5:10pm EST - It's a new week for Rust development and we're seeing some ongoing progress on AI along with several changes to items. Let's get into it…

AI progress

Garry continues trucking along on the new artificial intelligence for animals. Working on the prerelease branch, he has added a bunch of functionality including:

Animals wake up when being attacked
They wake up when gunshots are heard, and move away from where the shots are coming from
They don’t try to eat alive things
They stop fleeing if tired
They fear players a bit more

Keep in mind, this new AI will not be in the game this week. The earliest we’ll see this in game would be the next forced wipe (March 2nd), however, given the size of this body of work, it may take longer than that before it’s ready for prime time.

Vending machine changes

Helk has tweaked a couple things with vending machines this week. They now have double the health (1000 hp instead of 500) and the quantity of each item for sale shows up on the front monitor. It doesn’t appear this is live on the staging branch as of writing this, so check back later for a picture.

Turret improvements

Some improvements to the peacekeeper mode of turrets are also coming down the pike. They will no longer continue to consider players hostile if they’ve died and come back. Also, they no longer consider water bottles, bota bags, and buckets to be hostile.

Decor deployable progress

Vincent continues his work on the base deployables branch. Although we haven’t seen anything specifically on this yet, it does appear we’ll be able to decorate our bases in the near future. So far Vincent has added rugs and chairs. Given it’s on a separate branch, we don’t have any visuals on this quite yet, but maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll post some on the devblog...