HDRP Art and Car Scrapping!
2:00pm EST - The update and devblog are live!
1:00pm EST - Our update stream is live! twitch.tv/rustafied
12:00am EST - Update day is once again upon us and the team at Facepunch has some great things in store.
The update is expected to hit at normal time (2pm EST / 7pm BST). Our update stream goes live at 1pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day.
Update summary video
Here’s our update summary video from Puddy!
HDRP Art Backport
Crown jewel of the update, literally 2 years in the making, the HDRP Art Backport project goes live today! Originally started in May 2019, the HDRP branch aimed to transition much of the visual effects of Rust over to the spiffy new High Definition Render Pipeline courtesy of Unity (the underlying engine of the game). Sporting high fidelity VFX at a fraction of the cost to your GPU, this functionality stood to make the game look much better while improving performance.
Unfortunately, not all is always as advertised. After over a year of work, the developers decided to scrap the original HDRP branch citing performance concerns. Not to be a total loss, the team set out last year to port over some of the beautiful new visuals while being careful not to fuck over performance. That body of work, the HDRP Art Backport as it has been known, is finally ready for prime time!
New environment art
Most striking of the changes, much of the environmental art (rocks, foliage, random junk, etc.) has been updated. With an overall higher fidelity, the improvements are striking. This change isn’t limited just to the visual realm though as various elements of gameplay such as climbing mountains and some base designs have been impacted as well.
Monument shifts
Most monuments have been tweaked or just completely remodeled with this update as well. For instance, Satellite Dish and Junkyard have been entirely redone -- including a new car scrapping ability at Junkyard (see more on that below).
Other monuments have received more subtle changes. Airfield has some new entrances, Dome has a new underbelly along with an easier pathway to the top, Lighthouses now have a beautiful focused rotating light at night, along with various other tweaks across the board. For a full rundown of the changes to monuments, check out my previous post. There are also a couple changes to puzzles, which have been updated in our guides.
Freight transit lines
Another highlight of this HDRP Art Backport is the further integration of Freight Transit Line stations to each monument. Now, in many cases, instead of spawning somewhere nearby the monument, the FTL stations have been repositioned into the monument itself.
Performance
With all these visual improvements, you may be thinking, “Well shit, my FPS is going to suck now!” Not necessarily. The team at Facepunch was very careful not to fuck performance up with this one. Based on their internal testing, client performance is roughly the same as before, even with all these better looking models in the game.
View all the monument shifts and more information…
Car scrapping
An exciting new feature of the game has been added with the merging of all this HDRP Art. The Junkyard, along with being completely redesigned, now offers a new way to stock up on scrap and other resources.
Scrapping overview
A new minigame of sorts, this redesigned Junkyard features a Magnetic Crane which you can hop in, drive around, pick up cars with, and recycle them in a big shredder for scrap and more. There’s some undrivable pickups which spawn around Junkyard and give you 50 scrap and 50 frags, but you can also bring in modular cars for a larger bounty.
Operating the Magnetic Crane
Before you get in, you’ll need fuel. This puppy ain’t no Prius either, it burns through a decent amount of fuel during operation. Given this, I’d recommend bringing at least 50 low grade to get started, but more definitely wouldn’t hurt.
Driving the Magnetic Crane is similar to driving a car in game, except you need to hold shift while pressing the WASD keys for direction. This is because there’s also the whole crane part to operate, which is done with the WASD keys and left/right click: W/S moves the top part of the arm up and down, A/D turns the body, left/right click on your mouse moves the main crane arm down and up.
If you’re scrapping at night, you can toggle the bright headlights with your old friend the ‘F’ key. The real magic starts to happen when you activate the magnet with the ‘R’ key...
Scrapping cars
Once you’re near a car you’d like to scrap, tap that ‘R’ key to activate the magnet. Don’t worry about being directly on top of the car as the magnet is pretty good at sucking up whatever is nearby. From there just lift the arm up, drive over to the shredder in the center of the Junkyard, and hold the car nearby.
The shredder pulls any nearby cars into its teeth with ease, quickly grinding it up and spitting the resources off the conveyor belt down the line. Keep in mind it’s a good idea to have at least 2 people while scrapping, so one person can pick up the resources while the other drives the crane.
Payouts
Now to the most important part: How much do you actually make from scrapping cars? As you’d expect, it varies depending on the quality of the car and modules / components involved. On the very low end, you get 50 scrap and 50 frags for the junker pickup trucks found around the yard - which there are about 9 of at any given time.
