12:00am EST - With just one week before the update, we’ve got some fresh water dynamics and the team is finalizing the newest monuments along with other things.

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

Oil Rig incoming!

All hands are on deck finalizing the next monuments to hit Rust. Alistair told me the Oil Rigs - one large, one small - will hopefully be merged in by the end of this week. As the finishing touches are being placed, some new information about these upcoming offshore hotspots is coming to light.

First, it appears as though the new, beefy scientist NPC (Heavy Scientists) will be making their debut on these Rigs. It’s not clear just exactly how heavy they will be, but we should be able to test them out once the Oil Rig branch is merged in. It also looks as though the Chinook helicopter will be touching down occasionally on these new monuments.

Stay tuned here for more on these exciting new landmarks as they are merged in - we’ll post all the juicy details in preparation for the update next week.

New human AI

Helk has started on a new AI system for human NPC’s. This fresh AI might not only improve performance by lowering overhead, it aims also to enhance behavior of NPC’s overall. Implemented on the Oil Rig branch, it appears as though the first iteration will be tested on the Heavy Scientist NPC’s.

Fresh Water

The water 4 branch was merged in earlier this week and with it, a bunch of new water dynamics. Gone are the swathes of plain ocean, now replaced by hypnotic, undulating waves which travel gracefully towards the shore. Not only are these new waves nice to look at, they provide an extra new level of bounciness to boating (some tweaks to buoyancy might be needed before the patch). There’s also some nifty new wakes and various other shifts to water overall.

Fuel Generator

A new type of electricity generation is on the way. After posting on his ArtStation page, Tom started implementing the model, prefabs, and various other elements of the art for the new Fuel Generator. No word on when this’ll make it in game, but having the art complete is an important step of the process.

Giant Excavator

Work continues on another new monument, the Giant Excavator. Although it’s still very much in the early stages, Vince told me he’ll send me a teaser shot at some point later today. I’ll post and tweet once I get it!

Edit: Just got the image posted above from Vince!

Other things

Improved prefab processing for faster load times
Optimizations and fixes to deferred mesh decals
Order network group subscription order by distance to player
Various military tunnel fixes & optimizations
EAC SDK Update (maybe…)