12:00am EST - The team trucks along as we approach the March update.

Naval Work

Naval work continues to tighten up both boat systems and the Deep Sea experience ahead of further balance passes.

On the player boat side, deployables now snap properly with spacing adjusted for wave motion, and many deployables and IO entities are allowed on boats by default — including flame turrets and shotgun traps. Boats now respect full building privilege checks, HBHF sensors work properly onboard, and IO disconnects cleanly when a boat sinks. Decay has been rebalanced with a 24-hour delay and 12-hour decay window, cannon hits slow boats more noticeably, and AI reversing behavior has been smoothed out. Static boat building stations have also been added to tropical islands, complete with magnetic alignment to help position boats.

Deep Sea systems have seen polish as well. The entrance portal now randomizes after each wipe, loot initially spawns at around 70% and refills over time, and treasure missions no longer get stuck if a player disconnects. Memory usage has improved with duplicate ocean sim loading removed (saving roughly 80MB), and multiple ghost ship and portal fixes address performance and collision edge cases. Deep also sea now triggers an open toast + notification sound.

Performance and Optimization

Performance and rendering work saw some meaningful gains this round, with major optimizations to GamePhysics.Trace and TraceSpheres to improve scaling and add proper unit/perf testing. Terrain rendering has also been upgraded with R16 heightmap support, GPU compute-based height updates, and smarter culling using min/max height values to reduce unnecessary draw calls.

On the world side, baked island meshes received significant collider reductions — in some cases dropping from hundreds of thousands of triangles down to a fraction of that — alongside an improved underwater dissolve pass for better visual blending. Indirect instancing issues were addressed (including detached doors, ghost objects, and a Mac VRAM leak), though occlusion culling has been temporarily disabled when indirect instancing is active. Duplicate ocean sim data loading was removed for large memory savings, and motion vectors were disabled on model prefabs to reduce overhead, with tooling added to catch any remaining cases.

Boxes DLC (Storage Box Pack)

The newly renamed Storage Box Pack DLC is set to arrive with next week’s update. The pack includes clothing, ammo, components, metal, and wood box variants, all receiving proper LOD, texture, material, and instancing passes. GPU instancing has been enabled across box materials to keep performance solid even in larger storage-heavy bases.

On the backend, an auth refactor ensures boxes properly respect TC and boat privilege, preventing unintended information advantages during raids. Component boxes now support a hopper toggle flag, and the store page is prepped with a 16-box lineup and skin viewer support. Additional shadow, LOD3, and texture optimizations — including scaling certain 4K textures down to 2K — round out the final polish ahead of release.

QoL / Fixes

Scientists armor calculation fixed (hazmat ~30%, full metal ~50% as expected).
Spectate now orbits last position if the player disconnects.
Multiple deployable collider cleanups (GroundWatch fixes, stringpool issues, boat placement regressions).
LootContainer null inventory crash fixed.
Fix for doors incorrectly showing “Placing through walls” when valid.
Train coupling audio double-play fixed.
Fluid splitter/combiner deploy regression fixed.
Multiple store UI fixes (currency fonts, countdown errors, owned item ordering, gallery arrows).
Added debug.showentities command to visualize invisible entities.

Other Stuff

Server browser region handling cleaned up further, with better UNKNOWN region handling, ordering tweaks, and datacenter naming updates.
rust_relay_server gained a packet relay layer and related convars.
Network protocol bump tied to Item field cleanup (intended for next wipe).
server.randomize_seed cvar added to allow random seed assignment on launch.
Large oilrig collider layer adjustments to prevent LOS antihack violations when shooting through vents.
Static boat stations receive additional fixes (spawn state, water position, NRE safeguards).
Indirect instancing Mac VRAM leak fix via direct-to-VRAM buffer uploads.
Occlusion culling temporarily force-disabled when indirect instancing is active.
Additional TraceSpheres and physics unit/perf test coverage added.
Editor Map Creator improvements: new UI, procedural scene support, FPS improvements in play mode.
New container fill commands: fillcontainer and fillcontainer_radius for randomized inventory testing.
ddraw now works in Scene View (text and screen text support).
Motion vector automation tool added to detect and disable object motion vectors on model prefabs.
Multiple deployable clipping test expansions and GroundWatch validation improvements.