12/28 @ 11:00am EST - There will be no update today, however, we will still be wiping our weekly servers. EU servers will wipe at 5pm GMT, US servers wipe at 5pm EST.

4:30pm EST - The update and devblog are live. Our servers are now updated, game on!

3:00pm EST - Our update stream is live! twitch.tv/rustafied

2:34pm EST - Throwable flares were just added! More info coming soon...

12:00am EST - 'Tis the season! As Christmas rapidly approaches, the last update of the year is upon us. With it, we’re seeing notifications for building upkeep, changes to night, a new handheld flashlight, and more!

Our update stream will go live at 3pm EST. Stay tuned to @Rustafied for news throughout the day. Now, let’s get into it...

Update summary video

Here is our update summary video from Puddy.

Decay notification

After the advent of building 3.0 the other week, building upkeep is more important than ever. Couple hours late on filling that cupboard? You have a serious problem on your hands. This in mind, Helk has added some better notifications for the upkeep status of your buildings.

When in a building privileged area, you’ll now see a countdown of how much time is left before your building decays or a notice that your building is actively decaying. Note: these only show up for people with building privilege, while they are in the direct build radius of the base.

Also, if you hover over the 'Cost per 24 hours', you can now see how many blocks and what upkeep percentage you are at.

Easier upkeep

In a last minute change, Helk has shifted two things about decay which should make it a bit easier to upkeep your base:

Time for blocks to decay has increased by 30%
Decay tiers have been increased by 50 blocks (cheaper decay)

Night changes

Twilight in Rust will be a bit different this week as the team has implemented some shifts to lighting. Here’s the gist:

No moon should now be pitch black, with the goal of making many gamma boosting techniques ineffective.
Night time with a moon is now a bit brighter (but this may change prior to the update).

A picture is worth a thousand and all, so here are some examples of full moon vs. no moon on the staging branch right now:

Handheld flashlight

With the darker nights, a new tool has been added to the game to help Newman's navigate. This handheld flashlight is a default blueprint, can be crafted for 30 metal frags, and can even be used as a melee weapon (and therefore has durability). At this time the world model is that of a torch, but I'd expect this to change soon.

Edit: The world model has been added.

Flashlight

Cost
30 metal fragments

Blueprint
Default

Workbench
Level 1 required

Throwable flares

The flashlight isn't the only new way to illuminate this newfound darkness, throwable flares have been added too! These items can be crafted, but are mainly meant to be found (in caves specifically). They can be thrown by equipping one and pressing the left mouse button, or dropped by pressing the right mouse button.

They are not a default blueprint, but can be researched relatively cheaply (20 scrap). They can be stacked to 5, provide about 2 minutes of light, and will set you back gunpowder and metal frags if you choose to craft one. Here are some pictures and more details.

Flare

Cost
20 gun powder
15 metal fragments

Crafting time
1 second

Light duration
~2 minutes

Throw distance
26 meters

Research cost
20 scrap

Workbench
Level 1 required

Admire animations added

A new way to appreciate your skins is here as the long awaited admire animations have been added! Simply press 'N' while holding a weapon and your player will look at both sides of said weapon. The animation can be halted immediately by pressing fire and cannot be seen by people around you.

Increased miner hat light

The size of the light for the miner hat has increased with this update. Here is a before and after shot:

Roof fixes

Another thing which shifted with building 3.0 was roof placement. Specifically, roof blocks now occupy the wall socket at their bottom end, so you need to choose between a roof or a wall. Although this has been a successful nerf for roof stacking, it has come with a few quirks.

Thankfully, the team has fixed some conditional models, so roof visuals should be more consistent now.

Tree revamp (in progress)

We’ll be seeing some shifts to the tree’s in Rust in the near future as Damian has started on a fresh branch called ‘tree_revamp’. In the first (of likely many) commits, a douglas fir prototype has been added.

Given this is on a separate branch, we’re unable to see or test any of this at the moment. Although I wouldn’t expect to see these changes in till the new year, we’ll hopefully get some sneak peeks in the devblog later today.

Other things

Huge improvements to culling - great FPS improvements!
Downed (wounded) players no longer block player movement
Flashlight can now be added to crossbows
Festive window garland now includes the door garland too
Game tips now tell players to place and fill cupboards
Lots of fixes and tweaks to fog
More work on animal AI behavior
Upkeep also scales with decay.scale convar (easier testing)
Small sign placement fix

Charitable Rust 2017 follow up

Our yearly charity event, Charitable Rust, took place at the beginning of this month. It not only was an amazingly fun time, but we smashed our goal out of the park!

With an original goal of $8,000, we raised over $12,000 in donations for Direct Relief during the 12 hour live stream event. In addition, there were 2 skins for sale (courtesy of our friends at Xtab) on the item store - the proceeds of which, are also being donated.

I’m thrilled to announce, the total revenue from those skin sales was around $37,000!

Couple things though:

Steam still takes their cut. I can’t get a clear percentage from anyone on this, but it seems to be somewhere in the realm of 30%
Steam takes upwards of a month to distribute the earnings to Facepunch and Xtab

Given this, our Tiltify campaign is still sitting at $12k and change, while the actual amount raised is almost $40,000.

Facepunch and Xtab will be contributing their portions of the proceeds directly in the Tiltify campaign once distributed, so we should have a final number within the first week or two of January. I’ll be sure to post a follow up here as soon as that happens.

A huge thank you again to everyone who participated! We set a high bar for next year!!

Oh, and as for Helk’s pickles, I’m still waiting on them. Expect to see me eating them live on our first update stream of the new year (January 4th).

Happy holidays!

This is the last update of the year, and with that, this is the last update post we’ll do for this year. I wish you all a very happy and safe Christmas, New Years, and whatever else you may celebrate. Much love from the entire team at Rustafied!