March 2022 Update

Monument Lighting

This month we’ve made visual improvements to some of our older monuments to get them more consistent with the quality of our new content. This includes changes such as adding darkening volumes to interiors to prevent them from becoming too bright during the day, adding new lights and effects, tweaking existing lighting and other minor visual improvements.

As a result, the interiors should feel much darker and more atmospheric. The monuments that we’ve changed so far are the Supermarket, Oxum's Gas Station, Bandit Camp and Launch Site and we plan to improve more of them over time.

Soundtrack Release

This month we're really excited to announce the release of Rust's official soundtrack - available now on Steam, music streaming services and a handful of digital stores. This initial release (Volume 1) is comprised of 29 tracks clocking in around 1 hour and 45 minutes of music.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1701720/Rust_Soundtrack/

Alex originally wrote a lot of these songs for our update videos but he's been expanding them into more fleshed out, standalone pieces of music. There's also some songs he has written to fit the occasional calm moment in game that you won't have heard at all yet.

Alex is in the process of getting these songs chopped up and implemented to playback dynamically in game as well. Around half of the new tracks are ready in this update, and the rest should follow shortly.

Listen now on your favourite music streaming platforms, including:

Spotify Apple Music Bandcamp YouTube Music Amazon Music And many more digital music stores!

Improved vehicle body visuals

This month we've been exploring new ways to improve the visual experience when driving vehicles. While we initially explored dedicated viewmodels for vehicles (floating arms in front of the camera) we settled on using the full body mesh with tweaked hand logic. You can see this most obviously on the Snowmobile, the driver seat of Modular Cars and the Workcart, while it's visible but less obvious on the Minicopter and Scrap Transport Helicopter.

This approach allows us to highlight the hand IK on vehicles like snowmobiles and cars so you can see your arms turning. There's also some subtle camera movement if the player model leans or moves (like on the Snowmobile).

Magnet Crane Cleanup

We looked at the junkyard magnet crane this month to see if some bugs and the general feel of it could be improved.

It's now a bit more stable to drive, and old issues like the driver not quite visually syncing up with the cabin as it rotates are fixed.

Another concern with the crane was that with its controls being pretty complex, it was easy to burn through your fuel just learning them. To combat that, we've reduced the fuel it uses at idle by 80%, and the maximum fuel it uses when not holding anything by 25%. So if you're just practicing moving the magnet arm and rotating the cabin, your fuel will only be being consumed at 20% of the rate it was before.

Snowmobile Cleanup

We added some small final touches to the snowmobiles.

Most were minor bug fixes, but an obvious one is that animations are improved, with the driver now getting visually bumped around at times, and showing an idle animation cycle. Audio is improved as well, with the snowmobile revving more realistically when driving up hills.

For game balance, the arctic base snowmobile no longer comes loaded with any fuel.