6:20pm EST- With the exit of early access just around the corner, it just got a lot easier to keep up to date with the latest changes to the staging branch. With the forced BP and map wipe this week, we've got some great visual changes coming in - and pickles.

Standalone staging branch

Gone are the days of having to choose between the staging or main branch of Rust - you can now have them both installed at the same time! Simply go to your steam library, scroll down to Rust, and install the newly added ‘Rust - Staging branch’.

This will make it a lot easier to stay up to date with the latest changes, especially now that the team is switching from weekly update releases to monthly.

Forced map and blueprint wipe incoming

To mark leaving early access, Facepunch is starting every Newman fresh by wiping maps and blueprints when the update hits on Thursday. As with all updates, there is no set time for it to go live. That said, it generally happens sometime between 3 and 5pm EST.

Save 157

There are a bunch of changes to procedural maps on the way including a tree revamp, more terrain tweaks, and a new experiment with how things look and feel in general. All of this stuff is still on a separate branch (save157), so we don’t have any visuals yet. Stay tuned for a ‘merge from save157’ commit.

Edit: These changes have been merged in, and they look awesome!

Scientists NPC's coming this week

Alistair just confirmed with me that the plan is to have scientist NPC's turned on by default after the update this week! Check back on Thursday for more information on these guys.

Edit: Just heard from Alistair again - he told me official servers will have scientist NPC's turned on, however, community and modded servers will need to turn them on manually if they want them.

Helk's pickles are here!

Helk has added a new food item to the game: Pickles. They can be eaten and come with a chance of botulism!

In perfect timing, I actually received Helk's pickles in the mail, so I will be testing them for botulism and eating them live on the update stream this week.