12:00am EST - We’re past the halfway point for Rust development this month and the team is cranking out improvements, optimizations, and progress on projects. We’ve also got horse armor!

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

Horse armor added

After work on the art last month, the horse armor branch has been merged in with its initial functionality. On staging now are two types of horse armor: Roadsign and Wooden. They are both default blueprints and cost the same thing at the moment (15 cloth and 150 bone fragments). This doesn’t appear to be finalized, however, so expect it to change prior to release.

To equip a horse with its new armor, simply walk up to it, hold ‘e’ and select ‘Open’. You’ll also notice that horses now have 12 storage slots (armor not required to access storage at the moment). The armor isn’t showing any damage protection information yet, but stay tuned for some damage testing results closer to the update.

Crafting improvements

After getting merged into staging last week, the crafting improvements are seeing even more... well… improvements. As you may recall, the crafting menu not only has more categories (electronics), favorites have now been added, allowing players to easily keep track of those often crafted items.

This week, the UI has been improved on the favorites system, with the addition of star icons and the ability to favorite an item from the icon (instead of having to click into the item details first). Also, a little bounce effect was added to the ‘Favorites’ category every time you add a favorite.

Map improvements

A slew of map improvements continue to be worked on this month. Along with adding custom markers to maps, it appears some other features may be added into the mix such as death locations (may be in the form of a general area circle instead of exact location).

In addition to the map changes, more information is being added to the death screen (distance, etc.). Also, the display of multiple sleeping bags appears to be getting grouped into clusters, hopefully making it easier to find the exact bag you’re looking for.

No visuals on any of this yet as it’s still on a separate branch. The likelihood of these changes making it into the next update seems high, so stay tuned for more specifics once this gets merged into staging.

Optimizations

The priority on improving FPS continues this week as the team works on several optimization paths. Along with the huge umbrella of HDRP work, LOD’s and skeletons are also being improved upon. 

Vincent is going through and optimizing the LOD’s of various objects. LOD, which stands for level of detail, refers to the various versions of an object loaded in as it comes into view (less detailed far away, more detailed up close).

Bill continues his work on skeleton optimizations. No, this isn’t some spooky Halloween business (although it’s almost that time of year again, isn’t it?), these optimizations are for the skeletons of each player and animal.

No word on when these optimizations will make it into the game. LOD’s and skeletons both appear to be smaller projects, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see them in this coming update. HDRP, however, is a much larger undertaking, and probably won’t be in game till later this year.

Instruments

Thai continues his work on making orchestras in Rust a reality. This week he’s added a new Guitar model and made progress on the Cow Bell, Drum Kit, Tambourine, Trumpet, and Bass. All these instruments and more currently exist on a separate branch, but are expected to be merged into staging in the near future. Stay tuned for more details on each new noise maker.

Vehicles progress

Bill continues trucking along on the vehicles branch. As you may recall, this body of work will add various types of modular ground vehicles to the Rust lineup. This week he’s been working on fuel consumption among other things. Fuel is now used per engine instead of per vehicle and vehicles have less fuel consumption when idle. 

No word on when these will make it in the game, but as it is a larger project, I wouldn’t hold your breath for next month.

Other stuff

• HDRP progress

• Helicopter optimizations / fixes

• Boat engine fixes