10:15pm EST - Just had a sweet jam sesh with Argyle Alligator and the crew at the community center on main. Good times had by all, especially the guy who mowed everyone down with his Thompson towards the end.

1:10pm EST - The week continues on, as does the Rust development team. With decay still being worked on, fixes to explosions, new heads and headgear, we’re in store for a nice update on Thursday. Before we get into that, let's talk about entity limits...

Entity limits

For the past several weeks, one of the biggest pain points for server owners has been wipes due to hitting the entity limit. Originally defined at 150,000, the actual limit of entities appears to vary from server to server and wipe to wipe. Once this limit is hit, gameplay goes to shit in the form of being unable to build, spawning in the air, and overall performance drops.

Our main server is currently at 174,000 entities. Normally, I would have wiped by now, however, given it’s been a few weeks since we really tested this, I’m pushing the limits to see what the effects are. This will give us further insight into the state of entity limits and ideally allow us to make it to the Thursday update before we have to wipe. I’ll keep you up to date with how the server holds up over the next day or two. In the mean time, if you’re not running a beast of a computer, you may want to play on the development branch for improved performance.

4:52pm EST - Clarification on colliders and entities

There’s been some confusion about this so called 150k entity limit, so I wanted to clarify further. First, the difference between entities and colliders:

An entity is an object, like a player, animal, building block, etc. A collider is a component of an entity used for collision. If an entity doesn't need to collide with anything (bushes for example) it doesn't need a collider.

Unity 5 officially has a 270k collider limit, however, as of the other week, physics on servers started going nuts at the 150k collider limit. Here’s where I fucked up; I kept saying entities. The reason being entity count is always on the server console where as I didn't even know how to find the collider count till Helk just told me (see below). As it turns out, the numbers are pretty close anyway. Using our main server as an example: it’s currently at 177k entities and 185k colliders.

Long and short: I’m still not sure if this physics issue from the other week is still in play, that is why I’m testing it now and potentially sacrificing optimal gameplay for a couple days. As of now, I’m not seeing any complaints of weird shit happening with the physics yet. That is good. I’ll keep you posted as we breach 200k.

How to find your collider count (server owners only)

Type ‘dump’ in console.
Starting at your rust_dedicated.exe folder, go to diagnostics\Physics.txt
Your total colliders is right at the top, like so:

Physics Information

Total Colliders:185,352
Total RigidBodys:2,448

Mesh Colliders:135,006
Box Colliders:25,963
Sphere Colliders:2,247
Capsule Colliders:22,135

TL;DR: We're testing the limits of the game to see at which point shit gets really fucked.

Burlap headgear is in

Rust fashionistas can rejoice, the burlap ensemble is now officially complete. Earlier today, Helk implemented the burlap headgear that Xavier has been working on for the past little while. This fresh headpiece, which is a default item, will run you 30 cloth. Here’s some pictures:

C4 fixes

There have been some issues with C4 damage traveling through walls, destroying boxes in homes while leaving the walls intact. Helk has done some tweaks to how C4 damage works, preventing this glitch from happening. He’s also added an explosions raycast so you can take cover from the blast damage.

New barrel sound

Alex continues tweaking sounds, the latest of which being barrel impacts. The new sound is much deeper, giving the effect that you’re actually hitting a large, hollow drum as opposed to some solid metal mass.

Thompson rate of fire lowered

Complimenting the several nerfs to the AK from last week, Helk has modified the rate of fire for the Thompson, lowering it a bit.

Grenade changes

Helk has also tweaked the grenades, improving the usability and adding better effects. Here's a quick video demonstration:

New heads

Be on the lookout for some new faces once this update hits on Thursday, Tom has added 3 new heads into the mix. No visuals available as of yet but I’ll post ‘em when I get ‘em.

EAC update

Garry’s focus for most of the day has been in the realm of EAC. He ran the update and then has been fucking around with the EAC hashtool since. I don’t get the sense the specifics of this are important, all you need to know is: the better EAC works, the less hackers we have to deal with.

Question? Comments? Join the conversation at Rustaforum.com