4:25pm EST - It is a fresh week for Rust development and, as the year winds down, the team if focusing on optimizations and fixes. No wipe will be forced this week, however, all Rustafied servers (with the exception of Low Pop) will be wiped when the update hits on Thursday. Before we get into what’s going on with development...

I’m going on vacation!

I’m heading off for some R&R and will be gone till after Christmas. Thankfully, our leadership team is picking up some of the slack so we’ll still have an update summary post / update stream on Thursday. Check back then for the lowdown on this update! Now, let’s get into it...

Optimization

Garry is working on performance improvements and optimizations, which is good considering performance - especially on the server side - has gone downhill over the last several updates. It’s always hard to tell how effective optimizations will be until they are live, but we’ll hopefully see some better performance after the update hits Thursday.

Also in the performance realm, Andre has started a new branch called “tree-performance.” With one commit so far, he’s optimized some LOD’s (the models you see from various distances) and added a tree quality convar.

M249 balance

Helk has tweaked some things with the M249. Along with lowering the aim cone, he’s lessened the horizontal recoil a bit. This should make it a bit easier to hit your targets when firing multiple rounds.

Auto turret changes

In addition to the M249 tweaks, Helk has fixed some issues with the auto turret. Specifically, he’s made it so auto turrets can’t be placed under water and set it so turrets won’t shoot back at other turrets anymore (hopefully).

Water updates

Diogo is fixing up some issues with the water system. As with some commits, they are a bit code-centric (i.e. Changed number of border mesh rings to 64 to improve per-vertex scattering calcs). That said, DX9 and OSX users should see some fixes to water when the update hits.