Rust News

Multiplayer survival game Rust continues to get bigger and deadlier with each passing patch. This month's update, called Road Renegades, adds new vehicles like motorbikes and bicycles, a traveling vendor in an armored truck, and…..
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[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]





Motorbikes can now be found at several monument locations. One is a single-person bike and one has a sidecar as well, where a second player can sit and use weapons.

These are relatively fast and nimble vehicles, useful for quickly traversing the map using low grade fuel. If damaged, they can be repaired with a small amount of Metal Fragments.







Bicycles can now be found across the map on roadsides, and also at several monuments. The standard bike takes one player, but a three-wheeled variant allows a second player to sit and shoot from the rear.



The bicycles aren't as fast or strong as the new motorbikes, but they're easier to acquire, and they don't use any fuel. Instead, they slowly consume your own food and water levels.



Holding Sprint while biking will have the driver stand up and give you a bit more temporary power and speed. Sprint mode will also automatically engage if you're struggling up a hill. This feature wears out after a few seconds and needs time to recharge.





Take your enemies captive with the new Handcuff and Prisoner Hood items!



Use the Handcuffs on a surrendering (friendly gesture) or downed player to take them prisoner - restricting their inventory, belt, use and interact options.

Handcuffed players can be pushed around and forced into vehicles and other mountables.



Place the new Prisoner Hood on your victim to block their vision and disable their map access, preventing them from seeing where you are taking them.



Handcuffed players can hold their attack button to progress the unlock minigame. Fill the progress bar and the Handcuffs break, releasing you! Unlock progress is tied to the Handcuff item condition so that you can always eventually get free - but being damaged or pushed will temporarily interrupt your breakout attempt!

Additionally, performing the friendly gesture - at any time - lets other players inspect your full inventory and modify your belt - a great way to show you're not a threat or hiding something valuable!





We've added a brand new event! The Travelling Vendor. The vendor will spawn naturally on maps with ring roads (4000+) and traverse the roads.



The vendor sells a selection of wares: from basic building materials to some of the best items in the game. Each time the vendor spawns a random selection of items are chosen to sell, along with a different price each time. If you're lucky, the vendor will decide to sell something at a discount, so keep an eye out!

To get the vendor to stop just run up to it, but don't stand blocking its way for too long or you will be ignored. It can't wait on you forever! It doesn't take too kindly to gunfire or selling to hostiles so make sure you're on your best behaviour.

I want to say a huge thanks to the Rust Discord Community for their incredible work in helping debug and improve the vendor.





Ceiling Light Wiring
Ceiling lights IO points are now easier to target

Improved Barricade Placement
Can now place barricades on rocks and dirt roads





To introduce a little more variety into the NPC vending system, this month we have introduced a change that increases or decreases the sale price of items purchased with scrap based on that item’s popularity.

The way it works is we now keep a running total of the average number of items sold every 6 in-game hours. Every 6 hours if the number sold is less than the average then the price of the item will drop by 5% for the next 6 hours (down to a minimum of 50%). If the number of items sold has increased above the average then its price will be increased by 10% (to a maximum of 100% extra, or twice the price). We will be starting prices at 200% so they will likely drop for a while before settling to the “market” price.



An example of the logic:

• The average amount of SAM sites purchased in a 6 hour window is 150, and the current price has no increases or decreases.
  
• At the end of a 6 hour window we check and see that 155 SAM sites have been purchased.
  
• Since the average has gone up, we raise the price by 10%.
  
• Since the price is now more expensive, sales drop to 120 over the next 6 hours.
  
• Since this is below the average we then drop the price by 5%, which results in a 5% price increase in total.
  

You can see the current discount and price when looking at an item on the map or in-person, the price displayed is the final price and there’s a small indicator that communicates what the current price change is and what that item’s initial price was. You can easily tell at a glance what items are cheap and what items are expensive, as well as how much they’ve changed price to make informed purchasing decisions.

