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

12:00am EST - With one week till the big update and forced wipe, the team is cranking out a ton of quality of life changes, fixes, and more!

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

Rust on sale!

Rust is 50% off until June 3rd as part of Steam's Open World, Survival, and Crafting Fest! Get it here!

Quality of life

There are a slew of quality of life changes in the works. From the looks of it, most of this will make it in for the update next week. Here is a summary:

Barricades at monuments
Barricades can be placed in monuments on terrain (more fragile, faster decay)

Disconnect grace period
Allow players to skip queue when joining a server for 5 minutes after they are disconnected 

Horse reverse
Horses can travel backwards (at half speed) and armor slows them down less than before

Workbench access
Can now open and unlock techs from the lower tiers of workbench when using a higher tier (eg. T3 workbench now allows access to T1+T2+T3 tech trees)

Tool cupboard storage
Block the following items from being stored in tool cupboards: sulfur ore, sulfur, gunpowder, explosives, diesel, camera, laptop

Building blocked visuals
Show a sphere effect around building blocked areas of monuments and caves (example)

Helicopter handbrake
Helicopters no longer roll on slopes if the engine is off and there's nobody mounted. They apply "handbrake" instead

Wire slacking
Hold left shift and scroll your mouse wheel while placing wires to add slack to the line for a cool effect

Planter fill
Can now hold sprint to fill in vacant slots in a planter with any selected seeds (example)

Smaller medium battery
Reduced medium battery size by ~15% to balance them against large batteries and make them fit under half walls

Salvaged hammer buff
Buff salvaged hammer (now destroys every barrel 2 hits)

Skin names on bench
When skinned items are added to the repair bench, it now shows the name of the skin

Hammer UI improvements
Always show demolish & rotate option in hammer but gray it out to reduce misclicks when upgrading (example)

Less window craft time
Decrease craft time of the following items from 30s to 15s: Wood shutters, all types of window bars, window glass

Compostable bone
Bone fragments are now compostable into fertilizer at a ratio of 4:1. No bait value.

Vendor attachments
Show attachments in a tooltip for weapons for sale at vendors

Other stuff

• Entering the "last used" code on codelocks is now 2.5x faster

• Removed electric furnace 'Turn On' and 'Turn Off' side inputs (now auto on if they have power for better handling on things like server restarts)

• Double size of mixing table recipe list from 4 -> 8 recipes shown at once

• Increased laser detector range to match the beam length (from 4 to 12 meters)

• Tesla coils and igniters now automatically heal themselves when under building privilege

• Show building guide of teammates (must be holding building plan yourself to see your teammate's guide)

• Added a new input to SAM site to toggle the defender mode

• Industrial changes

• Increase industrial conveyor from 12 item filters -> 30 item filters

• Increased search menu size from 5 items -> 24 items

• Made the conveyor filter menu larger to show more items at once (example)

• Painting improvements

• Make the sign painting UI follow the UI scale option

• Increase max paint brush size to 100

• Fix paint brush sizes less than 2 having gaps

• Finish making strokes not overlap with themself, which was making it difficult to use low opacity values This makes it behave more like a real painting app where you can't paint over somewhere that you already painted in the same stroke (example)

• Changes to no build volumes at monuments

  • Reduced no build volume at desert military base and arctic research base

  • Increased no build volume slightly at launch site and sphere tank

  • Small monuments no build volume increased, switched to sphere collider

    • Lighthouse 100m

    • Mining Outpost 70m

    • Super Market 100m

    • Gas station 100m

    • Warehouse 100m

• Helicopter collision changes

  • Previous way wasn't working well for ground driving, where hitting obstacles would quickly deplete health

  • Old helicopter collision behavior:

    • 0 - 18km/h, no damage

    • 18+km/h, take away a minimum of 15% health, increasing with speed

  • New rules:

    • 0 - 25km/h, no damage

    • 25+km/h, take away a minimum of 5% health, increasing with speed Damage from high-speed crashes remains the same

Fishing changes

Fishing is seeing a number of shifts this week. Here is what we’re seeing so far:

• Fishing trap now uses the same fish selection and bait logic as the standard fishing rod (different catch options for fresh water/ocean water)

• Simple shark now requires a depth of 5.5m to fish (was 5m)

• Fish traps are now considered to be fishing at 5m regardless of their location (fishing trap can now get all fish except for shark due to depth and orange roughy as it's only available in a moonpool)

• Added the ability for more than one lure item to be used at once when fishing. Applied to worms and grubs up to a maximum of 3 (a stack of 3 worms and grubs can be used to catch high value fish) on both rods and traps

• Can no longer put items with no bait value into the fishing trap (same behavior as fishing rod)

• Show the max stack bait size in the information panel when bait is selected

• Fish trap now has a 50% chance of failing, bait is still consumed but trap will remain active

• Updated bait values:

  • All fish based food now has no bait value and cannot be used to catch more fish

  • Raw Bear and Wolf meat is now worth 3 bait (was 5)

  • All berries are now worth 1 bait (was 0.5) and can be stacked up to 5 times as bait

  • Raw human meat bait value is now 3

  • Anchovy, herring and sardine bait value is now 2 and can be used in stacks of 2 (use 2x to reach 4 bait value)

  • Small Trout, Yellow Perch bait value is now 5 and can be used in stacks of 2 (use 2x to reach 10 bait value)

  • Catfish, Small shark, Salmon, Orange Roughy are now 10 bait value and limited to 1 stack

  • Raw fish meat and spoiled human meat bait value is now 0

  • Raw fish meat is still 0 bait value

• Rationale: Use smaller fish as bait to catch bigger fish, with the risk of losing your bait and having to start from the small fish again. No longer allow raw fish meat to be used as bait so a large fish can't be gutted to restart the cycle. The goal is to introduce a risk element - do you cash out with your medium fish or use it as bait to try and get a bigger/better fish?

Fixes

There’s also a bunch of fixes in store for the update next week. Here are some from this week.

• Fix item split slider resetting every time you split an item (still resets to half if you split off half or more of a stack)

• Fix Oilrig not spawning on the top of the map as often as expected

• Some visual fixes for Bradley

• Fix mixing table resetting to the top of the scrolling menu of recipes every time you access one

• Do not show IOEntity UI information panel for generic IO type items (fixes signs and frame showing power usage 0)

• NRE fixes for CH47 Scientists

• Spooky speakers audio now falls under the voice props volume slider

• Fixed flame arrows on crossbow not hiding their particle effects while using a scope

• Fixed scrap heli not being driveable on ground with Ctrl key anymore

• Fixed scrap heli wheels not animating

• Fix formatting not working for bullet/numbered lists for the in-game news

• Fixed broken modular car spawn commands

• Fix F8 menu not updating when you switch servers

• Fixed f1 grenade skins not appearing on the thrown grenade (don't look too closely though)

• If an item's amount is > a protentional new container's max stack side, return false from CanSwap. Fixes drag-swapping an engine part from a modular car engine onto a stack of a different tier of engine parts losing all but one of the stack.

Other stuff

• SAM sites no longer target sleeping or kinematic vehicles

• Renamed "Suicide" to "Respawn" in the main menu

• More work on the Traveling Vendor

• More work on the Blunder Buster (new weapon)

• More work on Hood and Cuffs (minigame to get out, no suicide option when cuffed)

• More work on crude gestures

• More work on the Radtown Redux monument