1:00pm EST - A fresh week of development is upon us and we’re seeing player model updates, progression progress, sedan lights, and hair!

Hair is in! (sorta)

At long last, hair has arrived in game (on the staging branch). It’s still not fully implemented - as in, your character models don’t have it by default, and it’s a bit rough around the edges (neckbeard alert) - but several hair models are in game and can be spawned in and added to characters via clothing inventory slots.

As of right now, there are three models, one for each type of hair to come: head hair, facial hair, and yes, pubic hair (warning: this is a picture of a hairy, black dick... never thought I’d say that again). All three styles are for male character models, but we can expect more hairstyles - including female - in the near future. By the way, you can apply all hair to female models, and I have to say, the beard almost fits the female models better than the male at the moment.

I wouldn’t count on hair to go live this week as it is clearly a partial implementation. That said, we can expect fresh doo’s and player pubes to hit Rust in the near future.

Edit: Hair has been removed from the staging branch with the player model update revert.

Player model updates are in (never mind)

Hair is not the only exciting thing merged to staging today. These woolly manes are only a small part of the larger body of work that is the player model updates. These iterations on player models include updated faces, blinking/looking for eyes, and various improvements to bodies.

Unlike hair, these are already applied to your player models on the staging branch, so you can expect to see them in game this week (unless they are removed again at the last second for some reason).

Edit: These models have just been subtracted again... disregard the whole 'coming this week' thing.

Progression underway

Helk, after polling the player base regarding priorities, has started on a new progression branch. First order of business was to relock all items other than default blueprints. That’s right, you heard it, BLUEPRINTS!

Most details are still unknown, but it does appear the game is shifting to a hybrid of components and blueprints. Don’t expect to happen overnight - fundamental shifts to the game such as this take time to implement. As always, we’ll keep you up to date as this branch progresses.

Edit: Helk has made several more commits and tweeted looking for feedback. Here's what we can derive:

• Research tables will convert scrap along with the source item to turn it into a blueprint
• There will be three levels of workbenches
• Workbenches will increase crafting speed
• Certain items will require that you've learned the blueprint and a specific tier of workbench to craft

Sedan improvements

After being added to the game last week, the sedan (still only able to be spawned by admins) has gotten several improvements. Along with improved collision detection, headlights and tail lights have been added. The taillights are on all the time, however, the headlights only turn on when someone is behind the wheel.

Lag issues

For the past week, many popular servers have been experiencing intermittent lag. These spikes appear to only happen to certain players on the server at random times. After working with the developers and putting some of our servers in debug mode for profiling (pardon the restarts), the going hunch is this poor performance is related to the recent changes to navmesh.

Although not 100% confirmed, it would make sense given the symptoms: Only happening to certain people on the server, only affecting very populated servers, only happening on certain parts of the map. Thankfully, Alistair told me Pal has implemented some fixes for several issues found during profiling. Hopefully this means the spikes get better after the update on Thursday.

In the meantime, please keep in mind this is a known issue with the underlying code of the game, not an issue with any individual server. The only surefire way to avoid this lag is to play on a less populated server.

Edit: Bad news for EU Medium II - as fallout from testing, we were unable to recover the save file and had to wipe. Good news is: This testing helped find some potential sources for the lag issues we've been experiencing.

Other stuff

• More work on the AI system
• Fix to the AK47 worldmodel
• Tweaked a bunch of 3rd person player animations