4/20 @ 3:40pm EST - Slow Rust news day and I'm traveling anyway so no update post. Also, we're upgrading rustaforum.com to a new version of our forum software so that'll be down for a couple hours.

11:58pm EST - Happy Friday Rust! Basking in the afterglow of yesterday’s update, players prepare for a fun filled weekend. To help that weekend go as smooth as possible, the team is prioritizing tweaks and bug fixes. A small update already addressed some issues with decay, but before we get into that, let’s take a closer look at these new heads...

A look at the new faces

With the addition of 3 new heads, Rust is full of unfamiliar faces. As Garry mentioned to our server owner community yesterday, there are actually 6 new heads (due to the 2 skin types). Given there are no mirrors in Rust, it can be hard to know what you look like (although the character preview on the tab screen does give you a small scale preview). To provide some more detailed shots, I spectated around our server last night and grabbed a couple closeups of the new heads:

For even more looks at the new faces, check out this video Phaedo 82 captured in our server last night.

Decay tweaks

Yesterday’s update featured the first iteration of decay system. Although Garry didn’t get into the specifics, decay works by slowly taking away health from foundations (requiring you to repair with your hammer). As expected, reports of the decay system fucking up started rolling in within hours of the update. One of the biggest issues pointed out was foundations below stairs and blocks are not accessible to be repaired. Garry has done some tweaks this morning, making it so landlocked blocks don’t decay. He released these changes in a small patch about 2 hours ago and, so far, things seem to be working well.

Another weird thing is the rate of decay appears to vary between different blocks, people, and servers. I built a stone test house last night after the wipe and, as of this morning, the foundations had only lost a couple of health points (although some blocks lost more health than others). Other people have reported their whole house disappearing within a matter of hours. It’s not clear at the moment if this is caused by intentional design, conflicts with a mod, not doing a fresh wipe with the update, or something else entirely.

As with all new systems, decay is going to have to be tweaked and balanced over the next several weeks before it’s fully doing it’s job as intended.

New stair shapes

Vincent has added 2 new types of stairs. The wood texture model for both the L and U shaped stairs have been committed. Don’t expect to see them in play this weekend, they still need to be implemented into the build plan. Below is a WIP version, expect some visuals on this once they are live on the development branch.

CraggyIsland

In an exciting step forward, Rust now has its first non-procedurally generated map. It’s a buggy little island called CraggyIsland. Although it is spectacularly underwhelming, it represents a huge leap towards user created maps. Here’s a quick and dirty flyover I created:

If you want to try this on your server, just replace the +server.seed call with +server.level “CraggyIsland”

Airdrop Massacre

Furthering the freecam frenzy, I created a short video of the fight over an airdrop crate which took place on our main server about an hour after the wipe yesterday. Enjoy!

Building team

Rustafied is expanding again. With the launch of our youtube channel this week and a twitch channel coming next week, we’re broadening our horizons. As with any growing organization, we have to build a team to provide support. We’re currently looking to fill several open positions on our guide team, server administration team and media / events team. If you are interested in lending a helping hand, please fill out an application. If you’re interested in server moderator or events, fill out an intern application.

Question? Comments? Join the conversation at Rustaforum.com