We’ve only applied this to sales where the currency paid is scrap - vending machines that offer scrap in exchange for items (fish market, resource exchange, etc) are unaffected. This will also not apply to player created vending machines.

Why are we making this change? We believe the NPC vending meta can be shaken up a bit and this seems like a fairer change than us just arbitrarily changing a bunch of prices across the board. This way the prices will increase and decrease based on player behaviour and will vary from server to server. As usual we’ll monitor how this goes over the next month and make changes as necessary.





Building on last month's work to reduce the overall number of objects in Rust to save memory, this month we are rolling out even more improvements. We applied the same principle (reducing the number of objects by combining them when possible) but at the project level, so that most assets are already combined and streamlined in the build and don’t need to be processed when starting the game up. The streamlining process we use here is even more aggressive and results in even greater memory savings while also reducing time spent processing assets.

As well as these optimisations, we’re going to be making last month's renderer improvements now enabled by default.

We believe this approach combined with last month's improvements has resulted in about a gigabyte of reduced memory usage on a fresh server.

This was a huge effort as it involved manually modifying hundreds of assets across the entire game. Thanks to the valiant efforts of our QA team we’ve identified many cases where slight unintentional material and colour changes occurred but it’s possible some more snuck through into the release so please let us know if you see anything that looks incorrect!

Just like last month, we have more improvements in the pipeline for next month including memory improvements to monument foliage and a new process for loading monuments that will hopefully reduce loading times and further reduce memory usage.





Underwater visibility has been messed up for a while now. It was an unintended consequence of us rewriting the way we shade things underwater, to make it more flexible.

That low visibility has now been fixed, but we might continue to tweak it some more in subsequent patches.





Since our last anti-cheat update back in April, we have banned an additional 65,181 accounts, 10,297 of these were temporary, and the remaining 54,884 were permanent bans. Here's the breakdown per patch:

[h3]June - Seismic Shift:[/h3]

• 14,949 permanent bans
  
• 5,898 temporary bans (86.39% of which were automated)
  
• 117,554 reports
  

[h3]May - Meta Madness:[/h3]

• 19,876 permanent bans
  
• 2,755 temporary bans (91.80% of which were automated),
  
• 111,094 reports
  

[h3]April - Waves of Change:[/h3]

• 20,059 permanent bans
  
• 1,644 temporary bans (94.67% of which were automated)
  
• 96,473 reports
  

[h2]NOTES[/h2]

• Patch-specific report data is only from Facepunch Official servers due to data reliability originating from non-official servers, the total number of reports across all server since April is 3,645,165.
  
• Bans that were later reverted are excluded from these metrics.
  
• Bans are placed for multiple reasons. The numbers above do not strictly reflect only cheat-related bans, but cheat-related bans make up the vast majority of bans.
  
• A single player can receive multiple bans, for example, if a user is temporarily banned and then later switched to a permanent ban, this is counted as 2 bans in the above metrics.
  
• Over the last 31-days, we've had 1,751,457 unique players, and close to half a million daily active players. Using the metrics above, it could be interpreted that 1.2% of the player base are cheaters, it's very common for cheaters to use many accounts over the course of the month. Cheaters often receive an account suspension, get another account, receive another ban, rinse and repeat inflating the true number.
  

The above is to provide context and transparency, not to state we're doing a good job, there is much more to be done in this area, and we are continuing to work on it.

[h2]NEXT[/h2]
In the last anti-cheat blog update, I discussed how we've limited the information cheaters can read and abuse from network data, such as knowing players health and buried stash locations, authorization lists from turrets and tool cupboards. The holy grail would be not networking nearby players and items you can't see.

If a player is behind a hill and you can't see them, don't network the player. If a tool cupboard is inside a base, don't network the tool cupboard. This is server occlusion, and it's difficult to get perfect. We're currently experimenting with this and hope to do a slow rollout over the coming months, pending further internal testing.

Additionally, we're currently working on many experimental features to disrupt cheats, some of these changes are nearly completion and will be deployed Soon™.

