December Update

Excavator

The excavator has received a massive production buff. One unit of Diesel fuel will run the excavator for 2 minutes and produce any one of the following yields :

• 100 HQM

• 2000 Sulfur Ore

• 10,000 Stone

• 5000 Metal Fragments

In addition to this, a terminal can now be found next to the generator. While the excavator is powered on, the communications relay will charge. Once it has charged for 100% (10 minutes or 5 diesel by default) you can use the terminal to request airdrop supplies to the excavator.

Hopefully these changes to the excavator will see it be a more viable and widely used monument.

Excavator Tummy Tuck

We have frequently heard from you about the limited real estate left available on some map seeds. One of the main complaint was about the Giant Excavator monument. It was meant to impress by its sheer scale when first introduced, but we have come to recognize that it does sacrifice a good amount of play area. As a result I have remodelled the terrain surroundings of the monument, and shrunk the overall surface it consumes by a good 30%.

First Person Spectate

Spectating players should be a more pleasant experience this month with a revamped First Person Spectate mode. We've tried to mimic the actual gameplay perspective as much as possible, supporting proper weapon viewmodels, better camera perspectives, alt looking and much of the standard game HUD like the compass, vitals, hotbar and teams.

This new mode will automatically activate when spectating in first person, it also works when playing back demos. I've also added a button to easily spectate a specific player in the admin UI tab.

Hopefully this will make spectating players more enjoyable for admins, as well as providing some new cinematic options for demo users.

Improvements & Fixes Highlights

• NVG Clarity -Reduced NGV grain and overlay intensity

• Vehicle Animal Attacks - Animals will no longer attack players inside cars

• MP5 Costs - MP5 research cost increased and drop rates lowered

• MLRS Barrage - MLRS rockets cluster less towards the centre

• Compound Bow Changes - Compound Bow now unlocked from Tier 1 Workbench

• Tech Tree T2 - Electricity and car parts now on a separate branch

Check out the changelog for more changes.

AI Cleanup & Tweaks

This month we were finally able to remove two more of the various AI setups that we've had in Rust over the years. Now pretty much everything is running on one system. This meant we were able to remove a ton of code and prefabs - this is better for maintenance and long term development of the AI. There should also be some slight performance improvements.

We've also made some tweaks to the animal and human AI, such as fixing some annoyances and increasing responsiveness.

There's more improvements to come in this area now that the bigger features are finished.

Forest Density

Since the World Revamp update, we've received a lot of player feedback surrounding forest density, the aim of world revamp update was to upgrade Rust's visuals without sacrificing performance/FPS. While balancing performance to visual fidelity we were conservative with foliage density values while trying to match them closely as possible to the prior procedural generation.

Today we've slightly but noticeably increased forest density, we hope this will bring back some much-needed forest density while keeping performance under control.

Blueprint Wipe

With today's