Rust News

Map markers have received an upgrade this month, with the maximum amount of markers increasing to 5 and a new set of controls to help you store useful information along with your map.



Placing more markers is as simple as using the RMB as normal, and markers are deleted in the same way. If you have reached the maximum number of markers (5 by default) you will need to delete another marker to make room.

To edit a marker simply click on it with the LMB and use the controls that pop up. You can select from multiple colour and icons as well as adding a label. Note that the label will be slimmed down to three characters when displayed on the compass.

If you are the leader of a team all of your teammates will see all of your markers, as well as their own.






Pings are a new system to help you more effectively communicate to your teammates when using reconnaissance tools like cameras, drones and the binoculars.

While using any of those items (and holding down RMB when using the binoculars) you can double tap (KEYBIND) to pop down a ping. All of your teammates will see this ping, even if you are not the team leader.



Single tapping the ping key will place a contextual ping when possible, for example placing a node ping when aiming at a node, a loot ping when aiming at a storage entity or a gun ping when aiming at a dropped weapon.



Double pressing the ping key will place a red hostile ping, designed to represent danger.

You can also hold the ping key down to access a radial menu with all of the ping options in case you need more flexibility.



Single tapping while looking at a ping will cancel it, otherwise the ping will expire in 10 seconds.




The new double saddle item lets two players mount and ride a horse. This is in addition to the old single seater saddle, so the choice is yours!

Wild horses spawn with a single seater saddle and you can swap it for a double seater via the horse radial menu, if you have the required saddle item (and the other way around!).

Both saddle items are available for purchase from the stablemaster or via crafting.






The new refresh for the world models has finally arrived. Finally, you will be able to tell if you have dropped HV, Incendiary, or Normal Rockets! Alongside the world model refresh new world models have been created for the different types of shotgun shells.



Some of the items that have had a world model refresh are :

• Road Sign Gloves
  
• Snap Trap
  
• High-Velocity Rocket
  
• Incendiary Rocket
  
• Shotgun Ammo
  

Hopefully, soon there won't be any more brown burlap sacks on the island!




I've made a few improvements to the computer station UI this month.

You can now use arrow keys or mouse wheel to switch between selected entities. The UI will also now show the health of the entity you're currently controlling.

We have an existing console variable - vehicleDismountHoldTime - that can be set to a value above zero to enable hold-to-dismount on vehicles. This is now also used if you're remote-controlling a drone at the computer station. Setting it even to something small like 0.2 seconds can be a simple way to avoid accidentally dismounting and crashing your drone.




[h3]Alt-click to ignore loot[/h3]
Alt-click inventory items to ignore loot containers

[h3]Computer station UI[/h3]
Health bar, key controls, hold-to-dismount

[h3]Floating Single Items[/h3]
When subs and boats are destroyed, storage drops single items in a floating container

[h3]Vending Machine Genetics[/h3]
Vending machine and marketplace now display plant genetics

[h3]Steam Nickname Fix[/h3]
Team UI will use steam nicknames




This month we extend our analytics platform by recording gameplay stats on official servers.

There was actually an existing analytics system in place but it only showed totals for the whole game such as "100M stone mined per day". That doesn't tell us much, we are looking for more detailed info like:

• max sulfur per hour you can mine
  
• number of players gathering the same nodes in forest vs snow
  
• how quickly you get into fights while farming based on base location
  
• how far players travel to farm
  
• etc
  

We are still in the stage of rolling it out so we don't have many pictures to show off.






A couple months back I made a commit to see if doors could be placed on top of deployables, which caused a bit too much excitement. It needed some extra fixes but now should work!




After upgrading to a 7950x3d I realized you can't change CPU affinity when EAC is running. I added some commands so anyone can change their Rust's core affinity & process priority. You can specify multiple ranges of cores, like "0-7,15-23"

Everyone should try using cpu_priority high and see if it makes any difference.

If you have a 7950x3d, try using cpu_affinity 0-15 to keep Rust running only on v-cache cores.

You can add these as steam launch parameters too: '-cpu_priority high'




Multithreaded networking is now enabled by default for both client and server. This should help with performance of both the client and the server, particularly with network encryption enabled, which should be the case on most servers.

