It is a fresh week for Rust development and we’re seeing improved spawns, optimization, and some other great progress.

Larger spawn areas

Newmans freshly washed up on the beach should now be spread out a bit more as Andre has made the coastal spawn areas larger. With this, he’s improved on the spawn handler density enforcement.

Optimization

Andre is also working optimization in the realm of garbage collection. Garbage collection is used to free up resources in the game. Unfortunately, if garbage collection happens too frequently, it can be a source of poor performance. With this in mind, he’s eliminated a bunch of garbage collection allocations for various sounds and effects.

Bradley progress

Helk appears to be working on the Bradley APC, a functionality in the ‘Now’ category of the new roadmap. Although we don’t know if it’ll make it in this week, we can expect the first iteration of this new PvE element to patrol the launch site (and eventually roads across the map).

AI progress

Pal continues his work on the AI branch, further optimizing the navmesh grid. This navmesh is required for the upcoming Scientist NPC’s to navigate the complex terrain of Rust. Optimization is crucial, however, given the navmesh generation already bottlenecks when starting servers.

Small backpack art

Tom has committed the materials, textures, prefabs, and more for the upcoming small backpack. Although it is unlikely we’ll be seeing this backpack in game this week, this artwork is an important milestone in the process.

Small monuments

Vincent and Damian are making great headway on the small monuments branch. As mentioned in the recent devblogs, these small monuments will spawn on roads around the map and provide more opportunities for new players to loot. As with all monument and dungeon art, we can’t expect to see these in game till the next forced wipe at the earliest (on September 7th).

Other stuff

• Fixes for OSX
• More description fixes and updates
• Removed max draggable from items (except liquids)