3:40pm EST - With a forced wipe just around the corner, the team is improving procedural maps and getting ready to leave early access.

More cliffs and hills

As with many forced wipes, we’re seeing shifts to procedural map generation. Working on the ‘save156’ branch, Andre has added significantly more cliffs and hills. No visuals on this are available yet, as the changes are still on a separate branch. Expect screenshots and more information once the save156 branch is merged into main over the next day or two.

Water well monuments coming

Also on the save156 branch are the new mini water well monuments. Similar to other small monuments, we can expect these to spawn around the map and feature some loot drops. Water well monuments are also expected to provide - you guessed it - water.

Like the other procgen changes, stay tuned for more information after the merge.

Rivers are no longer green

Rivers have gotten more visually appealing as Andre has shifted the water color. No longer a murky green, rivers are now a more welcoming hue of blue. Here's a before and after:

Pillar removed

Andre has also tweaked some things with building on the save156 branch. Along with removing some support sockets (likely in the interest of optimization), he’s removed the pillar building block. “How much outrage could this possible cause?” he asked in his commit. So far, it appears 1 table flip worth of outrage.

Recycler added to Junkyard

After several requests, a recycler has been added to the junkyard dungeon. This is also on the save156 branch, so no word on exact location yet, but I’ll make sure to include that in the Thursday update post.

AI work

Improvements to AI and the upcoming NPC scientists continues. One of the final items on the roadmap list to leave early access, these blue non-player characters are getting smarter by the day. Not only are they better at moving around the various navmesh making up the map, they can now open doors and break barricades in their way.

Still off by default, these scientists can be turned on by a server operator with the ‘squadmanager.sqaud_disable false’ command. Will they be turned on for all servers this week? Only time will tell...

Disable tip option

Helk, after adding a ton of these in the last two weeks, has added a menu option and convar to disable blue tips for new players. Found under the main game options, this new setting will make a lot of veteran players very happy.

More tips

Along with the disable option, Helk has added a couple more tips for sleeping bags, spears, and cloth collection.

Blueprint wipe

When the update and forced map wipe hits this Thursday (Feb. 1st), all Rustafied servers will also wipe blueprints. There is no word from Facepunch on a forced blueprint wipe at the moment. The next blueprint wipe on Rustafied servers will be April 5th (or when forced).