2:05pm EST - It is a new week in Rust development, and I'm pretty excited about this one. Garry, after burning himself out a bit on the paper maps, is focusing on implementing new items and functionality. Already we've seen work being done on floor spikes and water tanks; and today we see the first new item officially make it onto the dev branch: the candle hat...

Candle hat

This goofy, impractical looking thing was voted on by the community a couple months ago as the preferred form of head mounted light source. After the art was completed in February, it was expected to go live weeks ago. As of today, it has finally made it into the development branch, and although it is still a work in progress, we can see some insight into how it works and what it will cost.

Some details:

• It costs: 30 cloth, 10 animal fat
• It takes 60 seconds to craft.
• It is not a default blueprint, you will have to find one or research one before you can craft it.
• There is an ignite button on the item details screen when you pull up your inventory. At the moment, however, it appears to be lit all the time.
• It loses durability relatively quickly when it is lit, similar to the torch.
• It illuminates the area immediately around you, and can be seen by others from pretty far away.
• At the moment, it looks like you'll have to repair it using a repair bench, as opposed to refilling a fuel source.
• Being a work in progress, there is no flame on the actual candle yet, but expect to see that before it goes live.

And some screens:

Faster build times

Garry was working this weekend on optimizing the asset bundles. As you may recall from the devblog, this body of work is intended to speed up the build process, a very welcome thing because Jenkins has been taking his sweet time as of late. We should see the benefits of this as we get closer to Thursday and find ourselves staring at the progress bars, waiting for the update to hit.

Unsuck Hapis progress

On top of the new items slated to come in this week, I’m really excited about what is in store for the custom map, Hapis Island. At the moment, gameplay is pretty broken due to a lack of loot and nodes. This should all be fixed on Thursday, however, as rock spawns and rad towns are key pillars in the unsucking of Hapis. Expect more details on this as the week progresses and the unsuck branch merges into main.

Beancan grenade changes

Helk has tweaked some of the chances with our newest improvised explosive device, the beancan grenade. Here’s the lowdown:

• 50% chance a dud re-ignites when picked up
• 25% chance for a dud
• 15% chance for long fuse (15 seconds)
• 15% chance of exploding shortly after throwing
• 70% chance it has normal fuse (3.5-4 seconds)

Guns last longer

In addition to the beancan changes, Helk made it so guns lose health slower when being shot. Cool.

Animal footsteps

Alex continues work on the animal footsteps. Already, animals are moving more naturally and less like they are skating on ice, and now we should have some improved sounds to boot. Now we just need the AI to be optimized so a server with more than 150 people can actually have animal movement on…

The stream continues…

After streaming every night last week, I took a little break over the weekend. That is over and I’ll continue streaming around 9pm EST tonight. We’ll be doing some normal gameplay mixed with some live freecam raid action. Follow our twitch to know exactly when we go live.

Question? Comments? Join the conversation at Rustaforum.com