META MADNESS

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

AIMCONE REDUCTION
Any movement in rust would modify your baseline Aimcone so that shots taken while in motion were somewhat inaccurate. This was supposed to discourage "running and gunning". The problem with this is that *any* kind of motion while in a firefight puts you at a disadvantage (minor dodging) and increases the amount of RNG experienced by the player.



What I've done is reduced this penalty to zero to start, and blend it up to the full amount after 4 rapid fire shots. This means is you can now strafe and dodge while tap firing and not experience a huge aiming penalty, however full auto will be penalized.

I've also adjusted the Aimcone curve modifiers for a few weapons so that more shots have a higher probability of landing closer to the center. This has been applied to the Custom SMG, SAP and LR300.




WEAPON + ATTACHMENT UPDATES
Weapon mods have received some love this month.

BURST MOD The duration between bursts while using the burst mod has been significantly reduced to 2x firerate instead of 3x firerate.

HOLOSIGHT The holosight mesh has had its edges thinned so that less of your vision is obscured while using it. This is a stopgap until we produce a new model for it. I've also fixed the Holosight reticle being affected by motion blur.

MUZZLE BRAKE & BOOST Both the muzzle brake and muzzle boost have had their negatives reduced, they now have less damage reduction and less damage falloff and should prove to be far more useful.

LR300 TWEAKS In addition, I've made some changes to the recoil, damage fall off, bullet velocity, and burst mode of the LR300. This should now be the best in class AR.

Everything subject to change.



SAFEZONE RECYCLERS
Starting today, Recyclers in safezones have been nerfed. Their cycle time has been increased to 8 seconds and they now yield 80% of what they used to. This is the price you now must pay for safety.



However, the recyclers found at monuments have the same cycle time as before but now yield 120%! This is to reward players taking the risk out in the open.



While I am aware that a great many keyboards may be smashed as the death screen fades in over the droning hum of the active recycler, I still have hope this helps usher in a new era of roaming and monument combat.



SALE SALE SALE!
Some great items were not used because they were way too expensive. To that end I've made the following changes:

• HV Ammo - Gunpowder cost reduced significantly, and the yield per craft increased to match non HV ammo.
  
• Torpedos - Craft yield increased from 3 to 5.
  
• Incendiary Rockets - The cost has been drastically reduced and their damage + flame spread increased.
  
• Drones - Tech trash is no longer a requirement for drones.
  
• HMLMG - Gear cost has been reduced.

EXTERNAL STRUCTURE CHANGES
Large External Gates and Walls now require the player to stand still for 1.5 seconds when placing, making them less useful for immediate PvP encounters in the wild. We felt that being able to place down such large structures in a short amount of time felt at odds with our style of combat that rewards situational awareness and environmental tactics.



WOODEN BARRICADE RESIZE


To fill the void left by the external wall changes regarding dynamic cover during PvP, we have doubled the size of the deployable wooden barricade. The wooden barricade remains instantly deployable and provides a moderate amount of cover on-demand without being overpowered or polluting the landscape with large, unsightly deployable.

This is without a doubt a large shift to PvP, we'll be monitoring these changes carefully



BRADLEY CHANGES
Some further tweaks to the Bradley this month.

Scientists now spawn in stages, based on the Bradley's health, and there's some Heavy scientists thrown in the mix now, too.

• At 80% health, 2 scientists will spawn
  
• At 60% health, 4 more will spawn
  
• At 40% health, 6 final scientists will spawn

There's also been some tweaks to make some of the Scientists more aggressive and use varying attack angles.



DOOR CONTROLLER
You can now use door controllers without worrying about raiders abusing them to open your doors! This is accomplished by unpairing door controllers once your TC is destroyed & requiring code lock authorization for pairing.

They also are much easier to setup as they can now be placed just like code locks.

This should reduce the pain of constantly opening and closing the doors of your base... especially when your teammates tend to leave them open.