As an additional optimization, we improved the way our memory pool handled contention between multiple threads to ensure there are no negative performance edge cases from all those additional threads.

Earlier last month, we also addressed an issue where one thread was spinning at 100% utilization at essentially all times with multithreaded networking enabled. Since this was resolved, there are now no known issues and we really recommend all server owners to leave multithreaded networking enabled.




It's now possible to launch or reset Rust into safe mode - a basic, extremely low quality settings config to help diagnose problems. You can use safemode with a new button in the Options menu or by passing the -safemode command in the Steam launch settings.

You should only use this feature if you are advised by our Support team or are experiencing problems with launching the game. Using this feature will overwrite your current settings so be sure to back them up beforehand.




For the next week, every 24-38 hours in-game hours an Easter egg hunt will begin. You'll have 3 minutes to collect as many eggs as you can. The top 3 players are given special eggs as a reward. These eggs can be cracked open for various types of loot ranging from scrap all the way up to an M249!



If you don't make the podium, that's okay. The painted eggs you collect can be upgraded to Bronze eggs once you collect 10. If you collect 10 bronze eggs then you can upgrade to a silver egg, eventually all the way to gold!

There are various items available to help you during your hunt. The Easter Basket will allow instant pickup of eggs and the Bunny Onesie and Ears will provide you with an advantage via Egg Vision.

Have fun!




[h3]Egg Suit[/h3]
The Egg suit is an eggsquisite egg themed craftable costume which can be painted when unequipped.



[h3]Rustigé Egg[/h3]
This years beautiful handcrafted Rustigé Egg will feature a miniature underwater lab scene contained inside.

Rust developer Facepunch Studios has canceled a small event that would have taken place at a coffee shop in San Francisco next week, citing "an IRL threat."..
Read more.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



The Drone is a new player-controlled craftable deployable, operated from the Computer Station. Easily damaged from impacts. Can be picked up and deployed just about anywhere - but it doesn't have the best signal, so you'll need to control it using nearby Computer Station.



The Drone can be unlocked from the tier 2 workbench tech tree.




C4 can now be remotely detonated via RF.

Select the item and click enable RF, then set a frequency. An RF Broadcaster or detonator can then be set to the same frequency and as soon as the C4 detects the signal, BOOM. Please note that C4 deployed outside of your building privilege zone will decay after 24 hours. Also, anyone can pick it up (with a 5 second delay) so keep a look out when using it during raids. Use it to set traps in your own base or for controlled demolition of someone else's. There has never been a better time to bankrupt a clan!






A new player-craftable CCTV Camera system can be used for real-time surveillance and security when paired with the Computer Station. This camera has pan, tilt, and zoom capability and must be placed on a ceiling.



All cameras now require 3 power instead of 5.

The PTZ camera can be unlocked from the workbench level 2 tech tree.




Autoturrets can now be configured to be pairable with a Computer Station. While the autoturret is turned off, there is a new menu to set the ID which you can then add in your Computer Station.



When connected to an autoturret from a Computer Station you will take control of it so you can look around and even shoot at things. However, the camera on the autoturrets don't have a great view of far away objects.

The autoturret cannot be controlled whilst in peacekeeper mode.




Something that has constantly been requested in Rust+ is the ability to view cameras. I've tried a few different solutions to get that working but had nothing that worked good enough until recently. You'll now be able to add cameras from a paired server in Rust+ and view them from your phone!

This is an alpha release of the feature. I'll be working on improvements over time but, if there are any issues found, it may be disabled or limited to preserve server stability. Server owners can control this feature using the 'camerarenderer' set of convars.

Video Example Here

The signal from your cameras has got to travel a long way to get to your phone so everything is low quality but you should be able to make out most things in the world.

All of the new, controllable cameras can also be used from Rust+!

You will need to make sure you have the very latest version of Rust+ from the App Store or Google Play. You will need Rust+ native version 0.0.29 as seen in the Rust+ settings. This version of the app is currently in the process of being released so you may need to wait a bit if no updates are available on your device yet.




It was great to see the response to the Industrial Update last month, particularly the bases filled to the brim with pipes! As well as some general bug fixes and performance improvements, we’ve made some QOL improvements this month to help with some of the more common complaints. As always we’ll be improving this further in the future so please keep the feedback coming.

