6/21 @ 2:30pm EST - The update is live and a devblog has been released. I’m adding more information below.

12:00am EST - It’s the halfway point for Rust development this month and we’re seeing new features and forward progress - some of which is going live this week.

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

Friday update

There is a patch expected to hit this Friday to release the Chippy Arcade and some performance improvements. There is no set time for this update to hit, but I’ll update here and tweet once more information becomes available.

Edit: The update is expected around 3pm EST (8pm BST) on Friday.

Chippy Arcade

Rust has released a new game on Steam! Chippy is a twin-stick bullet-hell shooter where you chip apart destructible bosses pixel-by-pixel. Like they did with Clatter, Facepunch is releasing an exclusive item in Rust which will only be available to those who own the other game. Instead of a helmet like with Clatter, Chippy owners will be able to place a whole arcade in their base (if they’ve played Chippy for more than 30 minutes).

The Chippy Arcade plays Tennis (aka Pong) against a computer opponent. Games are best out of 5 and the AI is pretty damn decent. No word on crafting costs, but we’ll add them here once they are available.

Oh, and if you haven’t already, go check out Chippy on Steam!

Edit: Tennis is no longer the game on the arcade - it has been replaced by a mini version of Chippy! It appears to still need a little work, but expect another commit or two before going live.

Edit 2: The Chippy Arcade is live! See crafting information below.

Crafting
10 High Quality Metal
2 Gears

Crafting Time
30 seconds

Performance

The team is addressing performance on several fronts this week. Also going live with the patch tomorrow, these changes will hopefully provide improvements to optimization.

Along with some profiling for packet handling, Andre has shifted the AI sensing. Although animals will no longer sense other NPC’s, they will require less overhead as they are no longer doing expensive visibility checks all the time. Given AI is notoriously a usage hog, an improvement like this stands to have a large impact on server performance as a whole.

He’s also reverted some physics things to improve performance, particularly on servers. Along with this, there’s been some shifts with unloading prefabs and network lerp, which could improve performance as well.

Long and short: We’ll hopefully see improved performance (especially on the server end) after the patch on Friday.

HDRP

Garry and Petur are chipping along on HDRP. As you may recall, High Definition Render Pipeline (or HDRP) allows for high fidelity visuals with optimal performance. This is still on a separate branch, so no visuals quite yet, but this body of work stands to drastically improve the overall look of the game in general so it’ll be exciting to see.

Gestures added

Gestures have been added with the latest patch. You can use them in console by typing “gesture ______”. Here are your options:

• wave

• victory

• shrug

• thumbsup

• chicken

• hurry

• whoa

You can also bind them to a key like this: bind m “gesture wave”

Other stuff

• Fixed Rustige Egg not taking splash damage

• More work on the Giant Excavator monument

• Continued work on the new environmental shaders