9/29 @ 1:10pm EST - We are working on an in-depth rundown of the new cargo ship event that’s live on the staging branch. Keep your eyes peeled for an article on Monday!

9/27 @ 10:00am EST - With 1 week to go before the big update the team is still working on the Cargo Ship server event. Not much new to report or show off this week as all the work is still on a separate branch. Check back next week for a full rundown of what’s coming in the update.

12:20am EST - We’re at the halfway point of the development month for Rust and the team is making some great progress on this new server event.

Our update preview stream goes live at 3pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day.

Cargo ship progress

The primary focus for most of the team this week has been on the upcoming cargo ship server event. As you may recall, this large vessel will traverse the waters of Rust, stocked with scientists and loot. Players will be able to board the cargo ship, PvP, grab some loot, engage a scientist or two, then depart with their plunder.

A large percentage of the commits this week were towards the cargo ship branch, which is still not merged with staging. So although we can’t experience it in game quite yet, we can get a sense for some of what has been worked on.

Along with handling the pathfinding of the ship itself, the team is tackling the extra level of complication added when you have what basically amounts to a large monument slowly moving around the map. Not only does it need know where the ship can and cannot go, it needs to track and match the velocity of all individual items (players, deployables, etc.) along with it. This can especially be challenging when you have to track projectiles such as thrown objects (which is still on the todo list).

Long and short, some great progress is being made on this new server event and it’s likely we’ll see it in game for the October 4th update. In the meantime, Helk sent me a quick video of him running around the cargo ship:

AI improvements

Pål did some work on improving AI this week. Not only did he fix several errors and compile issues, he has made it so NPC’s now also support custom waypoint pathing instead of the default navmesh form of navigation. This will give the dev team the ability to set custom routes for NPC’s to navigate if they so choose.

New plants

It appears some new plants are on the horizon as Damian has been working on art and styles of a potato plant. Looking at the roadmap you can see Farming 3.0 is right around the corner, so expect it to become a larger dynamic of gameplay in the coming months.

Hidden commits

Another week of large amounts of hidden commits. What is hidden behind these commits? Is it optimization? Antihack improvements? A fundamentally shifting new gameplay dynamic everyone will lose their shit over how it will totally ruin the game and then get used to after a day of playing? Only time will tell…

Other stuff

• Garage door easier to open/close when placed near ladder hatch

• Metal shop front exploit fix