[h3]New Filtering Options[/h3]
There is now a new option when modifying filters to allow more advanced controls. You can now change a filter to require ANY of the listed items, ALL of the listed items, or NONE of the listed items. The default is Any, which is the behaviour from last month.

There have also been some changes to the number based filters, there are now 3 different number fields you can modify per item: Min, Max and Buffer.

• Maximum is unchanged from last month, it will stop moving items if there is greater than the amount provided in the output container.
  
• Minimum will now only move if you have greater than the supplied amount of items in the input container. For example, if you set minimum to 40 wood and you have 50 wood in the container, 10 will be moved.
  
• Buffer is the old minimum behaviour, and will only move items in predetermined buffer sizes. For example, if you set Buffer to 40 wood and you have 50 wood in the container, 40 will be moved. This is helpful when supplying the Industrial Crafter with items required for crafting.
  

Minimum, Maximum and Buffer are only available when using “Any” and “All” filter modes, these options are not available when using the “None” filter mode.

To help understand buffer transfers there is also a new UI that shows any transfers in process.



[h3]Placement Improvements[/h3]
The minimum distance between pipe points is now dramatically smaller, allowing for neater pipe placement around corners. There’s a new colour available (green) and “soloing” a connection by pressing RMB while looking at a plug will now keep the connection highlighted even if mousing over other entities. You can also now hold SHIFT when placing a pipe to make it collide with deployable entities, this can help run pipes around boxes and other objects in a more natural looking way.



[h3]Crafter Improvements[/h3]
The Industrial Crafter now has 4 blueprint slots, allowing you to craft multiple items without having to connect conveyors to the blueprint slots (although those connections are still possible). When a crafter is deciding what to craft, it will look left to right and craft the first blueprint it has the required ingredients for.



[h3]Network Size Limits[/h3]
The maximum size and depth of Industrial networks has been increased to 32 (from 16). This should allow more complex networks without having to resort to inserting extra containers. Along with this the behaviour of some item movement logic has changed: daisy chained boxes will now be filled in order rather than items being split up between them (the splitter will still split stacks though).




When the vending machine is destroyed, it drops no loot. This was too incentivise players to sell high-value items and discourage raiding player-run stores. Over the years vending machines have undergone many changes, such as drone trading via the market terminal. We've also seen players use vending machines to despawn loot in various methods and act as additional base armour.

From today, when the vending machine is destroyed, it'll now drop 50% of the loot stored inside.




We have spent the month thoroughly testing and fixing multithreaded networking and are happy to report that as of the writing of this post all known issues with it have been addressed. In order to play it extra safe we will continue testing it on official servers over the coming days and then release a server update to enable it by default for all servers. As a reminder, if you're a server owner, feel free to test things ahead of time by adding the -networkthread startup parameter to your server.

Simultaneously, we will continue testing it on the client internally and then enable it for all clients by default next week.




[h3]Improvements[/h3]

• Reduced minimum gap between pipe points
  
• Can hold Shift to place entities on top of other deployed entities
  
• Reworked Maximum and Minimum filter behaviour and added a Buffer mode
  
• Added 3 more blueprint slots to the Industrial Crafter
  
• Improved pipe generation performance and fixed pipes being regenerated too often
  
• Added a green pipe colour
  
• Added an extra slot for storage adaptors on the front of small boxes
  
• Electric Furnace and Storage Adaptor performance improvements
  
• Buffer transfers will now be cancelled if a conveyor is turned off or runs out of the item mid-transfer
  
• Added a UI visualisation to show what buffer transfers are in process
  
• Conveyors will now turn back on when they receive power if they were on when they lost power
  
• Reduced volume of Industrial sounds
  
• Industrial Crafter will now only make noise when it is crafting
  
• Industrial Crafter will now pulse red if it’s output storage is full
  
• Various server garbage collection improvements
  

[h3]Fixes[/h3]

• Looking at another entity while an IO connection is solo’d will now maintain the solo visualisation
  
• Fixed being able to place storage adaptors in places where they would intersect with other colliders (eg. top of a small box placed under a workbench)
  
• Fixed some cases where blueprints wouldn't respect number based item filters
  
• Fixed sometimes being unable to build in areas where pipes used to be
  
• Ziplines should now be much less likely to kill the player if they collide with the terrain
  
