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

12:00am EST - We’re at the halfway point for Rust development this month and some big things are moving into the testing phase! 

Our update preview stream starts at 1pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the week.

Rust on sale!

The Steam Spring Sale is on and with it, you’ll find 33-50% off all Facepunch titles and DLCs! This lasts March 16-23rd.

Nuclear Missile Silo

The next monument to grace the Rust plains is upon us! Added to the AUX2 branch late last week, the Nuclear Missile Silo is officially in testing mode. From the looks of it, this will be a large, underground monument with rads, loot, and NPC’s. 

Unfortunately, AUX2 is currently closed to the public, so no visuals or specifics quite yet. That said, having any project like this hit AUX2 is a huge milestone towards going live in game. We’ll keep you posted as this new monument becomes available for wider testing.

Double Saddles

Also hitting the AUX2 branch, double saddles are on the way. Soon allowing two players to ride one horse, these double saddles will likely be available for testing at the same time as the Nuclear Missile Silo. 

In game map improvements

Third to be merged to the AUX2 staging branch, a slew of improvements to in game maps are on the way. From the looks of it, players and groups will soon be able to place and label multiple markers on maps. They’ll also be able to ping on the fly to alert teammates of points of interest (including corpses, bags, and more). All of this will work with compasses too based on what we’ve seen in commits.

As with the previous projects, this will be available for wider testing once AUX2 is opened to the public (or when all this is moved to AUX1 or normal staging). Given its 3 new features, my guess is the team at Facepunch is shooting to get these things ready for the April 6th update and forced wipe in 3 weeks.

Attack helicopter 

Not merged with AUX2, and still on a separate branch, the Attack Helicopter continues progressing as the UI for gunners is being implemented. This week specifically saw the addition of ammo counts and zoom indicators to the gunner UI.

Based on commits, the Attack Helicopter is going to be similar to the Minicopter, except it’ll have skis instead of wheels, oh, and it’ll shoot freaking rockets (and probably guns). We’ll keep you posted as this exciting new vehicle gets closer to testing.

Multithreaded networking

For weeks the team at Facepunch has been working on implementing an updated version of networking for the game. This includes changing the networking to a multithreaded process (to help with optimization and performance). This week, launched in an optional server and client update, multithreaded networking has been turned on by default. 

The devs have indicated this will ideally show a slight increase to overall performance. We’re running tests and intend on fully transitioning our servers soon.

Autowear clothing

A new quality of life feature for putting on clothing is on the way! Simply hold the alt-look key while right-clicking or hover looting from a loot container to wear clothing items immediately (if they can be worn without taking off anything else).

Also, if holding the alt-look key and right-click or hover looting from main inventory or clothing inventory, it’ll behave as if there is no loot container open (as in, put the clothes on). All this is subject to change.

Gameplay metrics

Merged into normal staging this week, the gameplay metrics branch is now tracking a ton of player related actions and server information. Likely to be used by the developers for monitoring and balancing the various meta’s of the game, these metrics are going to be an excellent new tool in the devs arsenals - and could eventually have some cool uses for communities too.

This week specifically focused on adding tracking for things like keycard swipes, hackable crates, violations, server tags, dropped items, despawns, and more.

Other stuff

• Show steam nickname on team UI / nametags if one is set

• Work on some new world models

• Show HP bar (and text) on the computer monitor when remote controlling entities

• Move to next/prev entry on computer UI with arrow keys or mouse wheel

• Fixed TCs showing "Open" as default option when in building priv but not authorized

• Prevent opening turret inventory until authed on turret

• Added support for custom size for hi-res screenshots in builds. New convar is Screenshot.HiResScreenshotCustomWidth. Set to 0 (the default) to use default hi-res screenshot size, which is 4x your native resolution. Set to any other number to use that number (clamped between 128 and 16384)

• Fixed antialiasing settings not reverting when taking normal-res screenshots with transparency