12:00am EST - With one week until the update, the team is working on fixes and new functionality. 

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

Giant Excavator fixes

The newest monument to make its way into Rust is getting more love this week. Added to the staging branch last week, the Giant Excavator Pit is slated to go live in the game next week. 

As with any new functionality, fixes and balance is needed before it’s ready for prime time. With tweaks to culling, lighting, and various other things, this new monument is looking production ready! For more information on what to expect with the Giant Excavator Pit, check out our in depth post from last week.

HDRP progress 

Work continues on the upcoming graphics overhaul. As mentioned previously, this large undertaking will not only drastically shift many visual elements throughout the game, it’ll ideally improve client performance in a big way too.

On the same branch, Garry has been trucking along on some Movie Maker functionality. No details on this have been officially released as of yet, but we’ll of course keep you posted as more comes to light.

I asked Alistair if he expects HDRP to go live with the August 1st update and he told me it ‘won’t be going live for a while.’ Not surprising given the sheer magnitude of changes going into this branch. Expect full coverage of the changes once the HDRP branch is merged into staging.

Terrain shader optimizations

Diogo is throwing some improvements our way. With a couple of commits this week, he has optimized the terrain shaders around 15%, making them faster and easier to read.

Hunting jacket material fixes 

As mentioned on reddit recently, skins for the hunter jacket always appear very dark. Alistair, hopping into action, has fixed the issue by modifying the skin material.

Other stuff 

• Skin reload problems at extremely low FPS

• Fixed water systems NRE

• Added warning message to loading screen when joining servers with 4k maps with less than 10GB of RAM

• Increased server browser timeout limit to 90 seconds