Theodore Baggins

I have an extra. I'll DM you a code for a box outside my base the next time I'm on. They're fun, but not necessary for my build this wipe!

Sounds Good! I think I might have both forgotten how rare they are and just gotten really lucky on my cargo ship runs last wipe. I think I might have been a bit alarmist about this; next time I'll check with more people; bug reports should probably for known issues instead of suspected ones!

Welcome to the Double Helix Gallery and Art Store at Z26! I still have some more that I need to wire, but I finished most of my shop today. The photos on the walls are a selection of some I've shot in different places over the years (cropped to fit Rust-resolution!). This is a follow-up on my previous post—I'll take a couple more shots tomorrow after I've stopped seeing mazes of wires and industrial lights!

Theodore Baggins here! I'm opening a gallery and art store called the "Double Helix" on the road through the north of Z26. The gallery spirals up then down on the outside, and has a collection of some of my photos. I have dropboxes to get people's thoughts on my work—I love feedback! My hope is that this can be expanded on the inside with submissions from other players with the second double helix on the inside. Right now, I'm working on the lighting—would love any and all feedback! Sign is in progress!

Quick question: Are there any guidelines I should follow for a maximum amount of lights on the shop? I'm making a gallery and I want to get the lighting right, however I want to make sure that I don't negatively impact other players' experience in the area.

I was thinking that there might also be a need for a "EZ Hardware" or "EZ Performance" channel. I find that I often am giving performance advice through chat. However, sometimes that advice is the same—like check your VRAM and RAM usage to see if you're overflowing to RAM (or worse, your drive). I'm a huge advocate for squeezing more performance out of your older hardware instead of saying "you just need better <insert component here>". Moderation might be difficult—after all, there are still Team Red, Blue, and Green die-hards that might not give the most helpful (or friendly) advice. Clearly explaining the tradeoffs requires nuance that might be beyond a discord response. However, I think that it'd be good to start somewhere, see how things go, and adjust accordingly. It might be am idea that flops, but I genuinely want to try to help players who are having a rough experience on the servers.

And also train for recoil. I suppose I could learn better by chopping trees with it... it the x and such. 🤔

A simple QOL improvement for building: a dot or a crosshair for using the hammer and/or salvaged hammer. I admit it: I'm not skilled enough with the salvaged hammer to always hit what I intend to. Skill problem? Yes... I've lost too many walls and floors by crippling lack of aim 😂😭

That horse picture is the stuff of nightmares lol. Reminds me of how chickens in Minecraft used to "blob" into medusas of chickens in the corners of my feather farms back in the day. The question is: can you buy all of them at once? 😁

Yep, many tears have been cried over this since they came out lol. Might be difficult to fix, especially since they can't be shared like a normal box. When I put racks out for decoration, I always try to load them up so players can't accidentally do this. Just a warning: there is a maximum amount of rocks and/or prototype's that can be placed to fill the space!

In addition to regular maintenance, some of the servers have needed to be taken offline and tweaked fairly regularly to increase their stability. I believe this was the case with Scourge, at least, when you put in this bug. Personally, I check Discord to see if people are reporting issues (or in the case of last night, talking about the merits of Australia's cute-and-totally-not-deadly animals... lookin at epopp and Tiff...)

This wipe, @Deuuseyand @ExcelFX set up teleports on Scourge US at the pumpjacks and GE, respectively. Excel has actually been doing this for pretty much every wipe since December (correct me if I'm wrong). I really enjoy this player engagement—the fact that it's a community effort makes me very happy. Excel's incredible zero-cost ore and oil exchange to is a thriving community hub, and Deuusey really went all-out on making his bases very pretty. However... player-made bases are both risky and a huge drain. Risky, because you're in an arms race against bad actors; you have to keep the bases (and fragile bags) safe from bad actors who might use the base as cover for heli attacks and yet if you upgrade too much, those same bad actors might see it as providing even better cover. I've personally seen this around Deuusey's power plant TP and the secondary honeycombed base I set up to help recover some of the lost bags from Deuusey's base. I say it's a huge drain because people want their teleports immediately on wipe day, or they start building the familiar, but infernal twig/wood-teleport bases. It also means that the players building bases for community TP's have to be online and/or auth other players that can place bags and will advertise the option in chat. I think the amount of creativity I've seen in both players' TP bases this wipe (and the convenience of the shared "maker spaces") has been really wonderful. However, it's a big lift—one that I know I couldn't handle. However, if TP's like the quarries (I actually use these constantly to avoid the time needed to clear GE on Scourge—no personal quarries like Survival) might break the economy more by reducing the cost of building up your oil reserves, I propose these small changes as alternatives: A public TP directly into bases to prevent bags from being taken out by incendiary rockets. This would still involve the community, but removes some of the worry and reduces the footprint necessary for the building. Admins being provided with TC access to the TP bases to help monitor chat and the dropboxes for requests (and make sure everyone provides a bag so things aren't spawned in). I'm loath to add more work for admins, but my hope is that this would be a minimal lift. Barring that, I think that regular notifications of the option from admins or the server on wipe day / first weekend would just help minimize the 1x1's that both prevent building (Power Plant is rife with them this wipe on Scourge US). If players know that there will eventually be a much better (and cooler) TP point, then they might only temporarily put a bag down on the ground on wipe day instead of a 1x1 that will last all wipe and prevent building.

