12:00am EST - Another productive week in Rust development with forward progress on new monuments and NPC’s, plus optimizations and exploit fixes.

Our update preview stream goes live at 3pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day.

Exploit fixes live

There have been some nasty exploits going on since the last update. Thankfully, the devs have released a couple client and server updates over the past few days to address these issues.

Heavy Scientists

A new, beefy NPC is on its way. The Heavy Scientist branch started this week with Taylor tinkering with artwork - LOD’s, skins, materials, and the like. No visuals or further information on these at this moment, we simply know they will be a more powerful version of the boys in blue we currently have.

Edit: Just got a sneak peek of the new Heavy Scientists from Alistair:

Oil Rig

Work continues on the Oil Rig monuments. Although these offshore monuments (one large, one small) haven’t been merged in quite yet, we do expect them to hit staging servers in the near future. When they do, we’ll post the pertinent details like puzzle solutions, loot info, scientists, etc.

Giant Excavator Monument

Another monument is in the works! The Giant Excavator has completed it’s white box (model without texture) version and Vincent told me we should have some visuals next week. In the meantime, I pulled the above from the depths of the concept Trello (not sure if this is anything close to how it’ll look).

Build improvements

Andre continues his work on improving the build speed of the server and client executables. Optimizations to this compiling will allow developers to test their changes quicker and stands to lower chances of delayed patches.

Performance increases

Optimizations to the game progress as Diogo continues work on texture streaming. This new system for memory management of textures stands to free up a significant amount of GPU processing power which could mean more precious frames per second for players.

He’s also done some miscellaneous other things to improve performance like rejiggering bundles, improving checks and references.

Other stuff

• More work to the water 4 branch (new waves and shit)