3:00pm EST - Our update preview stream is live! twitch.tv/rustafied

12:00am EST - With just one week until the December 5th update and forced map wipe, we’re seeing optimizations and improvements along with forward progress on long term goals - oh, and some exciting news about an upcoming mobile app.

Our update preview stream will go live at 3pm EST. Follow @Rustafied throughout the day. Before we get into it…

Thank you again!

In case you missed it, Charitable Rust 2019 was a resounding success, raising around $150,000 to provide education and build schools for underprivileged kids! A huge thank you again to everyone who participated. Check out my article from earlier in the week for more information.

Companion app on the horizon

That’s right… the infamous ‘comp’ branch - which was merged into main the other week - has been confirmed to be the initial trial of a mobile companion app for Rust! Alistair was generous enough to share with me that it’s in the very early stages and only on main for some initial testing by the developers.

Given this, the exact functionality and release date is still very up in the air, but we can say with confidence that interacting in some manner, shape, or form with Rust via a mobile app will be possible… someday. Based on the commits this week, we can see some work on team chat integration, so it looks like you’ll potentially be able to use this to communicate with your team in the game while on your phone!

We’ll of course keep you up to date as more information on this become apparent. But remember, it’s in the very early stages, so don’t expect anything soon.

Mountable changes

Garry has improved the mounts for rowboat, horse, minicopter and transport helicopter. Along with these tweaks, he’s added SideLeanAmount to BaseMountable, allowing player to lean over the sides of seats when looking to the side and down. Pretty cool!

Improved alt look

The alt look functionality has been tweaked to look a lot better. Not only does your body not show up in alt look mode (which was causing some issues), your perspective is no longer skewed and you can see much better than before.

Admin improvements

After seeing several quality of life improvements for admins last week, the team continued the trend by adding a couple more tools and goodies for moderators. Here is the skinny:

New admin command “teaminfo steamID” which shows who else is on a person's team
Added noclipspeed, noclipspeedslow, noclipspeedfast to allow admins to no clip around faster (protip - bind these for ease of use)
Show ban reason when rejecting banned players from joining the server

Thank you once again to Garry and the team at Facepunch for listening to the community and making our lives easier through these additions.

Instruments work

We’re seeing a bunch of work and improvements on the upcoming instruments DLC expected to hit next week with the update. As you may recall, this includes 10 new instruments in the game along with an entirely fresh dynamic for how to play said instruments.

On top of just playing the instruments in game, there’s a whole midi input functionality being worked on which stands to allow you to stream music into the game. They’ve also worked on improving the full keyboard playing functionality which should allow people who are familiar to do things like play happy birthday and the like.

For more information on the Instruments DLC, check out my post from last week and the devblog from Facepunch.

Monument optimizations

The team is working on optimizations for monuments which should be merged in shortly. These mainly deal with shifting how memory is handled around monuments, ideally improving client performance. Hey, improved performance is always a good thing!

Other stuff

Skeleton optimizations (and maybe some tweaks to bone scale?)
More horse movement improvements
Modular vehicle work (no sign of release date - doesn’t look like December)
HDRP progress (lots of procgen stuff - also no release date in sight)
Oh, and vote Rust for the Steam awards!