3:00pm EST - Our update preview stream is live! twitch.tv/rustafied

12:00am EST - Rust development is in full swing this month with forward progress on a number of projects including modular vehicles, hdrp, farming, unity updates, optimizations, and more.

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

Modular vehicles

Commits continue to be pushed out on the vehicles branch. Much of the work this week consisted around the lift mechanism of vehicles. This leads me to an interesting question:

Just how the fuck are these vehicles going to work? The fact of the matter is, we don’t know at this point - the devs have kept this pretty close to the chest. The lift hints towards the idea that a certain infrastructure will be required prior to being able to modify the modules on these new modular vehicles. Similar to workbenches, it stands to reason you’ll need a lift nearby to make any modifications to vehicles.

This still leaves much unknown. Where do we get the chassis or base of the vehicle? The modules? Are they found? Crafted? Purchased?

All remains to be seen. Good news is: based on commits, it appears much of the functionality has been developed on the vehicles branch, so we might see this get merged in sooner than later.

HDRP progress

Progress on one of the largest projects in Rust history continues this week. Focus on the HDRP branch appears to be on caves and mines this week. Along with making mining and cave entrances meet with the terrain easier, many textures and materials have been converted over to the HDRP standard.

Given the scope, this project is still likely months away from completion. Once done, however, it not only stands to completely shift the way the game looks and feels - a by product of the main intention - which is to optimize the game in a way we have never seen before.

Farming2

The next iteration of farming continues to take shape on the ‘farming2’ branch. This week has shown some potato progress, UI work, plant refactoring, and balance tweaks. Also, the small planter has been made a default blueprint, allowing would be farmers to get started even sooner after a wipe.

So far this next iteration of farming includes sprinklers, compost, fertilizer, advanced genetics, potatoes, and what looks to be a large overhaul of how farming works in the game. No sign when this will be live, but we’ll have some in depth details once it’s merged in to staging.

Minigun art

Here’s some bad ass looking art for an upcoming weapon, the Minigun.

Unity update

The team has updated the version of Unity (the underlying engine which runs the game). Although this normally just entails some fixes and optimizations in the background, it does sometimes cause some unforeseen things to go haywire. Luckily the devs merged this in early in the month, with plenty of time to catch any random issues which may have been caused by the update. For more nitty gritty information on what changed in Unity, check out the changelog here.

Edit: It looks like this version has been pulled out for the time being.

Foliage optimization

Optimization outside of the HDRP continues to take place. This week, a branch was started to optimize foliage. It’s not clear yet if this will have any noticeable impact, but any optimization is good news in my book.

More messages

A couple more useful messages have been added in for when you are building:

• Show a more helpful message when trying to build in a prevent building volume (including monuments)

• Show a message when building too close to another building

• Show a message when trying to build in an area where you do not have building privileges

Other stuff

• A spray can idea posted on twitter

• A new tool to benchmark effects has been merged in