Theodore Baggins

So when I last asked, @Death said that, at least server-side, it did not make a difference whether your lights were on or off—only the complexity of the circuitry. In this case, industrial lights and ceiling lights—as is true with windmills—are often a marker for where there will be lag, but not the cause of the lag in and of itself. Likely there is additional complexity hiding insidr that base, running unchecked by the limits of a single battery. The reality is that while monuments seem to have complex meshes and lighting, they have been heavily optimized for PvP play after years of gameplay. This process was seen in real-time over the last year as GE has been continuously refined. In contrast, base lighting, circuitry, industrial, and water—while fundamental to PvE—has not had the same pressure on FP, and therefore hasn't been optimized to nearly the same extent. Nor, I would imagine, could it be. After all, you can place as many lights on one ceiling as the physics engine will allow and your GPU just has to deal with the outcome. But on a refinery, lights will always be where they will be. And at night, at the monuments, you can see the compromises that were made when using a weapon flashlight—some places will just appear black. The caveat is that your personal (client) Rust settings will very much affect your fps in areas with lots of players' lighting, simply because of the amount of lighting calculations. If you are having trouble at your base, I would suggest that you first do a check Rust's reported values to see your fps and also see how much VRAM/RAM Rust is using with the in-game fps counter set to "advanced". (The VRAM/RAM usage will give you an idea if the complexity/amount of the objects are a factor—note how close they are to your VRAM max and the Rust default of 16GB* max of RAM). Then stand in one problematic place for 30 secs (to make sure everything is loaded into RAM/VRAM). First, try radically reducing your shadow distance. Then systematically attack everything to do with lighting such as water reflections, etc. one by one. Note any changes in fps. Also go into experimental and make sure shadow "layering" (can't remember the exact wording) is unchecked. Basically try to strip down parts of the lighting/shadow workload on your GPU. If your fps doesn't change much, then you are likely not facing lighting as a bottleneck. With lighting comes power, and with power comes all manner of other things—sprinkler particles, timers, conveyors, furnaces, etc. In this case, it may be important to a. increase your garbage collection size (in experimental), b. make sure occlusion culling is turned on (also in experimental), and c. lower your render distance. But I feel you—if your neighbors have open windows or roofs to their groweries, then this *will* be a problem, and one that you can't solve unless they wall in their chaos. Until we all commit to enclosing our refineries, furnaces, electrical, etc, then populated areas will always see dramatic drops in perform that are disproportionate to simply the amount of "building" in the area. For context, years ago before electrical, all lights (including the ceiling light) ran on low grade. When consumption was stopped for VIP, even that was enough to cripple performance for some people. Imagine being able to plop down a lantern or a tuna lamp anywhere... but never having to even wire it. Chaos ensued *I have found it essential both through my own experimentation and others' to manually set RAM usage. If you have 16GB of RAM, you'll have to sacrifice some settings until you can get below ~12GB and then manually cap that in startup options for Rust (-Xmx00G where 00 is the amount you want). If you have above 16GB, Rust seems to want to artificially limit your usage to 16GB unless you tell it to use more. When I'm taking screenshots, I'm on Ultra settings with everything maxed out, and I will commonly see RAM go up to 24GB and VRAM hit my 12GB max.

I saw on discord that removing personal pumpjacks was being considered. I was wondering if similar performance benefits could be seen by being able to upgrade a player's instance of a public quarry? As this would inconvenience players, maybe the first pumpjack purchased could be in addition to the native pumpjack yield? I'm certain that the areas around the three monuments would be littered with tp locations, so maybe there's a way to soften that as well? Such as a world TP that costs x amount of credits. I know this is probably not ideal for many players, but it's my hope that it would create a compromise between the PJ clutter and associated lag spikes while also still allowing players to buy and upgrade their pumpjacks.

Up three stories on top of a tree, in a full wrap around me lol. Time to spin up the recyclers!

Well I had a surprise! I threw one while recording to document that I had a stack of duds... and it was definitely not a dud any more haha. I'll leave the edge case testing to the professionals, but it seems to work for me right now. Is there any chance that, since it's the last day, I could get what I have transferred to next wipe? Even if there was a waiting period so I don't go crazy on day 1? Most of my gunpowder has gone straight towards net worth, and I no longer need any of the loot for myself or to sell for scrap.

Thanks so much! I had a ton of fun doing this (and also learned a lot about how to make my PC handle Ultra settings at playable framerates). I want to get good enough so I can play with no HUD on the regular! Just like Metro...

@ZΞD and I were able to confirm that this problem was likely masked by people using the signals as soon as they were purchased, regardless of the stack size, because if you have a stack that isn't cursed, move it into your hotbar, and then throw straight from the stack, the stack remains a stack of Apache signals as long as you keep it together and don't move it into your backpack.

A summary of my findings: This seems to happen for me with a "cursed stack" of signals. I've found that a reliable way to tell if the stack is cursed (and this has been verified by other players on Scourge US), is to click on the signal in your inventory and see if it says "Smoke Grenade" instead of Apache/APC Distress Signal. The picture, alone, absolutely does not guarantee that the signal will work. The "curse stacks" still have the standard signal image. I've seen it so far with both Apache and APC signals, however, there have been reports of attack helicopter flares—and I have personally observed this with minicopter flares—where the stack will say "Flare" instead of something like "Minicopter Signal" (sorry can't remember exact text), and when thrown, nothing will appear. I have reported and documented what I can in another ticket. At least one source of this problem is splitting a stack: pulling one signal off the stack will leave you with a stack that says apache and the pulled off signal being a smoke grenade. This happens for both the original person and someone it's traded to or dropped to. Another source has been linked to the backpack: Buying (either one at a time or multiples) and moving a stack into the backpack and removing turns the entire stack into smokes Buying one and moving it into the backpack turns it into a smoke grenade either when placed into the backpack or eventually when removed.