As you progress, the scrap and resources gain increase as the quality of cars shredded go up. The chassis size is the leading factor in scrap gained:
2 modules
75 scrap
3 modules
125 scrap
4 modules
125 scrap
From there, you get various other resources based on the modules attached, durability, and components installed. These resources are generally metal frags (between 150 and 300), high quality metal (between 2 and 10), and wood (50 to 200). Keep in mind you do not get any fuel back which might be left in cars, so make sure to take it out and use it in the Magnetic Crane (you’ll need it).
Other things of note
You do take bullet damage while driving, the Crane takes damage too
The Crane can be destroyed (it has 500 health to start)
A new Crane will spawn after 5-10 minutes if the current one is destroyed
You can’t drive the Magnetic Crane out of the Junkyard without take a TON of damage and having it be destroyed very quickly
Helis and boats cannot be scrapped
There’s a static car lift at the entrance of Junkyard to fiddle with components prior to scrapping
There are a lot of hiding places in Junkyard now, especially given you can hide in the junker cars
Hapis hiatus
As you can imagine, a change like HDRP Art Backport impacts all maps of the game, not just procedurally generated ones. Given this, custom and static maps like Hapis must be manually updated to take into account the new changes. Unfortunately, Hapis wasn’t quite ready to go for the update this month. That means for at least this month Hapis will not be included as an officially supported map.
For more information on what this means for Rustafied Hapis servers, please read the bottom part of this post.
Poker changes / fixes
The newest gambling craze to sweep Rust has undergone a number of shifts and improvements this month. Texas Hold ‘Em, the popular variant of poker played at Bandit by every Tom, Dick, and Newman now accounts for many more fringe cases than before.
Along with some UI improvements which now show more information, many obscure issues with payouts and player participation have been sussed out and remedied. The full changelog of every tweak and change would be a bit much to list here - just know poker has improved.
Finally, due to some of the monument changes with HDRP Art, poker can now be played on a 2 person table in one of the Abandoned Cabins.
Next round of Twitch drops
This months Twitch drops go live when the update hits. They’ll likely run for a full week, make sure to hit up the Facepunch Twitch page to make sure your accounts a linked.
Participants are as follows:
Console Edition this month!
Rust Console Edition launches later this month! On May 21st, Rust will be released on Xbox One and Playstation 4. Also, if you preorder the Deluxe or Ultimate package, you can get in on the public beta which is now going a bit longer.
Double11 (the team responsible for Rust Console) announced yesterday they will be extending the preorder beta until May 14th. You can also check out their new website for tracking the status of development.
Other stuff
NVIDIA Reflex added
Gib pooling improvements (optimization)
L96 Specular setup (no longer uses metallic setup). Now good for skin creators
Fix for audio perspectives sometimes getting mixed up
Fixed Wind Turbine excessive bounds and underwater deployment
Reduced large furnace bounds
Fixed missing open and close sounds on static research table and repair bench
Fixed a bunch of reported typos
Chainsaw visual fixes
Incorrect material gib fix
Include type field in smart alarm notification data
Some fixes to tree spawns / billboards
Rustafied server changes
With all the game-wide changes coming this month, a couple shifts to our servers were in order. Also, we added a new server in the AU! Here’s the lowdown:
Hapis servers are now Long servers
Given the Hapis map will not be supported until it’s been updated for the HDRP Art Backport (and given we don’t have a time-frame on that), we’re switching our US and EU Hapis servers to be US and EU Long III respectively. That means they will feature a monthly map wipe (only when forced) and a default size procedurally generated map.
Zenlabs
Our custom map servers (known at Zenlabs) are in a similar situation as Hapis. The custom maps must first be updated to account for the new art and none are ready for today’s update. Given this, we’ll be running small procedurally generated maps until we have viable customs to run. Also, instead of having both Zenlabs servers in the US, we’ve moved one to the EU and renamed them US and EU Zenlabs (instead of 1 and 2).
New server: AU Odd
I’m also proud to announce the launch of our newest official server: AU Odd. Similar to our US and EU Odd servers, AU Odd wipes on Monday at 2pm AEST (along with on forced wipe) and operate a default size procedurally generated map.
New ban policy
Starting today to help combat the hacker situation, across all of our servers, we will automatically be banning anyone with a VAC or other game ban of less than 180 days old.