Theodore Baggins

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.

Simply put, it'd be great if you could change the color of your backpacks on Survival / Scourge. Maybe this could be done through skins in the skin shop? I don't think there are any backpack skins yet, though. I'm not sure how much work it would entail and I know the backpack mod was already a lot of work, so I understand if the idea is d.o.a.

We've all been there. Fly to a monument, get sidetracked, teleport somewhere else and then realize you don't have your flare in your inventory. Time to buy another? But you can only do that once, because of the limits (which I agree with). I propose a "last parked" location be added to the map for vehicles purchased through the Black Market. Maybe even snowmobiles or motorbikes (I somehow lost a motorbike for an hour after repairing it). Maybe even the EZ store sedans (though I've seen fewer of them). And, of course, this would be amazing for the modular cars. You can't lose campers very easily if you have your respawn set to one of the beds, but the other mods are easy to lose. I think it would make sense for this to only be for cars that you've coded into or even just the last modular car you were driving. I know it's a big ask to enhance player maps, and tracking modular cars seems like it would be a nightmare. However, I'm suggesting the moon and would just be happy with a pebble. The instant pickup of bikes and snowmobiles is already great!

I can confirm this happened also while the bikes were in a box and not just in inventory. Unsure about what would happen if the motorbike was parked. Behavior on bicycle is the same; minus the fuel; hp was at 0. Several others also had the same issue. That being said, it was a small inconvenience compared to how great the bikes are.

Quick question: back in the day, you could select colors between the color dots to get more variety. However with the new interface, the only way I’ve had to make essentially a “paint palette” that I mix colors with off to the side and then try getting the color I want with the eye dropper tool. Is there a better way? Also opacity seems to not work the way I think.

What's the in-game download feature? I haven't seen it before

If you subscribe, you can set the amount! And you don't have to stay subscribed for more than the month if you don't want to!

On Pure, there are limits to what can be done just based on it staying Vanilla. If you find the end of the wipe dull, maybe join one of the modded servers that lst week? At least on US Scourge we hand out M2's like candy by then, and people are throwing helicopters and Brads fairly often. Many people will be grinding for net worth, but the millionaires of the server will have guns and some ammo to spare—specifically to blow having fun with other people. And, personally, I love doing this with new people to test out my heli towers and get their thoughts, even though I'm not a millionaire .

I'm assuming you're talking about a Pure server? If so, I would find it unlikely that it could be nodded this way. However, you could report the theft. Get up in their face to get their name lol—don't worry, the fires actually give you a chance to do this to the vultures . They then will be in your contacts as most recently seen, and you can mark them as "enemy" to make their name stand out in-game. Then either screenshot them, or better yet, start recording. On windows that command is win+alt+r. Call them out by @ in chat (this adds a time stamp to the message logs). Call them out in voice chat. Remember, they may be new and not understand. They may not speak English well. Then report it. But I get it—loot getting stolen sucks. In the end, friendship can make it so much better: if you know your neighbors, then you can ask them to watch one side and you watch the other. They might even want to help with your next one... provided you get to keep the M2 if it shows up haha. AFAIK other players cannot steal anything from your crates on the modded servers. Instead, they are instanced to each player based on damage (and who threw the signal for Brad). If you cannot open a crate, you didn't do enough damage. However, the bodies of each are not instanced, (obviously). If you're after a body, well... you can do the same thing but if you wait a little, you can probably find a Brad or heli parth at some point later and just ask for one of their bodies. They're probably all in it for the sweet sweet guns. You can even ask if they'd be willing to drop anything they don't want from their instances boxes and end up with enough armored doors to double the HQM from a body.