New SMG, And what happened to modular stuff?? Patch roundup | Rust Update 2nd August 2024
Happy wipe day to all! RUST’s Stay Alert update is now live for all players. This update added the Tin Can Alarm item to the game; a new trap for alerting players to the presence of others. This addition was joined by an assortment of improvements and bug fixes in this QoL-style update.
A new primitive trap
This month’s newest attraction is the Tin Can Alarm. Crafted from just a couple tuna cans, rope and wood, this trap is a new way to catch intruders in their sneaky act. Deployable almost anywhere, the alarm’s short trip wire is almost undetectable when set and doesn’t need to reset after an entity passes through it. Players, animals, and objects passing through the wire will set off a flutter of clanking tin cans loud enough to be heard by others in the vicinity, making this trap an excellent, low-cost tool for securing monuments and other contested areas.
To add a little spice to the mix, bush sounds are now audible for other players to hear. You’ll need to make sure you slow down when running through a dense thicket or even crouch creep to reduce your noise if you suspect others are within earshot. It’s probably a good strategy anyway; you never know when a bush might contain a tin can alarm..or a landmine.
Improvements and adjustments
Ziplines received some much-needed love this month. You will no longer be dismounted from the zipline if it drags you through the trees, and the line will dismount you higher up on the pylon making less work for you to climb to the next platform. The maximum distance has also been extended from 150m to 185m, and ziplines will now prioritize the furthest possible destination. It’s less work and more zip when you need to cross the map in a hurry.
Last month’s addition of the Dynamic Vendor System revealed some important insights over the course of the wipe, leading the devs to alter the system to operate on real time instead of in-game time to prevent quicker-than-intended price drops. The system now updates every 5 real-time hours, versus the default of 15 minutes in last month’s implementation.
Items dropped in the water now behave more realistically. Not only do they fall more slowly, they are also subject to the forces of the tide, allowing them to twist and turn in a realistic fashion.
More features in this RUST Update
- The exclusive Shockbyte TC skin is now available when renting a Shockbyte server
- Code locks now remember the last-entered code in between game sessions
- Trains now break barricades located on tracks
- Pressing your crouch key while driving bikes now allows for a faster turn
- Horses can now enter holes in terrain, including train tunnels, monuments and so on
- The next round of Twitch Drops will begin on August 8th and run through the 18th
- For a complete list of fixes and changes in the Stay Alert update, check out the devlog
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Thanks for reading, and see you in the next RUST update!
Video Transcript
Greetings, survivors and friends, Shadowfrax here with both a round-up of the latest “Stay Alert” patch that just happened and a look ahead to what’s happening in the next couple of months’ updates, plus more Twitch drops and a new weapon, which you may have already kind of seen, along with an update on what exactly has happened to modular weapons.
But first, as shown last week, the star of this month’s patch is the new tin can alarm, which is a poor primitive peasant’s laser detector and can be deployed virtually anywhere. I think it will be especially useful for securing monuments and setting up ambushes, but let me know if you’ve gotten good use out of one yet.
For a full breakdown, please check out last week’s vid, but one thing to note is that now the sound has been updated from the placeholder bicycle bell to a clatter of cans.
As mentioned previously, even though it uses tuna cans to craft, it would make sense maybe to have an explosive beancan version. I believe the idea has been bandied about at Facepunch, but no solid decision has been made as far as I know, and they may have just kicked the can further down the road. Cue plugins, I guess.
As if being sneaky hadn’t just gotten harder, moving around in bushes will now make sounds that are audible to players around you, and the magnitude of the rustle will depend on the force of your hustle. Creeping is, of course, much quieter than galloping straight through foliage, and as a by-product, the flapping of air balloon tarps will now be audible in the same way as they use the same system.
There were a few other changes this month and a lot of QOL stuff. Things dropped in water will now be floaty and waft realistically into the depths with bubbles instead of just plummeting like a millstone. There’s also a new splash effect when they hit the water.
And there have been a bunch of zipline improvements summarized as follows: Ziplines will now pick the furthest possible destination instead of the closest. Their max length has been increased from 150 to 185 meters and will now terminate higher up on platforms where possible to reduce the amount of climbing. Most importantly, you can no longer get dismounted by trees when on a zipline. Despite all the efforts to stop them spawning in the wrong places, sometimes life… er… finds a way, so now branches will no longer leave you in the lurch.
More stuff, including news of a new weapon, is next, and when that new rad town is coming. And speaking of radioactive places…
Back to the video, and in other changes in this week’s patch: NPC vendor price changes now operate in real-time rather than based on in-game time. This should be more understandable and will work correctly on servers that manipulate in-game time. Also, price changes now take place every 5 real-time hours. Last month, the prices changed every 15 minutes in real-time by default, so this slows things down a lot.