• Ziplines should now use alternate paths more often if the terrain is too close to the desired zipline
  
• Fixed some cases where the Repair resources required UI wouldn’t appear when attempting to repair an entity
  
• Fixed contacts button staying disabled permanently after connecting to a server with contacts disabled
  
• Fixed water catchers no longer filling up with water when connected to a full water container
  
• Fixed edge case where underground train tunnel entrance would not connect to underground train station
  
• Various fixes for multithreaded networking
  

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Bring new levels of efficiency and unlock new avenues for automation with this month's set of Industrial entities. With these new tools you can move items around your base as well as craft items automatically without you needing to lift a finger.

[h3]Storage Adaptor[/h3]
The Storage Adaptor is the starting point for most of your Industrial plans - simply attach an adaptor to an existing storage entity to make that entity compatible with your Industrial systems. The adaptor does not require power.



Some entities have more than one slot that a storage adaptor can be attached to for ease of placement. Typically the storage adaptor can use all inventory slots on it's attached storage for input/output, although there are some exceptions:

• When attached to a furnace the Input will insert items into the Fuel/Inputs item slots while the output will remove items from the output slots
  
• When attached to a locker the storage adaptor will only access one partition, to access all partitions you'll need to place three storage adaptors
  

The storage adaptor is compatible with:

• Tool Cupboard
  
• Large Wooden Box
  
• Small Wooden Box
  
• Small Furnace
  
• Large Furnace
  
• Refinery
  
• Electric Furnace
  
• Locker
  
• Fridge
  
• Drop box
  
• Vending Machine
  

[h3]Industrial Conveyor[/h3]
The Conveyor is responsible for moving items from one entity to another, generally via Storage Adaptors. Once powered and turned on the conveyor will look for items in containers connected to its inputs and then divide those items amongst its outputs.



By default a Conveyor will move any item it can find, but you can also assign a filter to have more precise control over exactly what items you're moving. Each Conveyor's filter can have up to 12 items or categories (resources/components/clothing/etc). When a filter is assigned the Conveyor will only transfer items that pass those conditions. You can also assign values to each item in a filter to control quantities, by setting the Maximum amount (don't send resources if the target container has over X of that resource already) and Minimum amount (only send resources in a minimum batch of X size).

You'll also find a Filter Pass and Filter Fail electrical passthrough, these will activate based on the current state of the conveyor allowing you to control other parts of the Industrial network based on what items are being moved around.


[h3]Pipe Tool[/h3]
The Pipe Tool is how you connect industrial entities - if you've used the Wire or Hose tool before you'll be right at home. Pipes come in 4 colours to help identify what's going where. Same distance rules apply here except that the anchor points need to be a small distance apart from one another and that pipes cannot go through building blocks or Vending Machines. They can go through deployables like doors.



[h3]Industrial Splitter/Combiner[/h3]
These work as you'd expect, allowing you to funnel or split the flow of items. In the case of a splitter connected to the output of a Conveyor, the Conveyor will spread its resources across all of its connections (eg. a Conveyor connected to a splitter which connects to three boxes that wants to send 600 wood will send 200 wood to each box).



[h3]Industrial Crafter[/h3]
Once attached to a workbench (any tier) the Industrial Crafter allows you to automatically craft items once provided with a blueprint and the required materials. Simply insert the blueprint of your choice in the blueprint slot, insert the required materials, connect some power and turn it on to start producing items.



The Industrial Crafter has built in Industrial slots (so no need for an adaptor) so that you can use Conveyors to insert materials and then extract the finished result. There is also a Blueprint In/Out Industrial slot allowing you to swap out the blueprint being crafted. The Crafter can only craft items that are appropriate for the workbench it's attached to and will take the same amount of time to craft an item as a player would.


[h3]Electric Furnace[/h3]
To complement the Industrial items we're also releasing the new Electric Furnace. It works similarly to other furnaces with a slightly accelerated smelting rate except that it requires power instead of a fuel item. This also means that it doesn't produce charcoal.



[h3]Limitations and Server options[/h3]
To maintain server performance there are several limitations to prevent Industrial networks from becoming too out of control. There is a hardcoded 16 container input/output limit for each conveyor. This means that as well as the max depth limitation of regular IO, a conveyor will only be able to see the first 16 containers it encounters in the input/output network.

