Blueprints and Tech tree changes | Rust Update 4th December 2020
This RUST update video is brought to you by Shadowfrax!
Happy monthly update to all as we usher in RUST’s newest feature; the tech tree. The Tech Tree Update is a new system that is designed to give players a more predictable route to researching and acquiring the items that they desire. With so many additional items introduced since the original experimentation system was designed, workbench experimentation has become a frustrating and expensive path to blueprinting. The new tech tree will make it possible to calculate how much scrap it will take for a player to get to the desired item in the tree. Players are still able to research blueprints of items that they possess at research tables, but this does not grant a shortcut along the tech tree.
In addition to the tech tree, the November Balance branch of work has introduced a heap of balance changes to many items in the game including adjustments to crafting times, crafting costs, item stack sizes, item condition and durability, item effects, and more. These adjustments are subject to change as feedback is collected and more adjustments will be made for the January Update.
Here are some of the highlights of the update:
- The new Tech Tree has emerged into the release branch
- Blueprints will no longer be found in loot containers
- Blueprints may no longer be experimented at work benches
- Blueprints can still be made of an item at the Research Table
- Various branches along the tree grant players more choices of what to unlock
- A large amount of balance changes have been made to adjust crafting costs, times, stack sizes, and more
- Supply drop visuals have been updated and added to the release branch
- Supply drop loot table has been revised to contain less junk loot
- More cinematic convars have been added
And with that, you’re here to watch his video!
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Video Transcript
Greetings, survivors and friends, Shadowfrax here with a ROUNDUP of December’s patch to Rust, with everything you need to know and a lot of things you probably don’t.
Whatever the case, I’m here to give you knowledge, so make sure you’re subscribed as hopefully, that’ll help both of us.
So, first of all, this patch was heavily focused on research, and if you’ve been playing for any significant amount of time, you’ll remember that Rust has gone through a few different systems when it comes to this.
Well, here in attempt number 3241 at bringing balance and improving your sexy little lives, we have now been gifted the gift of tech trees, not exactly a new concept in this type of game, but how does it work here?
First of all, four bullet points…
You still start with a set of default blueprints.
You won’t find blueprints in loot anymore.
Experimenting to unlock random blueprints is gone.
But you can still research items as normal through the bench.
Ok, so here’s how the tech trees work.
There are three blueprint tiers; each tier has it’s own separate tech tree, and each tech tree is tied to a specific bench.
This means you can only unlock tier one items through the tier one bench, tier two through the tier two bench, and you can guess the rest.
This also means that although you can still craft anything at a tier three, each bench has its own usefulness, and you’ll need to make use of the other two if you want to unlock everything, although it’s not obligatory.
The advantages of this new system are hopefully predictability and a clearer route to getting what you want for a set amount of scrap, but without the boringness and total linearity of the old XP system, if you remember back that far.
So simply use one of the benches, this is tier one, and then open its tech tree. You can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel and scroll around by dragging.
As you can see, this tree is broken up further with four starting points that each lead to different groups of blueprints, and this gives you more choice in what you want to unlock first.
Selecting an item on the tree will give you all the information you need about it, including crafting costs, its stats, and most importantly, how much scrap is needed to unlock it.
Blueprints must be unlocked in order, with each one only becoming available to unlock when an unbroken line before it has been. Although there is an exception to this, because as I say, you can still research items you’ve begged, borrowed, found, or stolen through the research bench as normal.
Here’s how that works:
So say, for instance, that I managed to ‘borrow’ some explosives and research them, I can create a blueprint for those and learn how to craft them as normal.
Now let’s go to the tier three bench and open its tech tree. Here you can see that the explosives blueprint is now unlocked, so that means I can unlock C4 next, right? WRONG.
You see, you need to have unlocked all the blueprints prior to an item in order to unlock it through the tree, so I’ll either have to do that first or somehow ‘borrow’ some C4. But hopefully, you can see how this system allows players to be more focused and plan their research whilst maintaining flexibility and get ahead if the opportunity arises.
I’m going to remind you, although by now it should already be playing in you head, but everything here, including costs, layout, and which items are in which tiers, is SUBJECT TO CHANGE.
And that means you should actually expect things to be unbalanced to start with, so if that’s what you find, then good. You’ll notice already that some items’ tier levels have changed; for instance, garage doors and high external stone gates are now both tier 2.
The tech tree system will be tested throughout December, and feedback will be taken, so if you don’t think something should be as expensive, or if you think it’s in the wrong tier, then press f7 in-game and send a nice little message to the TEAM.
I’d love to know what you think to all this too, so leave a comment, but please try to articulate why you love or hate a change, don’t just say ‘tech tree bad’ or ‘this is bad for solos’; that’s not a convincing argument.. tell me why.
Tech trees are a big change, of course, but we can’t ignore the mountain of other fiddlings that were made, most of which I’ve already mentioned, but to recap.
There was a whole chinook load of balance shifts this month, including crafting reductions and recipe changes across the board, along with stacking amount adjustments and a few functional balancing, which you can see here if you pause. As mentioned last week, our friends over at Rustafied have compiled a list of all of these, which is 32 pages long and probably required many, many cups of tea to make. I’ll leave a link in the description.
Also, as you should know by now, there were a few changes to supply drops. Visually for one, with an updated model, love it or hate it, which has had the gaps filled properly now and that, thanks to uncle Helk rewriting its loot table, should contain less junk. Apparently, now you’re guaranteed to find at least two pieces of decent armor, one very good, or two decent weapons. And no more wood armor, landmines, longswords, or stone spears. Boohoo.
Bradley and heli loot rebalancing are next in the firing line, so it seems.
Most importantly, however, the supply drop parachute now has wires. Praise be!
As well as this, there were some slight procedural map changes, as already mentioned, which should see better stable spawning and safe zone areas, plus radiation now being applied to the launch site floodlight towers. And yes, you’ll once again find transport a bit easier to come by, with reductions in cost for saddles, boats, and rhiiibs, plus some boats and horses now spawn in the wild once more.
There were also some fixes, for not being able to equip bone armor with a bone helmet, and chainsaws now never taking more than three attempts to start and using 75% less fuel.
You might notice that the Kayak Paddle was updated, too, this month with some improved visuals and 30% more paddliness.
A few more cinematic convars were added, allowing for depth of field focus to be locked to an entity, parented dolly movement, and night vision mode to be toggled in demos, along with an improved demo playback HUD, you’ll find all the details on the devblog, and I’ll just mention that if you want to know how to use any of Rust’s wealth of other cinematic abilities, then you should pay the official wiki a visit and I’ll be popping all the links you need in the description.
There’s some other stuff on the devblog that might interest you if you want to know what the TEAM have been doing behind the curtains over the last month, such as optimizations to speed up builds and Steam networking improvements.
Also worth mentioning is that sales of the Movember mustache raised $80k last month, and Charitable Rust 2020 raked in a whopping $200k! Splendid!
In works in progress
The Hapis island rescue is steaming ahead, no more visuals still. Same goes for the workcart. Same also goes for the new AI work that’s being done, although this is still just an experiment as far as I know. And lastly, an interesting commit that I’ll just leave here. And please feel free to speculate about it in the comments.
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