1:50pm EST - It is a fresh week in Rust development but Garry and team were working overtime this weekend. As you may recall, the update from last week was postponed and is now scheduled to go live this week (probably on Thursday). It’s slated to be a big one too, along with the new terrain, we’re seeing some great improvements to client performance and new admin commands. Before we get into that, let’s look at two surprising new items which have been added out of the blue...

Acoustic Guitar

The Acoustic Guitar is officially the first musical instrument to grace Rust with its presence. To play, use your primary and secondary fire then look up and down to change the pitch. No details yet on what this will take to craft, it can currently only be spawned or found.

Camera

Next, we have the camera. The world model is just a black box at the moment but you can take screens with primary fire, zoom by holding right click and looking up / down and lock focus with third fire. Like the guitar, no word on crafting cost yet but here’s a peek of what the effect looks like:

Performance

When the new terrain first hit the development branch last week, client performance took a big dip. Thankfully, the team prioritized some fixes and has drastically improved performance over the last few days. Along with some overall tweaks to make things run smoother, two new graphical sliders have been added to the F2 menu...

Shader level

Garry did a quick first pass on some low lods for shaders (in other words: lower quality versions which run faster). This does improve FPS, however, it is still a very rough implementation. If you drag it all the way to 0, trees and some other things can start to look trippy and fucked up. Here’s an example of the difference between minimum (0) and maximum (600):

Grass quality

Legacy players new to this version will soon be getting a different answer to “How do I turn off grass?” That is because a grass quality slider has been added. Turning this setting all the way down does essentially turn off grass. Already sparking some disdain from the community, this setting could arguably give unfair advantage to those who turn it all the way down. Here’s how the setting looks at max, half and min:

Teleport

Two new admin commands have also been added: "teleport" and "teleportany". The first command allows admins to teleport directly to another player given their name or steamid. The second command allows admins to teleport to an entity of their choice. I was a little confused about this one till I tested it out with, “teleportany bear” and was placed on top a bear which immediately started mauling me. That’s a cool functionality I guess, although frankly I’d much rather be able to spawn an entity next to me as opposed to teleporting me to the entity.

Glitch fixes

The team has also addressed some exploits and glitches. Helk put in protection against people un-crouching into ceilings and rocks. This fixes a slew of issues from people accessing cupboards through floors to building bases inside rocks. Also, Garry has tweaked some networking things to punish people with intentionally laggy or exploited connections. This stops some instances of people being able to use the hammer without cupboard access. Finally, they’ve fixed a glitch where a killer could access their victims new inventory after they respawn. All good stuff, these glitches have been a real pain in the ass and are very hard to police.

Question? Comments? Join the conversation at Rustaforum.com