Last month, we teamed up with a third party to handle takedowns on our behalf. One of the core objectives is aimed at cheat-related material. The takedowns will be made at the request of Facepunch staff after manual review. There is no automation, and there is no room for innocent content to be taken down.

• In the past 30 days, we've taken down over 300 cheats-related media on social platforms
  
• We're working on several other legal fronts, which are too early to discuss
  

The next anticheat update will be in November





Creative mode is a new set of native tools Paddy and I have added which allows players to freely build, place and experiment without needing additional plugins. You can enable creative mode for everyone on your server using the server convar "creative.allUsers" or enable it just for a specific player using “creative.toggleCreativeModeUser PLAYERNAME”.

Once enabled, there are several convars you can enable which overrides standard build and placement restrictions:

• creative.freeRepair - allows resource free repairs and bypass the repair cooldown
  
• creative.freeBuild - makes all building blocks free and adds the option to spawn blocks in a specific grade. Also allows the Hammer to upgrade and downgrade blocks for free.
  
• creative.freePlacement - removes most placement restrictions when deploying objects. Will allow building in building blocked zones, in other TC zones and when intersecting other objects.
  
• creative.unlimitedIO - allows an unlimited amount of line points and raises the distance limit when wiring IO entities to 200m. Also adds an invisible colour option in the colour wheel.
  

This was originally made to help our Media team more efficiently build and film content, but we also see this being helpful for QA purposes as well. Hopefully you find it helpful too!





FancyOrb's Global Warfare event takes place and all your favorite creators will be involved with Twitch drops!



Drops will be available across the entire Rust category on Twitch.

Be sure to get synced at https://twitch.facepunch.com/connect to claim your skins!

We're back with some amazing EpicDesk creator collabs for giant mousepads!

[h2]BLOOPRINT[/h2]





[h2]SEBBYK[/h2]





[h2]OILRATS[/h2]



To order check out their website as each of these deskpad campaigns have different end dates and shipping dates! They are ALL limited editions. Once they end they are gone forever!





Coming Late July FancyOrb is bringing you Rust Global Warfare 2!

You won't want to miss this! There will be Twitch drops and all your favorite creators involved.



If you're a creator and you want to be involved with this event join the FancyOrb Discord for updates and how to sign up!





Charitable Rust isn't until October, however, if you are a skin artist and would like to be involved with designing charity items for the Item store or Twitch Drops - pay attention over the next few weeks!



Skin contest is slated to take place for the entire month of July!

[h2]Contest Rules[/h2]

1. Use #CR2024 as official contest tag in Steam workshop.
   
2. No re-uploading old or previously submitted skins.
   
3. Do not steal or use any copyrighted or otherwise trademarked content.
   
4. Must be 100% original work (can work with others if all are listed on workshop page).
   
5. Must follow all basic workshop submission rules and standards.
   
6. If using the charity’s logo, it cannot be used on any weapon skins. Only Charitable Rust logo may be used on weapon skins.
   
7. Submissions must be high quality and Hi-Res, normals properly done/baked.
   
8. Cannot contain offensive or sexual content.
   
9. Limit of 5 skin submissions per creator.
   
10. Skins must be submitted by midnight (23:59) PST July 31, 2024.
    

More info, rules, regulations, and branding assets can be found here: https://www.charitablerust.com/skins





Hedge, Monstera, daVinci, and a few others from the Art community made this googley-eyed glory shrine of our savior Helkus Maximus.



It's probably best if we don't ask too many questions.





I'm just going to leave this here...

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]





If you made something cool or saw something cool, reach out! Tag me on X or u/ErrnieGerrn Reddit.

Cover image by Furthi

This month we're adding the Seismic Sensor, a new electricity-powered deployable.



When powered, it will listen for nearby explosions and send a power signal when detecting any.

