12:00am EST - With just one week until the update, the team is cranking on forward progress. They’ve also launched a great new resource for sneak peeks at new features.

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

New Facepunch Instagram

Launched earlier this week, the Facepunch Instagram account has already adorned us with several sneak peeks of new features not seen before. With 1 unique Rust related post going out a day, I’d say it’s definitely worth the follow.

Edit for context: As Garry has stated, these posts are just WIP / development images which are made without any promise or expectation. It’s just a peek into their world.

Horse armor progress

Helk has polished the new horse armor a bit this week. Along with adding costs and damage statistics, he’s added horse armor for sale at the Bandit Camp attire shop. There’s also been sounds added and a whole bunch of miscellaneous bug fixes and tweaks.

As you may recall from last week, there are two types of armor coming in. The Wooden Horse Armor is a default blueprint while the Roadsign Horse Armor requires a tier 2 workbench and 500 scrap to research. The other awesome part of this addition is the storage added to each horse. With or without armor, horses now also have 12 storage slots total.

Keep in mind, the horse armor implementation is still in progress, so all of this might change. Also, it’s not 100% working on staging at the moment (armor and items won’t take to horses in the wild quite yet). We’ll have more finalized details on the post next week.

Edit: Just heard some more details about horse armor which should be merged in soon: armor will make the horse slower, horse shoes will make it faster and reduce stamina drain, saddle bags add 6 slots of inventory space. All values (protection and otherwise) are still up in the air. Horse armor will protect the player, although not realistic, it’ll help people on horseback not be a sitting duck).

Wooden Horse Armor

Cost
600 wood
2 rope

Protection
+25% Horse
+20% Rider

Crafting time
60 seconds

Workbench required
None

Blueprint
Default

Roadsign Horse Armor

Cost
5 road signs
3 sewing kits

Protection
+50% Horse
+40% Rider

Crafting time
30 seconds

Workbench required
Level 2 

Blueprint
500 scrap to research

Oil Rig nerfs

Alistair has dealt a large blow to Oil Rig superiority this week as he’s nerfed them in two ways. First, all military and elite crates are now behind puzzles. Second, the recyclers have been removed from both Rigs. He’s also fixed small loot max population exceeding available spawn limits.

These changes are currently on a separate branch (save185) but I’m willing to be they’ll be merged in prior to the update and forced wipe next week.

Map improvements are in!

Leaked exclusively on the Facepunch Instagram earlier this week, the first glimpses of map improvements has come to light. Although it appears to be from the map improvements branch, the shot released is actually of the updated death screen.

From this, we can see several exciting new features:

• Map (improvements and all) added to the death screen

• Sleeping bag locations on the map

• Clustering of sleeping bags on map for easier access / organization

• Grid location added to sleeping bag respawn buttons

• Death location (shows the last place you died)

• Distance and number of hits from attacker

This work is still on a separate branch, so we can’t see it in action quite yet. This also means it’s up in the air as to whether or not it’ll be in the update release next week. As always, we’ll keep you posted as things progress.

Edit: This is now live on the staging branch! You can now also right click to add custom markers (each one you add has a different color), see the marker locations on your compass, and team leaders markers show on all team members maps. Also, this map does not show up on the death screen in streamer mode.

HDRP previews

Also posted to the Facepunch Instagram, two new pictures from the HDRP branch. As you probably already know, the HDRP branch is a huge body of work in which the team is drastically overhauling the look of the game with the intention of optimization and better performance (along with many improvements to graphics overall).

Now with this second shot in particular, I seriously thought it might be a troll from Facepunch and Garry just took a picture in a park or something. It is, however, confirmed to be a shot from a test scene on the HDRP branch. Keep in mind though, the actual foliage density and specifics are still very much a work in progress. A final performance sweep will be done prior to launch, which will likely have various elements tuned down in the interest of optimization.

Regardless, these look amazing, and I can’t wait to see this in action. We’ll still have to wait a bit before that’s the case as the HDRP work is not expected in game till the end of the year.

Quick loot coming

Adam is working on a new branch called quick loot. Judging by the name, it appears that a quality of life shift around looting is due in the near future. The specifics of how this will work don’t appear to be finalized yet. Given this, a launch with next weeks update is unlikely. 

Vehicle garages

Bill continues his work on modular vehicles. This week, along with a bunch of other things, he’s implemented some form of garage platform with lights to help with parking. All of this is still on a separate branch and we’ve yet to see any previews (future post to Instagram? Yes, please!!). That said, once this work is done, we’ll not only have a slew of new vehicle options for traversing the landscape of Rust, but it looks like we’ll have a place actually meant for parking them.

Other stuff

• Modular weapons coming? Looks like maybe this year, too!

• Compound scientists now covers blackspot near recycler

• Looks like double doors skinnability is being worked on again

• More work on instruments branch - and a shot of a Rusty Tamborine

• More LOD and skeleton optimization

• Fixed Bradley crates sometimes spawning under the world

• Fixed corpses not saving/loading their inventory

• Harvesting heli gibs no longer marks players as hostile

• Fuel Generator and Flame Turret now uses fuelsmall panel

• Remove H and J as default binds for drop stack/single current item

• Added "headlerp" console command

• Fixed heli blades spawning with blur on

• Added grass.distance convar (range 100-200, default 100, only really useful for video making)