10:50pm EST - Yes, signs are exciting, but a bunch of other stuff is also afoot this week. Pardon the abnormal timing of my updates, returning from a long weekend away has my schedule a bit wonky. I’m back in the groove so here are some of the other things you can expect in this weeks update...

Death routine

With signs out of the way, Garry is working on a new branch, dynamically dubbed, deathroutine. It’s not exactly clear what this body of work is, but the commits have told us several things:

• It deals with the looting of sleeping, dead and wounded players.

• Dead players (ragdolls) now have eyes

• There is something called “wounded player assist”

Expect more on this as the deathroutine branch merges into main in the next day or two.

Update: Just got this video from Garry. Nice, looks like this is the first iteration of players getting grounded (as mentioned on the mindmap).

Clothing customization

Xavier continues his work on standardizing clothing. Here’s what he had to say about it:

Spent most of the day writing docs on making clothing work together as well as stuff for the shader. Most of the documentation is done, and I've continued to tweak the shader so it behaves predictably with various test assets.

Also, I ran a few tinting tests...

To help grasp the magnitude of this, please realize: not only is this aimed at having all current clothing work seamlessly together, it is also a foundation which enables people to create custom clothing blueprints in the future. I do not yet have a location for this documentation, however, I expect we’ll be privy to it soon.

ISO effect

Expect night to get a bit more grainy with this update, Garry has replaced the previous gamma hack fixes with an ISO effect. For you non-photographers, ISO is the measure of sensitivity for your cameras sensor versus available light. The lower the number, the less sensitive. As this number gets higher, the image has more noise (or grain). I’ve dabbled in a bit of photography, so by my (non)professional opinion, I’d say Garry set the ISO around 3200. This equates to notable degradation in visual quality, especially when brightness is additionally boosted.

Item changes

Helk has made a bunch of changes to items. Here’s the lowdown:

• Pump shotgun is nerfed (it was doing upwards of 300 dmg per hit) - now each projectile does 10 damage (a max of 125 per hit).
• Bandages are cheaper by a whole 1 cloth (they now cost 5 cloth instead of 6).
• Stone pickaxe 'balance' (gathers the same, costs 25 more stones).
• Salvaged hammer has reduced melee damage and now costs more (100 wood and 50 metal fragments).

Consumable balance

Along with tweaking items, Helk has also shifted some aspects of consumables. Most notably, you can now only eat meat every 2 seconds. This helps prevent players from spamming meat in combat to stay alive. He’s also added appropriate sound effects for consumption and made it so “max caloric regen [is] restricted to 60 hp + 40hp * comfort.” If this doesn’t make total sense to you, don't worry, you’re not alone. Here is the explanation I got from Helk:

Before caloric regen would bring you to 75hp max, and being near a campfire would increase the rate it happened
Now caloric regen brings you to a max of 60hp but up to 100 if near a fire

New sounds

Alex is doing his thing on sound effects. With several commits in the past day, he’s done a pass on melee / bullet impacts, tweaked the flesh bullet impacts and added gunshot reverb tails. This is all to say, gunplay stands to sound a bit different after this update goes live.

Repair bench

Daniel is working hard on modeling Paul’s repair bench. Looks like the team is going with the second concept. Here’s the original concept from Paul and Daniel's progress:

Trello changes

If you track Rust development like I do, you’re no stranger to Trello. And, if you fall in that category, you’ve undoubtedly noticed several boards are no longer there (most notably, Rust Programmers). No, they were not made private. I received confirmation from Garry that they have been deleted. To be honest, this news saddens me. I love tracking updates on Trello and am sorry to see so much valuable information lost. I’m sure Garry had a good reason for this (although I’m unclear as to what it is at this moment), my hope, however, is that he is clearing out space to make room for a new, more robust form of tracking team members development.

Terrain improvements

Petur, Diogo and Andre (and the rest of the team) have been busting ass on the terrain-improvements branch. For those of you late to the party, this is the Legacy map, the mere thought of which has been getting fans hard for months. Petur, in alignment with his infamously ambiguous commits, has provided us with some small glimmers of what is to come:

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