• You can configure its range from 1 to 30 meters (one foundation = 3 meters)
  
• It will output a different power value depending on the type of explosion detected
  

A non-exhaustive list of power values from explosives:

• 1 power = F1 Grenade, Beancan
  
• 2 power = Explosive ammo, Satchel
  
• 3 power = C4, Rocket
  

The idea is to let you detect and trigger circuits when you're being raided. Alarms, traps... the possibilities are infinite, we're excited to see what you will come up with!





Traditionally, we blocked all forms of building inside Monuments. This made sense back in the day when Monuments were small in size and number, but over the years, the amount of land they take up has increased significantly.

We want to reward players who pick a strategic location during a fight, but it's hard to pick a good location when you're in an empty field!

This is why barricades can now be placed on the terrain around Monuments. This allows you to take cover as you enter and exit monuments, as well as take cover inside the open fields inside Monuments.

Applies to:

• Wood barricade
  
• Stone barricade
  
• Concrete barricade
  
• Sandbags
  

Remember: Monument Structures, Concrete, and Roads still block barricades at this time.

Decay and melee protection has been adjusted to account for more relaxed placement

• 15 minute decay
  
• 8-10 hits with melee
  

Behold the ability to see what your teammate is placing and where it will be placed! This should clear up the exact location your teammate(s) are shouting while trying to build.

By default, it only will show your teammate's deploy guides when you are building. This can be changed via the options menu to 'Always Show' or to be disabled.







When allowing barricades to be placed into Monuments we realized... it's not that clear where the building blocked of Monuments actually starts!

You will now see a red outline around the edge of monuments.



This can be toggled in the options menu.

Server owners can disable it via a convar if conflicts with custom Monuments.
Monument building radius
We also took the opportunity to adjust the building blocked size of some Monuments.

[h3]Larger[/h3]

• Gas Station
  
• Lighthouse
  
• Mining Outpost
  
• Super Market
  

[h3]Slightly Larger[/h3]

• Dome
  
• Launch Site
  

[h3]Smaller[/h3]

• Arctic Research Base
  

[h3]Faster Code Locks[/h3]
Once a code is set, the "last used" button is much faster at entering the code

[h3]Bone Fertiliser[/h3]
Bone fragments can now be used in a composter to create fertiliser

[h3]Faster Window Crafting[/h3]
Window glass, shutters and bars now craft in 15s instead of 30s

[h3]Skin Names[/h3]
See the name of skins at the Repair Bench, and a link to get them

[h3]Helicopter Handbrake[/h3]
Idle helicopters no longer drift down slopes

[h3]Reduced Speed Penalty[/h3]
Horse armour doesn't slow your horse as much

[h3]Salvaged Hammer Buff[/h3]
+100% damage against deployables

[h3]Mixing Table Ammo Recipes[/h3]
Added HV Ammo & Incendiary Ammo to mixing table

[h3]Industrial Conveyor UI[/h3]
Easier to search and setup industrial conveyors

[h3]Block Explosives In TCs[/h3]
Prevent players from stashing their explosives in TCs

[h3]Hammer UI Consistency[/h3]
Hammer always shows all options to reduce misclicks

[h3]Reduce F15 Volume[/h3]
Reduce volume of F15 by 50% to reduce strain on ears

[h3]LOD Improvements[/h3]
Fixed monument prefabs appearing invisible from far

[h3]Planter Autofill[/h3]
Hold Sprint to auto plant all held seeds in a single planter

[h3]Vendor Attachments[/h3]
Able to see the attachments on weapons for sale in vending machines

[h3]Chainsaw hit radius[/h3]
Adjusted the chainsaw hit radius to make it easier to hit the trees' X mark





While a queue is better than nothing (who remembers the days of spamming reconnect?), we want to avoid players getting stuck in a queue at all: especially when it's due to a crash.

We have made a few changes to allow players recently kicked from any server to skip the queue.

• Holds your spot
  
• 5 minutes max
  
• Any type of disconnect (kick, internet outage, crash, alt + f4)
  

When using the wire tool, you can now adjust the amount of slack in your wire using your mouse wheel while holding LEFT SHIFT.