I think this might be a good QOL improvement. I usually go out with a repair bench in my backpack, but I'm a packrat. 😁 This would also help alleviate the issues with exchanging wood is that the Outpost. It has a limited supply of wood, and it is easily exhausted—especially at the end of wipe. Of course, preparation goes a long way whether you're deforesting or converting!

Which server are you on? Do they lag more than when riding a motorcycle? There are many things that can cause you to drop frames or seem to teleport backwards or forwards. The majority of them are client-side (i.e. your computer and not the server). Your setup may be fine - but settings like render distance and ambient occlusion (in addition to the quality settings) can make a big difference in my experience. However, it's important to know that, while Rust has been optimized heavily over the last couple years, it commonly eats 20GB+ of RAM and all 12GB of my graphics card's VRAM on High settings. I've tuned a specific overclock for my Titan Xp for Rust and I still sometimes experience frame drops or "cinematic" frame rates, even if the total GPU load remains relatively low. For me, it's my processor and RAM that are showing their age—not my graphics card—so the settings that work for me won't necessarily work for you.

I think it's a good suggestion - it just might not work out. There are actually precedents for this idea! Originally you could build on roads, and admins had to manually enforce the rules until Facepunch added their own restrictions. That was in addition to the still-existing need for admins to make sure builders don't block waterways for boats. The second I can think of is that it took Facepunch a while to add water restrictions to where you could place oil refineries and windmills. I remember being bummed about the oil refinery restrictions because it limited ocean builds. However, both those examples are from when Rust was in Alpha, I believe. Depending on how the Facepunch code is written, it may not be as difficult as you think to add a check for building too close to something classified as a "river" similarly to how close you can build to a road or monument. Or if that category doesn't exist, fresh water could also work (which would also stop people from walling off the one part of a pond that you can drink from). That would solve building structures, but there are also other examples of where different "deployables" are limited. Case in point being refineries, but also the more complex code around limiting fish trap placement while also allowing tin can alarms in monuments. So you could add a restriction to building around rivers, similar to roads, but then allow fish traps and pumps to be exceptions to that rule. That's all in theory, though - I do not have much more than previous experience to draw from! attached are some pictures of shenanigans 🙂

I've noticed that the global chat can end up pretty clogged with people asking for help with electrical, plumbing, and planting questions. I always want to help, but sometimes I have to log off or I'm in the middle of something else and don't see messages. For a solution I was thinking about the model that most US states: a "Cooperative Extension" that has "master gardeners" and such to help share tips and tricks with new gardeners and farmers. In addition, they post their own gardens to help inspire others and show off their work. I was wondering if it'd be possible to add a channel for planting and one for electricity to Discord. This would could be a great resource for new players, those who are farming for the first time, and even experienced players who might need to check and see if there is a recurring bug. It might also help clean up the help and main discord channel as well, by crowdsourcing answers and making sure simple questions don't get buried. It might also activate the EZ forums by encouraging more thorough showcases of players' builds with Rustrician links and multiple screenshots. I love seeing how different players have solved things like automated recyclers!

The difficulty I see this creating is it eliminates options for bridges and creative builds that incorporate the water. And I can see many farmers getting frustrated by the change—optimizing farms is difficult and taking care of bugs in watering is already a game of whackamole. However, the opportunity is that it would eliminate the possibility of blocking waterways for boats, and I agree, it would be nice to actually be able to get food and seeds by going to a river.