What's new
The update adds cows and sheep to the island. Both produce dung, cows give milk and sheep give wool, and either animal can be harvested for meat, bones and leather. Grown cattle and sheep can be sold to a new Stable vendor, which makes an offer based on the animal's gene quality. A new navmesh also lets NPCs walk into player structures and respect doors.
What it means for your server
- NPC load: Only a subset of NPCs is processed each frame, up to a fixed time budget. Under heavy population the server should not lose FPS directly. Instead, NPCs react more slowly. The navigation system has also been multithreaded and optimised, at least doubling its performance since the last patch.
- Power and heavy fuses: Heavy fuse decay now scales with population. At 10 or fewer players online, fuses last four times longer, returning to normal by 100 players. The small heavy fuse box at the Power Plant can now be reached from outside through a broken window, which should help keep minimum power phases online.
- Powergrid loot rooms: Many monuments now have loot rooms that stay locked until enough Heavy Fuses have powered the Powerplant. The number needed varies, with harder monuments requiring more. The affected monuments are Airfield, Ferry Terminal, Harbour 1, Harbour 2, Junkyard, Launch Site, Military Tunnels, Nuclear Missile Silo, Radtown, Sewer Branch, Trainyard and Water Treatment Plant. Exact room locations were not revealed.
- Air Wolf helipad: At the start of a wipe, the helipad in Bandit Camp is in disrepair, and the air vehicle vendor will not sell until it is fixed. Players contribute resources by hitting it with a hammer, and once repaired it stays that way for the whole wipe. Admins can control this with
vehicle.padrepairsrequired(set to false to revert) andvehicle.setrepairablepads(0 for fully disrepaired, 1 for fully repaired). - Sandbags: Sandbags now have four stages, upgraded by stacking another sandbag on top, with the final stage being a pillbox. Crafting cost is lower, loot barricades come in stacks of 4, and the maximum stack size is now 20.
- Critters and swimmers: Frogs, rabbits, squirrels, sea turtles, crabs and jellyfish are being added to suitable biomes. They are heavily budgeted and are mostly set dressing for now.
- Memory and rendering: Duplicate hand meshes were removed from viewmodels, saving roughly 100MB. Store assets now load and unload on demand, cutting about 250MB at startup. The new Rust Render Pipeline is available behind an experimental setting for the first month, so players can switch back if they hit problems.
- Grenades and explosives: Grenades, C4 and satchels now use client prediction, so throws feel smoother on higher ping. Discrepancies are corrected by the server.
- Secure servers: Several more Facepunch servers now require TPM and Secure Boot. Facepunch reports reduced cheater presence on secure servers, and its long-term aim is to make this global.
- Crash reports: Crashes now upload automatically to Facepunch's backend, which should speed up fixes.
Key date
A mandatory server and client update arrives on 22 October at 18:00 BST / 13:00 EST for the Halloween features. Add it to your calendar now.