11:00pm EST - After a few rough patches this afternoon, the day finished off strong. Garry managed to fix the major issues before calling it a day. Here's the summary from the man himself:

Grain is scaled down - to the point where you shouldn't really be able to see it unless you're gamma hacking
Some client performance fixes
Invisible players fix
Spectate fixes

I'll fix more tomorrow :-)

6:42pm EST - Invisibility bug looks to be fixed with the latest client update. Spectate fix is still building.

6:18pm EST - Client update just came out which should fix some issues including spectate and invisibility. Testing now...

5:45pm EST - Some commits just hit @RustUpdates. Jenkins is building them now. This'll hopefully fix the invisibility bug, admin spectate, and some other things.

4:45pm EST - General consensus: ISO filter sucks. EDIT: Garry just made it more subtle.

4:30pm EST - Watch your character on the inventory screen for a minute, they've added some funny idle animations.

4:15pm EST - Game breaking bug alert: The update just launched with a huge invisibility issue in play. If you spawn in a sleeping bag, you are invisible to anyone in your general vicinity (render distance). You can see them and hurt them, but they cannot see, hear or even damage you in any way. Expect this to totally fuck up gameplay for the evening and pray Garry fixes it before we go into the weekend. The only fix is to relog or go outside and back into the render distance (which is pretty fucking far). Also, airdrop planes and crates are invisible (but you can hear them).

4:00pm EST - The big update just hit a couple minutes ago. All of our servers are now updated. Main and low pop did not wipe, however, dev branch wiped and has a new map (posted shortly). Oh, and the devblog just came out.

3:08pm EST - Garry just committed a theoretical fix for invisible players. Waiting on the build to test it out...

2:45pm EST - Had a quick chat with Garry before. The building placement bug is fixed and he's looking into the invisible spawning issue (mentioned just below). My guess is the update is still an hour or so away.

12:22pm EST - The team is still cranking away, getting ready for the update to go live. We're likely still several hours away (updates / devblogs have been hitting around 4pm EST (8pm GMT) for the past few weeks. Here's some things of note from the past few hours:

The health of twig blocks has been reduced from 25 to 5.
New cvar: effects.maxgibs (this defaults at 500 and relates to the building breakables).
The building planner is a bit fucked on dev (switching building parts doesn't update the guide till you swap items). Garry is tracking this down, however, it is still in play at this moment.
We identified an issue last night where players become invisible to the person who killed them if the death occurs close to the victims bag. This is pretty game breaking and no sign yet of it being worked on. I'll keep you posted on this one as the update goes live...

1:37am EST - Today is update day, and man, we've got a good one this week. It is still some hours from going live, I'll keep you updated as the day progresses. In the mean time, here's a summary of what's to come. First, there will be no forced wipe; map wipes are planned once a month (the first week of each month). That said, the entity limit still appears to be in play, so some servers may need to wipe anyway (more on that at the bottom of this post). Now, let’s start with an exciting new addition to gameplay...

Wounding

The past couple days, Garry has been working on a branch entitled 'deathroutine.' Although it wasn’t immediately clear, yesterday we found out exactly what it means: When your health is very low, you become wounded; incapacitated on the ground for a period of time. We got in to test the specifics of this new system and here are some important distinctions:

When wounded, you are stuck on the ground, unable to move (or even look around).
This happens when your health goes to, or very near, 0.
When wounded, your health is set to 5.
If left wounded, you either die in 30 seconds or recover (able to stand and move again).
Along with just finishing you off, nearby players can either loot you (by clicking E) or help you (by holding E and selecting the help option).
Helping a player costs no resources and takes about 2 seconds.
If you recover or are helped, you stay at 5 health and may become incapacitated again if you don’t heal quickly.
If you are bleeding while wounded, you will die in a matter of seconds.
You do not always go into wounded mode, head shots and mass trauma results in instant death.
If you suicide (kill in console), you become wounded. This would be a great way to deter suicide spam, however at the moment, you can just type kill again to finish the job.
As a cool aside, you can now loot sleeping players.

Signs

Another big gameplay addition from Garry this week, signs are making their debut. Long and short: they are made of wood, there are 4 sizes (only small is craftable by default), and they are bound to litter the landscape with hilarious sayings. See more details here.

Building breakables

Vincent has been busting his ass creating breakables for each building type. This is basically the ‘gibbing’ we’ve had on the twig tier for some time. With a little C4 in hand, we tested the new effects, and let me tell you, they look fucking awesome!

Flinches

Minh has been hard at work adding flinching animations for players and animals. Now, when either get hurt, they have a very noticeable and comical reaction. You really just have to see this one for yourself...

Sound improvements

Alex has made some serious strides on sound this week. First, gunshots sound a million times better. No longer does it sound like you’re firing in a padded room, shots now crack across the land with a wonderful sense of depth. In addition to this, melee sounds have been tweaked. You’ll notice this right away next time you hit a barrel.

Gameplay balance

Helk did a bunch of tweaks to gameplay balance. Here's some specifics:

You can now only eat every 2 seconds (prevents health regen spam).
Salvaged hammer deals less damage with melee and now costs 50 metal frags in addition to the 100 wood.
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 1 cloth cheaper (they now cost 5 each).
Stone pickaxe costs 25 more stones.

ISO night

Nights are a bit fuzzier now that Garry has applied an ISO filter to protect from gamma hacks.

New icons

The latest round of Megan’s new icons have been added. I don’t care what anyone says, I’m loving the style of these new icons (I mean, how badass does that AK look?)

Entity limits and wipes

The entity limit bug with Unity is still in play. This means, at some point on or around a server hitting 150,000 entities, gameplay goes to shit: People can’t build, they spawn in the air, and client FPS drops more and more. This means many server owners need to wipe more often then updates force (which is currently once a month). We have 3 servers, each in different places. Here’s a rundown:

Main server: currently at 100k - won’t last the weekend so we will be wiping it tomorrow (Friday) at 5pm EST. Goal being to last till the update next Thursday.
Dev server: currently at 130k - Will wipe either with the update launch or at 5pm EST today (whichever happens first). Also should last till next Thursday.
Low pop server: Currently at 85k - Should last another week, depending on build velocity.

Question? Comments? Join the conversation at Rustaforum.com