2:00pm EST - The update is live and Twitch Drops are active! Go activate your Twitch Drops here now!

1:00pm EST - Our update stream is live! twitch.tv/rustafied

12:00am EST - The team is making some great progress on new features along with some solid quality of life changes. Also, there is a mandatory update this week.

Our update preview stream goes live at 1pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day.

Charitable Rust is next week!

That’s right! Charitable Rust 2020 is a week from Saturday! Mark your calendars for November 21st, from 11am to 11pm EST. We’ll have multiple servers with a ton of custom gameplay, races, prizes and more! All the proceeds for this year support Rise Above the Disorder, an amazing organization which covers the cost of mental health care for anyone, anywhere.

Mandatory update today

Earlier this week Facepunch announced there will be a mandatory server and client update happening today at 2pm EST (7pm GMT) — by the way, this will not force a wipe. Although the purpose of this update has not been officially released, all signs point to this being the launch of Twitch item drops.

Edit: Here’s the Facepunch Twitch page to activate drops!

Twitch item drops

It appears 3 items will be available to unlock via Twitch Drops from November 12th @ 7pm GMT to November 19th @ 11:30pm GMT: Purple Glasses, Purple Underwear, and Headset.

Cost
30 metal frags

Cost
10 cloth

Quality of life improvements

The team has completed a number of quality of life fixes so far this week. Here is a summary of what’s been done:

Added delete and backspace key support for code lock UI
Glass for picture frames has been fixed it no longer makes the pictures dark
Improved small oil refinery placement on sloped terrain
Allow deployment on the repair bench
Fixed allowing deployment of water purifier inside cauldron
Added support for promoting players to team leader from the app

New supply drop

The SupplyDrop_v2 branch was merged in last night, introducing a new model for the supply drop. No longer a low detail, Unity-store-lookin’ green box, the supply signal is now a shipping pallet, draped with a green tarp, filled with various types of boxes and crates.

Now for the obvious question: Does it drop different loot? As of this moment, it doesn’t look like it. We’ll keep you posted if that changes.

Upcoming vehicles: Drones, Carts, and Cranes!

There are three new vehicles in the pipeline, all on separate branches (so limited details on each).

First, the Work Cart, which looks to be a railroad track based cart which players will be able to drive. Given it has an engine, it’ll run on fuel (most likely low grade). Now where exactly will we find these and what will we use them for? Details haven’t been released, but the commits speak of train tunnels and overpasses, so we can guess some form of mining operation. Maybe integrated in the existing cave system / map? And it’d make sense then that the Work Carts help transfer resources out of the tunnel. All speculation, we’ll see soon enough.

Second up we have the Crane, which although on the ‘vehicles’ branch, is less of a vehicle and more of a tool. Word is this will be a magnetic crane which allows players to scrap cars for good scrap and resource return. A new way to get resources from items in the existing environment? Nice!

Finally, the Drone. This appeared in a new branch week but there’s been concept art for this item floating around for years now. Although there’s only been 3 commits, we can see the drone has been implemented and basic AI control has been added to fly to a position. Will these be just for surveillance or will they have some other capabilities? Only time will tell.

We’ll have more details on all of these as it comes to light.

More phone booths

Expect to see some more phone booths around the map in the near future as the ability to append a phone name with a map grid code has been added. That basically allows for phones to be placed at every gas station, supermarket, and more around the map.

Other stuff

Ability to wear sunglasses and mustache at the same time
More hapis rescue work (still on separate branch)
Optimization around server start time (improving prefab build process)
More work on HDRP Backport
Enabled overcast weather type chance 0.1 again

A note about performance on Rustafied servers

For the past couple weeks, performance on our servers has been slipping. Because it started around the Halloween event, we first thought that was the cause (sorry Facepunch - it was us). As it became clear this was an US issue, we started racking our brains trying to figure out what the source of the lag was -- for a long time to no avail.

Thankfully, we found the source of the issue and resolved it as of Monday of this week. Based on all metrics and reports, performance is now A LOT better on our servers.

If you’re curious what happened, here’s the long and short: last month we started automatically banning for association along with several other types of auto bans (evasion, etc.) which has led to a significant increase in the amount of bans on our servers. These additional bans ended up overloading each servers local ban file, causing excessive garbage collection in the Rust dedicated process, thus causing shit performance. We’ve shifted some things with our ban sync system which will ensure this doesn’t happen again.

I’m very sorry for the negative impact this has had on your gameplay and for the time it took to resolve. I promise to continue to do everything in my power to keep these servers running tip-top. Thank you for your understanding and support.

Much love,
Bugs