It's purely visual, it doesn't change anything gameplay-wise, and it also works with hoses and Christmas lights!





I worked on a bunch of improvements for sign painting this month based on community feedback. There's a mix of QoL and bug fixes, but they should all improve your painting experience!

[h3]Changes[/h3]

• Made the painting UI follow your UI scale option
  
• Added a convar to switch which side the painting UI is on (paint.leftsided)
  
• Increased the maximum brush size to 100 (was 32)
  
• Fixed brush sizes below 2 drawing nothing sometimes
  
• Fixed drawn brushes overlapping within the same stroke
  
• Fixed weird color blending behavior for the softest brush
  
• Fixed portrait and landscape frames using an incorrect aspect ratio paint texture (no more squishing and export inconsistency)
  

1. This makes painting behave more like other apps
   
2. Fixes low opacity values not actually actually being low because the brushes overlap
   

[h3]Medium battery size[/h3]
Reduced medium battery size by ~15%, now fits under half walls

[h3]Tesla Coil & Igniter healing[/h3]
Tesla Coils and Igniters are now healed by your tool cupboard overtime

[h3]Electrical Furnace[/h3]
Now automatically turned ON or OFF depending on whether they have power

[h3]SAM Site[/h3]
Added a new input to switch your SAM Site targeting mode using electricity

[h3]Solar Panel[/h3]
Solar panels no longer take conditional damage when picked up

[h3]Wiring near vehicles[/h3]
Vehicles no longer prevent you from wiring components





We’re making several fishing changes this month to try and shake up the broader fishing meta. Our current issue is that it’s quite trivial to endlessly produce fish from a safe zone, then converting that fish to scrap. It’s not the fastest way to earn scrap but it is pretty reliable.

Our intention with the range of fish available to catch was always that you would work your way up the chain - catch a sardine, use that to catch a trout, use that to catch a shark. By allowing raw fish meat to be used as a bait you could easily gut one fish and catch dozens more fish with that meat, which could then be converted into even more fish.

To break this loop, this month raw fish meat is now only worth 0.5 bait (and can be used in stacks of 3) - whole fish can (and should) be used as bait but you now run the risk of losing that fish when casting out. The idea is to introduce a risk/reward mechanic. Do you cash out with your current trout catch or do you put them on line and go for the sharks?



To balance out this reduction in bait, we’ve made several other forms of bait more useful. Several bait types can now be “stacked” - if a fish requires 5 bait to be caught and you stack two Worms worth 2.5 each, you can now catch that fish. This behaviour is applied across worms, grubs, berries and small fish, making these baits more viable. We’ve also increased the bait value of human meat (1 -> 3), bear meat (5 -> 10) and wolf meat (5-> 10). The stack amount can be seen next to the bait value when selecting the item in your inventory.

The Survival Fish Trap became a bit neglected after we introduced the Fishing Rod, so this month we’ve adjusted it to make it more relevant. The trap now uses the same underlying fish/bait system as the rod, meaning you can catch different fish in different water sources as well as catch better fish based on the bait provided. The only mechanical difference between these two fish sources is that the trap cannot catch the same fish as it has used as bait and the trap has a 50% chance to lose the bait without catching the fish.





In order to save some space in bases, I’ve modified the Tech Tree menu to now allow you to browse and unlock techs from lower Tech Trees (eg. Access T1 techs from a T2 bench, access T1 and T2 trees from a T3 bench). Use the tabs in the top left of the screen to switch between available tech trees.

The workbench tax from last month's update is applied based on the Tech Tree level, so there will be no scrap cost changes as a result of this change. The tech tree also now opens immediately when accessing the workbench, saving you a click.





In hack week this month, I explored ways to reduce our memory usage, an area that is a real priority for us this year. While a lot of my experiments weren’t workable, one did actually end up saving several hundred megabytes of memory for very little cost, so it’s shipping as disabled by default this month.

