Giant Excavator Pit incoming

Update day is upon us, and with it, a new monument along with some exciting things on the horizon.

As always, there is no set time for the update. Generally speaking, it tends to happen between 3 and 5pm EST. Our update stream goes live at 3pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day. Let’s get into it…

Giant Excavator Pit added!

A new way to mine resources is here, in the form of a fresh monument: The Giant Excavator Pit. Located in the desert biome, this monument has been in development for several months, and requires a new form of fuel: Diesel.

Not for the faint of heart, the Giant Excavator Pit requires several people and proper protection to effectively take on. Here’s a summary of how it works:

1. Approach with Diesel (acquired at Dome, Oil Rigs, Junkyard, or for 300 low grade each at the Outpost).

2. Kill Scientist NPC’s (about 12 of them) and make sure you adorn Hazmat Suits (there’s radiation around the whole pit).

3. Fill the tank in the engine room with fuel, turn on the engine.

4. Select the resource you’d like to mine in the control room (on either side of the excavator arm)

5. Collect resources at both drop sites

For a full rundown of how the Giant Excavator Pit works, along with sample resource yields, check out our previous article which goes into more details. Also, here’s a summary video and some pictures.

Giant Excavator Pit: What you need to know

No large monuments on small maps

Somes shifts to procedural map generation this month as larger monuments have been removed from smaller maps. Promoting both better performance and more places to build, map seeds smaller than 3500 will no longer include monuments such as the Airfield, Launch Site, Military Tunnels, Train Yard, and Giant Excavator Pit.

Given the default seed size is 4000, this won’t affect most servers. That said, small servers will experience some stark gameplay differences when it comes to monument runs.

Scrap price shifts

Some changes to the scrap purchase price of two items have snuck their way in this month. First, at Bandit Camp, 2 scrap will get you 1 HQM (instead of 3 scrap). Also, at Outpost, 20 Low Grade Fuel for 10 scrap (as opposed to the previous 25 LGF for 5 scrap). 

Hunting jacket material fixes 

As mentioned on reddit recently, skins for the hunter jacket always appear very dark. Alistair, hopping into action, has fixed the issue by modifying the skin material.

Terrain shader optimizations

Diogo is throwing some improvements our way. With a couple of commits this week, he has optimized the terrain shaders around 15%, making them faster and easier to read.

New instruments coming

There is a new addition to the Rust team! Jarryd, on his first day, has started working on a new instruments branch. With a Cowbell, Tenor Drums, Trombone and Violin all in progress, Rust will soon become a much more musical place.

Other stuff

• Barren now has harbors, oil rigs and water wells

• Graphics overhaul in the form of HDRP and environmental shaders continues.

• Skin reload problems at extremely low FPS

• Take server identity into account when determining the default seed (easier to run multiple instances on the same hardware without getting identical maps)

• Fixed assigning sleeping bag to friend not reliably showing encountered players

• Allow items to be deployed under water barrel

• Water optimizations

• Added warning message to loading screen when joining servers with 4k maps with less than 10GB of RAM

• Increased server browser timeout limit to 90 seconds

New region: South America!

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of a new region for Rustafied servers. Serving all of South America, Rustafied.com - BR Main officially launches today with the update. For years people have requested we open a server in South America, however, we were unable to find a reliable host in the area. Thankfully, we’ve found a host which appears to be working.

After almost a week of testing, the server seems to be holding solid. We’re going to give it a couple weeks to keep testing to see if performance holds. If it does, we will continue hosting BR Main and consider opening more servers in that region in the near future.

We’re also playing with the idea of a monthly blueprint wipe on this server. We’ve had a lot of requests for monthly blueprint wipes, so we’re trying it out down there.

You can find BR Main on the official list.

SEA Expansion

I’m also happy to announce a new server in the SEA region. Rustafied.com - SEA Medium opens today with the update. As with our other medium servers, this is a 200 slot, 4k map with a 2 week wipe cycle. As with all of our other servers, you can find SEA Medium on the official list.

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