The traveling vendor has had a speed increase, with a new convar for server owners to adjust this: travellingvendor.max_speed. Its lights now come on at night and stay off during the day, and it will now detect and repel players on its bonnet correctly, preventing an endless AFK zone.
Trains will now break barricades deployed too close to the tracks, and you should now be able to deploy barricades around caves properly. Bikes will turn faster if you hold the crouch key, there has been a tweak to sidecar physics to make them better, and you can now ride bikes and snowmobiles onto the cargo containers so they can be moved onto the cargo ship—because, of course, I’m sure you’d want to do that a lot. And the potential for putting bikes in scrappy’s is being looked into.
Not only that, but also, horses can now enter terrain holes, which means train tunnels, the launch site ramp, and caves, etc., basically anywhere you can travel underneath terrain.
Switching gun firemode now plays a sound, storage adaptors don’t have collision so they won’t get in the way of anything, there’s an option to turn off blood on screen when getting hurt, the elevator max floor limit has been doubled, the last entered code for locks is now saved between sessions, and getting on top of a water junkpile doesn’t kick you for flyhack anymore. Praise be.
As mentioned last week, there’s a new Shockbyte tool cupboard skin earned for using the “rent a server” link in the main menu. And there are more Twitch drops incoming between the 8th and 18th. The “Home Brewed” selection will be dropping, and here they are for you to see.
Now looking ahead at what’s coming up next, and here’s one for the builders: Flavien is working on a visualization to highlight which block is the culprit when you’re unable to place a block for whatever reason. This is part of a body of work to improve the building error system, and you should expect this next month.
I’m told next week the team is going to be doing another hack week, so expect some hopefully interesting news to come out of that. But on a partially related note, there have been some changes to what’s coming in September and October’s patches, and please note, as always, this is subject to change, so don’t get too excited or disappointed, please.
September was meant to be a big update with a lot of changes to island generation, but this has now been pushed back to October as it needs to cook a bit longer. You can’t rush these things, you know.
But here are some things I know are planned for September: Wallpaper is one. So finally, we’ll be able to customize the insides of our bases, as that’s something some of us do have to look at most of the time. Speaking of time, a new IO entity—a digital clock—is being worked on for next month, which will show server time and allow for setting alarms. There’s also going to be an attire protection buff pass aimed at increasing TTK. More on this and whatever else is due for September when I get it.
October now looks like it’ll be the heftiest month of the year, and here are some of the things I know will be making it in then, as far as I know at the moment—subject to change, etc.
There’s a blunderbuss skin for the double barrel, the SKS skin—which we now know is actually a skin and not a new weapon—a new Frontier man hazmat skin, and a frontier hatchet. Expect these all to be DLC, I guess. And as mentioned last week, there’s a brand new weapon, a high-caliber revolver. There will be a water well update with a new food cache that will be found there, the return of legacy woodpiles, new temperate biome cliffs, a new unique environment apparently (not sure what this is yet), some more unique rock formations, better rivers, and of course the new radtown redux monument.
In the ocean, there will be new stuff too, with underwater dive sites, an ocean wreck buoy, and the DPV will finally be splashing down. Plus, of course, the usual seasonal content.
Other stuff being worked on with no set date yet, as far as I know, includes work on the player rig and animal ragdolls, there’s the rock-paper-scissors game, shields, and jungle ruins with crocodiles, snakes, tigers, and panthers. Oh my.
But what I wanted to talk about now is this commit regarding a tier 1 SMG, and I checked into this to make sure I read that right. And yes, this is actually a new weapon, and the thing is, you’ve possibly already seen it. Or at least bits of it. Let me explain.
You may remember from way back in 2019 when horse armor was just being added, this concept for modular weapons, with the idea hopefully being pretty self-explanatory. I know there was some excitement about this, and I’ve been asked multiple times over the years about what’s happening with it. Which leads me to this commit: you see, I’m told this new weapon is going to be based on the modular weapons assets that never made it in and will instead be a finished non-modular weapon in its own right.
Which raises the question, well, what about modular weapons? Have they been shelved? I don’t know how to tell you this, but yes, sorry, I truly am sorry. The problem was mainly one of balance, so I’m told. So we’re not going to be getting modular weapons after all, unless that becomes subject to change as well one day, of course. But we do get a tier 1 SMG, so yeah, pour out your grief regarding this development down below in the comments, please. And be kind, I am only a poor messenger.
— Transcript provided by and used with permission from Shadowfrax