A renderer in this case is simply a thing that is visible to the player - a crate, a rock, part of a structure, etc. Importantly for performance each renderer has LODs (Level of Detail) - lower quality versions of each renderer that we switch to based on the distance to the players perspective. In Unity each of these LODs typically lives on a child object of a master parent object, so Barrel01 will have a child Barrel01_LOD0, Barrel01_LOD1, etc that we switch to. What I discovered during hack week is that in a proc gen map of 4.5k size, we can have upwards of 1.3 million objects in the world, each of these objects has some overhead (we need to store its position, rotation, what the object does, etc). In a renderers case, for every single renderer we had 3-5 child objects, one for each LOD level.

I realised that in most cases each LOD object was just sharing a duplicate of all the information except for a different model, so I modified the system to detect when this happens and consolidate all needed information into a single object, then delete the child objects. By applying this to every renderer in the world, I was able to delete 385 thousand objects from the world, which had a combined memory saving of 484mb - pretty significant!

This combination process is run every time the game is launched, we’re currently working on a change to make most of these modifications before we build the game, which should yield further savings next month.

Due to how risky this change is (deleting 385 thousand objects has had some unintended side effects that we’ve now fixed), we’re shipping this new feature off by default, but we’ll monitor it’s usage through the month and likely turn it on by default sometime next month. The convar is graphics.collapseRendererLOD and you’ll need to restart your game after turning it on or off. Let us know how it goes for you!

tldr: 400k less objects
500mb less RAM





It would be amiss to say horses have not had their share of issues over the last few months. So following community feedback I looked into a solution that would resolve the difficulties players have had with horse navigation.

Alongside some minor adjustments to prevent horses from getting stuck and preventing unnecessary stamina depletion, I introduced the ability for horses to walk backwards. This seemed like the most logical approach to alleviate horses getting stuck and should be an overall improvement to navigation.





I've added a few more cinematic entities this month for Rust creators to use in their video and image projects. These can be spawned by server owners/admins and can be hidden via console with pre-assigned group numbers.

The new additions include:

• More spot and point light (red/blue/green variants)
  
• Unlit backdrops and cyc walls (green/blue/black/white/grey variants)
  
• Flags/cutters (small/medium/large variants)
  

[h3]Visibility Commands[/h3]
Cinematic entities assigned to different groups which allows them to hidden if desired. Use the command cinematicentity.hideobjects followed by group numbers to hide them.

Cinematic entities are now assigned to specific group numbers which allows them to be hidden if desired. Use the command cinematicentity.hideobjects followed by one or more group numbers to set their visibility to hidden.

The groups are setup like so:

• 0 = nothing (makes all entities visible)
  
• 1 = lighting
  
• 2 = backdrops
  
• 3 = props
  
• 4 = misc (flags/cutters)
  

You can hide one or multiple groups in the same command line - for example:
cinematicentity.hideobjects 1 - Hides lighting only (keeps light effect but hides the mesh)
cinematicentity.hideobjects 1 2 - Hides both lighting and backdrop meshes
cinematicentity.hideobjects 0 - Shows/un-hides all cinematic entities

You can also hide cinematic entity groups in demos with cinematicentity.demohideobjects followed by the same group numbers above. To revert to the visiblity of the entities back to their original states from the demo recording, use cinematicentity.removedemooverride





[h3]Join us for the Bellum Redemption event June 10th-17th![/h3]
There will be Twitch drops so be sure you get synced!



Please be aware of scams. Facepunch will never contact you. Only ever use our official website.
https://twitch.facepunch.com/





Turret interference has been effective at preventing players from surrounding their base in 100s of turrets, however it lacked feedback on how exactly to stay under the limit.

Turret interference will now be shown while holding a wire tool and looking at a turret.



It will also be shown in the hotbar while building.



While this is accurate most of the time keep in mind this only counts turrets you are authed on (it ignores enemy turrets). This mismatch is required to prevent players from holding a turret and seeing how many turrets are inside an enemy's base.


FULL DEVBLOG HERE