Yippee Ki-yay!

12:00am EST - Update day has finally arrived, and with it, we’ve got horseback riding, QoL changes, a UI overhaul, and more! As with all first Thursdays of the month, there will be a forced map wipe when the update hits.

Our update stream goes live at 3pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day. Let’s get into it…

Horseback riding is in!

At long last, horseback riding is here! Newmans can now take to the plains of Rust on their trusty steed. Below are some details on what you need to know about this exciting new feature.

Getting started
In this first pass of the system, all horses now spawn with a saddle on them. To mount one, simply walk up to it and press E when you see Ride Horse’. You’ll immediately be able to start walking around and enjoying the glorious new horse clopping noises.

How to navigate
Navigating while on a horse is pretty straight forward. You press W to move forward; A and D to steer (there is no reverse gear on horses at the moment). Control will have the horse reer on it’s two hind legs and let out a load neigh. If you want to dismount, simply press spacebar.

To gallop, simply hold shift and they’ll go faster (even faster on roads).

Stamina
This is a good time to mention the new stamina system. When you mount a horse, you’ll notice a little yellow bar with a lightning bolt icon on top of your vitals. By default, this bar is half full. As you gallop, the bar will drop. Once empty, your horse will let out a tired sigh and stop running till you give it a chance to recharge a bit.

Feeding
As you feed your horse - either by dropping food in front of it or by letting it graze on plants - this stamina bar will gradually fill up. As you probably guessed, the more stamina it has, the longer it can run.

Health
Horses of course have health. No, to heal them you don’t equip some meat and a hammer - you simply feed them and they’ll heal right up. Initial tests have a horse dying in about 15 bow shots, 19 pistol shots, or 15 shots from an AK - it doesn’t look like which part of the body they get hit has any effect on damage dealt at this time. Don’t be shocked if these numbers change in the near future.

Terrain
Horses don’t like deep water or very steep hills. They won’t go in water much deeper than their belly, but there are some rivers which you can wade through. They’ll slow down a bit as you walk up a hill, and just basically stop if it gets too steep. Big rocks and boulders are not your friend; your horse will simply stop when encountering such objects.

Storage
With regards to parking your horse, although you can’t hitch them to a post quite yet, you can get them inside a garage door and leave them. At the moment, horses just kind of stay put when you’re not on them. Helk told me he is still working on decay, but I imagine you’ll have to feed them when stationary inside so they don’t die.

First pass
Keep in mind, this is a first pass! Helk told me more advanced things like hitching will come next month. As with all fresh functionalities, it’s very likely for bugs and glitches to be present at launch.

Lower research costs

Learning all your precious blueprints has gotten a bit easier this month with the reduction of scrap costs for rare and very rare items. Here’s a lowdown:

Rare

Old cost
250

New cost
125

Very rare

Old cost
750

New cost
500

UI overhaul

As you load Rust after the update, you’ll notice a completely new look to the main menu. Garry, after reworking the Steamworks integrations of the game, has done an overhaul of the main menu UI.

Gone is the crowded screen of recent servers, news, friends, workshop items, and stats. Now, there is simply a clean menu on the left, small icon links on the right, and a peaceful video of the game scenery which changes each time you load the game.

As you click around the menu on the left, you’ll notice some shifts to the layout and positioning of various features. Overall, everything that was there can still be found (with the exception of some global stats). Additionally, several improvements and new features have been added.

Server browser improvements

Most exciting, Garry has greatly improved the server browser. Along with making it more responsive to refreshing and scrolling, he’s added the ability to see and sort by last map wipe. He’s also added an output of which friend is in each server (in green text) so you can easily join the server your team is playing on. On top of all this, he’s optimized the whole thing, so it quickly displays more servers while using less overhead on your computer.

In game store

Buying skins has gotten a whole lot more convenient this month as Garry also added a in game store. Now, instead of alt-tabbing out to browse to the item store, you can simply press escape and browse all the latest skins in game.

Click on the ones you like to see the details, add them to your cart, then checkout (which pops up a steam overlay payment / confirmation window). Easy peasy!

Oil rig nerf and fixes

After many requests from the community, Helk has nerfed the scientist loot on the Oil Rig monuments. After some initial testing, it appears as though loot is now significantly lower. Although meds and ammo appear to be roughly the same, components and guns are dropping at much lower rates.

In addition to the nerf, Alistair has fixed a bunch of miscellaneous issues and annoyances with the Oil Rig monuments. Long and short: he’s fixed projectiles being rejected, various jumping issues, and some false antihack triggers.

Improved fonts

You might notice fonts for chat and character name tags looks better. This is a result of Garry utilizing a little program from the Unity asset store called Textmesh Pro. Long and short: this program replaces the default Unity UI text and text mesh with advanced text rendering techniques and custom shaders, making text just look better.

Water storage shifts

Helk has tweaked some things with regards to water storage. First, water jugs now spawn with less water than before. Also, you can now pick water barrels up after placing them (with a hammer).

Unity 2019.1.1 update

A new version of Unity (the underlying engine which Rust runs off) is in play this month. Although you won’t see much of any differences to gameplay due to this update, it does include various numbers of fixes and a couple things to make the devs life easier.

Incremental garbage collection

One of the most exciting things to come with the upgrade to Unity 2019.1.1 is the ability to try out incremental garbage collection. This functionality splits up the garbage collection process over multiple frames with a goal of reducing the number of jarring hitches and frame drops in games. If it works, this could increase the overall smoothness of the game by reducing those annoying FPS drops.

Improved player movement

Helk has made a small but valuable quality of life change with regards to movement. Requiring less jumps, player movement will now automatically bump over small curbs and steps.

Bandit town fog

Petur has tweaked some of the fog effects in Bandit Town. It is now about half as saturated, and a bit more brownish. Also, the fog is less bright at twilight and the render distance has been tweaked.

Skin fixes

The team continued working on fixing the various issues with custom skins not loading / working which have plagued the game for the past several months. Are these problems totally resolved? Well the team has seen no issues on staging this month. As Alistair told me: “We've seen no problems so likely they're broken.”

Visual fixes

Helk completed several miscellaneous visual fixes this this month. Here is a summary:

• UI scope no longer scales with UI scale

• Viewmodels no longer lag behind when in vehicles

• Scope no longer freaks out and lags behind when on vehicles

• Muzzle flashes no longer simulate at low fps when in the distance

Giant Excavator monument not making it in

The latest monument, Giant Excavator, will not be making it in this month. Although it’s always exciting to have a new monument in the game, it’s only really awesome when said monuments are complete and tested. This delay with give the devs another month to work on it, so hopefully we’ll see the Giant Excavator come July.

Other stuff

• Silent boat bug fixed

• Garry working on some HDRP stuff

• Optimized looking up items by short name

• Server print when connected / disconnected from Steam

• Watchtowers can no longer be placed under terrain (exploit fix)

• Key lock no longer uses code lock guide mesh

• Removed placeholder cube and used building plan while deploying locks

• Fixed water junkpiles despawning when players were nearby

• Doorways render as full walls in reflection pass to prevent light bleeding

• Progress continues on reworking weapon textures and VFX

Introducing: AU Medium!

I’m happy to announce, due to popular demand, we are opening our latest server down under! AU Medium will match the other Medium servers in our arsenal - 200 pop, bi-weekly wipes, 4k map. Find it on the official list once the update is live!

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