There is also a hardcoded limit on how many items in a stack a Conveyor can move in a single tick - 32. If a stack has a count higher than this it will be moved gradually over several ticks.

There are also several convars to control the speed and efficiency of industrial systems:

• server.conveyorMoveFrequency - How often conveyors attempt a move (default 5s)
  
• server.industrialCrafterFrequency - How often crafters attempt to craft something (default 5s)
  
• server.maxItemStacksMovedPerTickIndustrial - How many whole stacks a conveyor can move in a single tick (default 12)
  

Previously doors would show "Open" as the default option whether you had the code or not, requiring you to randomly stumble upon doors you couldn't open, beeping in your face then requiring you to holding E to bring up radial menu and select unlock.

The new default options are as follows:

1. first placed = "change code" (to quickly set your code)
   
2. unauthorized on codelock & auth on TC = "enter code"
   
3. authorized on codelock & unlocked door = "lock door" (to prevent leaving doors unlocked)
   

This should allow you to see at a glance what you still need to enter a code on & open the codelock UI much easier.




Train wagons containing crates now have different variants of varying qualities. Overall should be seeing wagons with much higher-quality loot from crates.






Performance is always a hot topic but it is difficult to address without having an accurate image of the problem. This month I setup logging of client performance and displayed them in various graphs.

This has already proven to be useful. We noticed that exclusive fullscreen had lower FPS than borderless. Rather than guessing, we were able to query the database and confirm it.



See below for various graphs to get an idea of the insights we are seeing & some interesting data.

[h3]Overall FPS[/h3]
First up is median FPS across all hardware. It doesn't give a full picture: players with 60hz monitors are included beside 144hz gamers.



A better metric may be comparing average fps to monitor refresh rate to see how many players are getting lower FPS than their monitor supports... something we will look at in the future.

[h3]Best Performing Hardware[/h3]
These charts clearly shows how Rust is CPU bottlenecked (no surprise). What is interesting is how much the extra cache does: a 5800x3D is on average 50% faster than a 5950x!

Please don't use this as an excuse to go buy a better CPU as performance is subject to change... but do use this info so you avoid buying a new GPU for Rust then being surprised when it yields no performance improvement (at this time).



[h3]Hardware Capacity[/h3]
~75% of the playerbase is running 16GB or less of RAM.... perhaps we should really prioritize why Unity is hogging all the RAM.



The majority of players (73%) using 1080p... yet only 2.5% of players using 4k?!



[h3]Popular Hardware[/h3]
Looking at most popular CPU & GPU we find that it is similar to steam's hardware survey but differs slightly as for Rust. Here are some GPUs as % of total:

Our Metrics:

• GTX 1650 = 6%
  
• GTX 1060 = 2.5%
  
• GTX 2060 = 5.5%
  
• RTX 3060 = 7%
  
• RTX 3090 = 0.6%
  
• RTX 4090 = 0.2%
  

[h3]Graphics settings[/h3]
30% of people using motion blur 👀 only 5% of players using SMAA, 20% of players using primarily windowed mode (not borderless)... all interesting. I thought more players would have turned shadows off.



[h3]Operating System[/h3]
Our Mac playerbase is very small, only 0.3% of players.



Yet even stranger are the people still on Windows 8... laptops perhaps?



[h3]Future[/h3]
Next steps are to expand to gameplay metrics. Technically.... we already have some gameplay stats but they are very limited: "total wood gathered", "total kills", etc.

Better gameplay metrics will give us the ability to drill down to specific information such as:

• most popular weapon each day of a wipe
  
• win ratio of different weapon match-ups
  
• deaths per size of team
  
• hourly loot per monuments
  
• least used items
  

We've been aware of some server performance degradation with large scale farms and Water Catcher networks for a while and we've made some improvements this month to hopefully improve the situation.

The primary performance issue at play here is the amount of processing required when an entity in an IO chain switches on or off. Under normal circumstances this doesn't happen that often but water containers are considered On when they have water and Off when they are empty. When a chain of Water Catchers are connected and sending water down a chain each container will turn on when it receives the water and then turn off as it passes the water to its next container. Water transferring is quite quick and responsive, this results in rapid sequences of entities turning on and off repeatedly which sends a lot of network updates to any clients in range and involves a lot of (largely useless) IO processing as the network changes state so rapidly.