I was able to record the exact behavior- when the minicopter flares are stacked, and one is pulled off, it will be just a flare and not a minicopter. Rust 2024-01-26 17-57-01.mp4

In the completely unofficial (and in no way an entry) "GIF" category: (acrobatics performed by Vin Dizzle)

I have a stack of 5 APC Signals given to me by @Oxeus that say "smoke grenade" despite having the APC image. I haven't tried any of them yet, but since the visual change is the same, I believe this may be linked to the Apache Signal issue.

This problem appears to still exist for some players. @Oxeus knows the most details about this, as he has been selling the signals from his vending machine. Apparently (as you can see in the chat), it says "Apache Distress Signal" in inventory, but when it is either dispensed through a vending machine or even dropped to another player, it changes to saying "Smoke Grenade" in that other player's inventory. I bought one of the signals from his shop and tried it in this video—it had the apache logo on it but said "Smoke Grenade" when clicked in inventory. The result was, as expected with this bug, just a smoke grenade. Rust 2024-01-23 01-04-58.mp4 However, when I bought a signal from the store, and moved it from my inventory to my backpack and back again, it didn't change. It's limited data, since it was one signal moved into my backpack and not then into a box or vending machine, but I figured more data is better when debugging. Rust 2024-01-25 21-20-59.mp4

I realized that I didn't change this bug from Pure to Scourge; sorry about that!

Official Entry: Theodore Baggins P0 Many Theos were harmed in the making of this image. Many... many... Theos... Keeping this in (for the record) as it was my first entry. Theodore Baggins (Arctic Research) After the deadline because I misread things but I went for night scene:

Rust 2024-01-20 12-03-48.mp4 When I attempted it with one bought straight from the store, it worked. However, it no longer said "smoke grenade" in my inventory, but "apache distress signal".

Here is a video of the behavior. This was a signal that was given to me by another player, placed in a box, and then removed. If I had to hazard a guess, placing it in the box might have broken things? I used other signals before putting them in the box. The box in question is at my base in the Southeast swamp on Scourge. Rust 2024-01-20 11-58-56.mp4

On US Scourge, many players have reported helis won't come. Personally I have verified this twice; no message or heli when thrown.

Ditto for teleport requests - I've definitely missed someone trying to join in on a heli fight. I mean I've also "missed" the notification for someone wanting to join a heli fight because I wanted to corner the L96 market, but that's different... I gotta create artificial scarcity somehow!

Gotta fact check you there @Lord McGuffin, brains are nearly 60% fat (source) Still, recent studies have shown that there is a higher correlation between sugar intake and personal fat storage, rather than fat consumption, itself. This coupled with the marathon-running ability of our zombies would indicate that our zeds would indeed have a very low fat content. Players, on the other hand, eat far too much chocolate and have shown an inclination towards a more sedentary lifestyle with the advent of cars, a variety of helicopters, boats, snowmobiles, and now teleportation instead of good ol-fashioned cardio. Gone are the days of taking on bears with our bare hands and barely surviving to tell the tale. Instead we sit and fish and set snap-traps. It's times like these that I think back and remember the good ol times... where we could stack fishing rods up to 50 and get milcrate loot and fish by just clicking periodically. Now that was exercise!

I think this is a good idea, but also wonder if it takes some of the teeth away from the Rust experience. Having to revive back at your base and re-gear up to fight your way through the masses to your bag seems a little closer to the Pure experience where this is all you could do. A counter-proposal would be to have the map record your last... uh... several death locations. That way if things went sideways again when you were trying to get your bag back (hypothetically... in a minicopter accident where you lagged into a cliff in your rush to get your bag), you wouldn't lose that first marker.

I second this - I'm thinking they could be upgraded similar to a pumpjack? From a base size perspective, it'd allow much more compact builds, and from a rendering perspective, there'd be far fewer entities. Some of the megafactories, especially if they have windows to show off all their furnaces (cough @Sawyer cough), create what amounts to no-fly zones nearby. I imagine upgradeable electrical furnaces may be more difficult to code because they would require different amounts of power, but I think starting with the large furnaces and refineries would make the biggest difference, since everyone has to place those outside.

It'd be great if you could add a keycode lock to a snowmobile. Might not be worth the effort for how much it'd be used, but I use the snowmobile when I'm out and about gathering nodes and it'd be nice to have some peace of mind knowing that someone couldn't run off with or access the stash/fuel. Not sure if it'd make the code easier, but it'd also work just as well for me if it just allowed team access, sort of like the helicopters.

I have spent extensive amounts of time testing the snowmobile, and I am proud to announce that it is also an extremely capable sand-mobile. Like... faster than a car on a beach. In the desert, you'll hit grass occasionally, but then when you're about to get up, you'll suddenly rocket through the ground into a cactus a click away. 10/10 recommend. Downside: you must get a snowmobile to the desert and/or beach and also avoid all trees and/or bases along the way.

Hehe we need Google Maps' "parking location" feature. Have definitely lost my car as trees have grown around it.