• Now deployable on doors like code locks
  
• Automatically paired when placed
  
• Added 2 new side inputs : 'Open' and 'Close'
  
• Unpaired when the associated tool cupboard is destroyed

We also carried on improving electricity by adjusting components and fixing various bugs this month. Thanks again to the community for reporting bugs and suggesting ideas.

The full change log of each component can be read in the section at the bottom of the blog[rust.facepunch.com].



PATROL HELICOPTER CHANGES
We know the latest helicopter changes had some mixed feedback, so we've revised them. No go zones should feel a lot more fair, and most major bugs experienced with heli since the last update are now patched.

• Monument Crashing - the helicopter will now attempt to crash at a nearby monument on death. It won't crash at monuments with safe zones: outpost, fishing village, etc. This can be disabled by server owners via: patrolhelicopterai.monument_crashing
  
• Flee Behavior - heli would previously flee when it sometimes didn't mean to. Damage to start a flee has been tweaked, ensuring a flee every time you quickly remove 30% of its overall HP.
  
• Numerous Fixes & Improvements - heli will now properly target you on boats, cargo, trains and other moving entities. Targeting fixes and performance improvements have been made throughout the code. More legacy bugs: such as heli not exploding immediately on impact with certain terrain are also fixed.

LAUNCH SITE LOOT
The Launch site loot had received an overhaul. Before, the loot inside the main building shared the same respawn group as the rest of the launch site, meaning loot inside the main building was never guaranteed. Loot had a chance to spawn elsewhere at the monument, which felt discouraging when completing the puzzle and running the main building.



The main site building now has a dedicated respawn group, which guarantees 23 loot crates when the puzzle resets.

Additionally, more loot now spawns throughout the monument.



UNDERWATER IMPROVEMENTS
Underwater vision has been improved substantially. You can now see much farther when using goggles and even more so when viewing out a submarine porthole.

In addition, the surface accuracy of submarine torpedoes has been vastly improved and torpedoes were made cheaper to produce by way of an increased craft yield. Lastly, the duo submarine fires torpedoes slightly faster than the solo.




BUILDING QOL
Tool Cupboard Auth Friend Can authorize other players on a tool cupbard
Demolish High Walls Can demolish high walls & gates for 10min after placement
Fixed High Wall Snapping Hold SHIFT to disable snapping
Foundation Placement Fixed foundation placement under roofs & floors
Foundation Debris Foundations now drop debris
Floor Debris Floors now drop debris



TECH TREE CHANGES
We’re making some changes to how the Tech Tree works to try and incentivise new styles of play. Starting this month you will notice that the T2 and T3 workbench tech trees now have a tax rate applied to them which will increase the cost of unlocking items. We’re starting this at 10% for T2 and 20% for T3. This cost increase only applies to unlocking via the Tech Tree, researching items via the Research Table is unchanged.



Our thinking behind this is that we feel the Tech Tree progression path has become a little stale and needs to be shaken up, but we don’t want to lose the advantages that the Tech Tree brought to progression - making difficult to find blueprints attainable in a way that felt fair and not as at the mercy of RNG. While there are a number of avenues we can use to try and make both forms of progression feel more balanced this feels like a simple and understandable starting point.

As with all of our changes we’ll be closing a close eye on this and will likely make further changes in the future.





CARGO SHIP CHANGES
It’s been great to see the reception to last month's Cargo Ship/harbor update, we hope you’ve all enjoyed some very (very) intense firefights. Based on the feedback we received we’re making a couple of changes this month:

• The Cargo Ship will now dock at both harbors (if they exist) on a map before leaving. Note that any containers that have already been placed on a ship will be deleted when it starts its approach to the next harbor.
  
• You can now mouse over the ship on the map to see if it has already docked.
  
• The containers that are spawned to be placed on the Cargo Ship will now be spawned when it starts its approach (about 100m away from the harbor) rather than when the ship arrives at its dock, giving you more time to hide in the containers.
  
• The container spawn points have been mildly tweaked so that all of the containers should be accessible, although you might need to do some climbing.

We hope these changes make the event a bit more understandable at a glance as well as make the combat encounters more interesting.