To solve these issues water will now take 10 seconds to start draining once it's inserted into a container. This means that when water travels through multiple containers each container in the sequence will build up a buffer (usually 50-100 water) in each container. This allows the same water flow as before but mostly prevents the containers rapidly turning on/off. The result is that a small sequence of 3 full barrels connected to each other powering a sprinkler used to be sending 10-20 network updates every few seconds will no longer send any updates at all while the system is active, only a few updates when the system runs out of water. This should improve performance primarily on the server but receiving less network traffic will help client performance as well.

We've also modified the behaviour of Water Catchers, when a Water Catcher is going to generate some water, it will now deposit its water as far down the chain as possible. This means that if you have 3 Water Catchers connected to a Water Barrel, the catchers will actually never receive water at all, instead the water will be deposited directly into the barrel.

In a benchmark of 1000 water catchers connected to each other, we found that the server's IO would become unresponsive after several minutes of gameplay as the system became overloaded with water transfer processing. With the above changes server IO performance remains instantaneous even if we artificially limit the servers frame rate.

There is also a new optional server convar "server.waterContainersLeaveWaterBehind" that modifies the draining behaviour to leave one unit of water behind in a liquid container that drains into another container. This keeps the container in its "On" state permanently and further helps performance. Since this is a change in functionality it is disabled by default, if your server is still experiencing IO performance issues due to water entities turning this on may improve performance.




Today we're permanently retiring Hapis Island map. Hapis Island was first introduced in April 2015 by Petur, inspired by the original Rust legacy map. Over the years, Hapis has gone through countless revisions to where it is at today.



[h3]Why Retire Hapis? [/h3]
We're a small development team with no dedicated staff focusing on map design and creation, our mapping attention is focused on procedural maps. Hapis has continuously been developed on the sidelines as a lower-priority project with any free time Petur has. Free time is harder to find nowadays as we focus more on larger, longer-term features with a higher level of polish. Hapis Island needs a lot of attention requiring hundreds of work hours to be polished and kept fresh, which we can't currently give it.

Hapis Island is missing many key features we've added over the past couple of years, zip lines, subways, new monuments and above-ground rail systems, to name a few. When Hapis can support newer features it often takes an extra month, or few for the features to be introduced to Hapis, leaving players waiting and disappointed, some features, such as the rail systems Hapis can't currently support due to a lack of internal tools.

This isn't the end for static maps on Facepunch servers, we'll be working with the custom map community to fill this void over the coming weeks and months.




We have upgraded the client engine to Unity version 2021.3 earlier this month. Initially there have been a number of issues from the upgrade, but we've gone through and addressed all the major ones with several small patches.

This new version of Unity should open up new possibilities for both performance and visual improvements that we're hoping to introduce over the coming months. A big one is Unity's Burst compiler that will help us transition existing code in the Jobs system to a higher performance version of it.

Unfortunately the upgrade also introduced a bug in fullscreen exclusive mode that caused a significant performance degradation compared to borderless fullscreen mode. Due to this we had to retire fullscreen exclusive mode. If you're encountering issues that seem related to this, please contact our support team to figure out a workaround for your specific setup.

The server build of the game will remain on 2019.3 for this month while we continue testing the new engine version to make sure the server build is stable enough for a wide release. More on that hopefully next month.




We've been working on a major networking performance improvement called multithreaded networking. This will apply to both the client and the server, but naturally it will have a significantly higher impact on the server. Due to the nature of the change we wanted to make sure it's working as intended before enabling it by default, so we're first going to start testing it on select official servers this month before hopefully enabling it by default on all servers next month. If you want to start testing it before then, simply add the startup parameter -networkthread to your server or client. Please note that this is a highly experimental feature that may cause significant problems when enabled.




As announced in the November and December devblogs, we are working on a number of networking improvements that require us to retire server query port sharing. Because of this, we have requested that all server owners that are still using this feature update their server startup parameters to use a query port that is separate from the game port.

We have decided to pull the trigger and finally retire query port sharing this month. If you're a server owner who still hasn't updated their server startup parameters, please make sure to do so immediately.