1:00am EST - Showing off the new animals on staging during our update preview stream!

12:00am EST - With one week until the monthly update, the team at Facepunch is trucking along on functionality and content.

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

Animal and AI updates

The first iteration of the new AI and animal models has made its way to staging! It’s still a work in progress, however, these new models and animations are looking great. This also includes the first iteration of a combined AI system (as opposed to the previous 3 seperate systems). With this new system there are some big improvements to behavior, such as wolves will join together in packs of 3 and stags in packs of 5. There is definitely more work to be done, but this is a great foundation to build on.

Submarines

Rust’s newest aquatic vehicle has made strides forward in development this week. The Solo and Duo Submarines, which have been in progress for a number of weeks now, are approaching their launch point.

This week we saw work on the prop animations, dashboard functions, and interior progress. The team has also tweaked how the particle bubbles ejected from the sub behave when reaching the water's surface.

All in all, these subs are still very much a work in progress and have not been merged into the staging branch yet for public testing. That said, they do appear to be close to that point, so we’re keeping a close eye on the commits to test as soon as they make their way in.

New tunnel content

Also moving forward this week, some new content related to the train tunnel system. Specifically, it appears as though the art has been finalized for the new countryside bunker entrance. The team is also working on a larger base variant to appear at certain points in the tunnel system.

Like much of the other active projects, this work is still on a separate branch, so we can't quite provide any visuals. Also, given the scale of this work, I’d be surprised if it’s ready to go for the June 3rd update. Either way, we’ll keep you posted as more progresses.

World revamp tweaks

After the launch of the massive world revamp earlier in the month, the team is making some tweaks to procedural map generation. Along with modifying the broken down vehicles on the road to lessen the impact on junkpiles, the team has modified some monument placement rules. Specifically, Giant Excavator has been downgraded to default priority as opposed to highest priority. Also, the priority of version ‘C’ of the mining quarry has been downgraded to match the other quarry priorities.

As with all changes to procedural map generation, these require a map wipe so will likely go live with the next forced wipe and monthly update (next week on June 3rd).

Edit: These changes have been merged with main.

Contacts

Helk continues his work on the mysterious ‘contacts’ branch. With things being kept pretty close to the vest on this one, it’s still not clear just exactly what this branch will entail. Recent commits just show the project being synced up with the other work being done on the main branch, but don’t provide any insight into what this could specifically be. We’re keeping a close eye on this one and will let you know as soon as more comes to light.

Demoshot

Another branch receiving a lot of love is the demoshot project. Still on a separate branch, we can gather from the commits this entails a bunch of improvements and additions to the demo playback functionality in the game. Will this make it in for the update? That remains to be seen, but we’ll keep you posted as always.