VIEWMODEL RENDERERS
Since implementing a dedicated viewmodel renderer system back in April 2021[rust.facepunch.com], all of our viewmodels have been split between the old and new system. The primary stumbling blocks were viewmodels with lots of particle effects and lights (torches, flamethrowers, etc). While we covered most of the high impact cases of viewmodel jittering by supporting guns (how often do you use the birthday cake on oil rig?) we’ve been wanting to consolidate everything for a while. This month we’ve updated all of the viewmodels to use the new renderer so they should appear smooth and jitter free regardless of where you are in the world. The affected viewmodels:

1. Both flamethrowers
   
2. Water Bucket
   
3. Beancan Grenade
   
4. Molotov c*cktail
   
5. Flashlight
   
6. Birthday Cake
   
7. Garry’s Mod Toolgun
   
8. Poker playing cards
   
9. Lunar New Year spear
   
10. Minigun
    
11. Paddle

You should see no visible changes if it's all working correctly.





AI PERFORMANCE FIXES
I've investigated and addressed a couple of AI performance issues that were causing the AI to take longer to process than necessary, especially on servers that have been running for a while.

This should help with AI server performance across the board.





EFFECTS PERFORMANCE
After noticing occasional framedrops during gunfights, I've spent some time investigating the issue and found out that our impact effects prefab warmup wasn't working as intended.

All impact effects are now warmed up correctly during loading times.

This should drastically reduce the stuttering when spawning a big amount of effects prefab for the first time (e.g when a fight starts and bullets start flying). This has a very little if no impact on loading times.



MAP UPLOADING
Procedural maps are now automatically uploaded from game servers to our backend so players can just download them instead of generating them when they first join the server.

This should significantly reduce the time it takes to join a server for the first time after it wipes. It may also reduce the number of players seeing "Rust is not responding" popups while joining servers for the first time.



HARMONY 2
Harmony is Rust's built-in modding platform shipped with the server. It powers modding frameworks like Oxide & Carbon, as well as standalone mods.

We upgraded from Harmony 1.2 -> Harmony 2.3 which brings us up to date with the latest features & additional stability.

This requires mod authors to recompile their Harmony mods. Fortunately the majority of mods only need to change a single line.

Before
using Harmony;

After
using HarmonyLib;

Players shouldn't need to worry as the majority of large servers already started updating their mods before the update went live. Server owners please keep an eye out for mod updates as every Harmony Mod will needed to be updated.



ELECTRICITY CHANGELOG
Tesla Coil, Igniter
To stop them from self-destructing, they are now disabled upon reaching <10% of their max health.
No longer take damage when picked up

Electrical Branch
Reduced minimum branch out power from 2 to 1

Button
Reduced press time from 5s to 1s

Storage Monitor
Will now recognize partial stack changes and pass power through when removing or adding a items to a stack

Splitter
Fixed power distribution issue when not all outputs were used

Memory Cell
Fixed side inputs triggerable by 0 power circuits

Timer Switch
Fixed an issue where its side input was triggered inconsistently by circuits update (e.g: industrial conveyor updating its state)

Counter
When set to 'Show Passthrough', it now displays its passthrough even if nothing is connected to its output
No longer requires a connection to its output to display its passthrough when set to 'Show Passthrough'

RF Receiver
Updated recipe:
- Metal Fragments 100 → 150
- Tech Trash 1 → 0

RF Broadcaster
Updated recipe:
- Metal Fragments 100 → 150
- Tech Trash 1 → 0

RF Transmitter
Updated recipe:
- HQM 5 → Metal Fragments 100
- Tech Trash 1 → 0

RF Pager
Updated recipe:
- Metal Fragments 50 → 100
- Tech Trash 1 → 0

AND, OR, XOR Switch
No longer emit light when unpowered

Industrial Conveyor
Can be placed upside down again

Industrial Light
No longer referred as Simple Light when looking at IO connection handles

Smart Switch
No longer referred as Switch when looking at IO connection handles