12:00am EST - Thursday has arrived, and as we get used to this new schedule, the team has made some solid progress towards the update next week.

Our update preview stream will go live at 3pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day. Let’s get into it...

Next update: March 1st

As per the new post early access schedule, the next update - and therefore, everything listed below - will go live on March 1st. There will also be a forced map wipe when the update hits (no forced blueprint wipe is planned).

Grief protection

Andre has added a valuable feature to tool cupboards to prevent decay raiding. When destroyed, instead of spitting out the resources inside, cupboards will now commit those resources to the upkeep time. This time is maxed out to 24 hours by default, however, server owners can shift this if they prefer using the new upkeep_grief_protection convar.

And, for all you clever tricksters out there, you cannot simply destroy one cupboard, place another, then destroy that one in attempts to reset the upkeep timer. Grief protection cannot be triggered multiple times by repeatedly destroying cupboards.

Scientist behavior

Scientists are several steps closer to being ready for mainstream this week. Along with some miscellaneous fixes and touch ups for AI behavior, scientists now react to gunshots.

They are still turned off by default, so unless the server you’re playing has intentionally turned them on (like the Facepunch official servers), you’re not going to be running into any boys in blue quite yet. Will they be ready for prime time by the update next week? We’ll see...

Edit: I just got confirmation from Alistair that they are shooting to turn Scientist NPC's on by default for the update next week. We are going to turn them on for our Odd server wipes on Monday to help test.

Chainsaw progress

The Chainsaw is one step closer to making it in game this week as Minh has hooked up the prefabs and sounds along with various special effects.

No word yet as to how this new item will function. Will it be the ultimate wood gathering tool? Will it be able to splinter a wood door apart? Or will it just be used for depicting scenes of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Rust? We'll see...

Bed repair and pickup

Beds just became a bit more workable when it comes to base redecoration and upkeep. Not only can they finally be repaired, they will now be able to be picked up if a player with a hammer has building privilege (just hit ‘E’ with your hammer equipped).

Skin download enhancements

Andre has also completed several improvements to workshop skins. First, he’s added a timeout so if skins fail to load from the workshop, it’ll just skip them. He’s also added some logs when skins fail to download, so the developers can track down problem items.

Hair cap progress

Matt continues his work on hair caps. As you may recall from devblog 197, this body of work revolves around getting hair visuals to look better, especially for people who opt to use non-TSSAA, or even no anti-aliasing at all.

He sent me a couple screens (shown below) and a video. Although these aren't on staging yet, we can see that not only is hair looking better overall, but the colors of these new doo's is more natural.

Other things

• New skins are approved
• Water purifier can no longer be placed on barbecue
• All signs, banners, frames now repairable
• Ensure locker, bed, workbench destroyed if construction placed on no longer exists (ground watch tweaks)
• Shotgun trap container no longer small stash