. The view model is in and animations for firing and idle have been added. Although not it the game yet, I expect we’ll see this newest addition to the Rust arsenal show up within the next couple of updates.