4:40pm EST - Happy Saturday all! If you didn't see it yet, the devblog came out a little while ago. Short and sweet, I look forward to the optimizations and improvements launching. There will be no update happening today. Garry replied to the devblog discussion on /r/playrust saying:

"We don't want to shake the tree too much on the weekend when people are just sitting down to play - because it'll require all servers to update. So it'll probably be Monday."

I'll keep you posted next week on the status of the update. In the mean time, I will do my best to stay on top of mass server drops and performance to keep us running as smooth as possible. Along those lines, I've been unable to nail down a set time when performance drops. Some times it’s 13 hours, other times it’s 7. So when you ask, “Bugs, when is the next wipe?” the answer is: When performance drops, and that could be any time. Also, last wipe date / time is always on the server page.

In lieu of an update today, a couple Rustafied related matters. First of all...

Thank you!!

Yesterday, I requested support from you all to help with my server bills. I’m ecstatic to report, not only did Novembers massive VPS bill get covered, we received enough donations to cover the next several months of operating costs. To all you who contributed, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I am moved and honored by this outpour of support! I will continue keeping you up to date on Rust development and running the best server possible.

Creating team

So far, I've been doing this all by myself. I'll be honest, it takes a fuckload of time. Thankfully, I am a UX consultant by trade and I work from home. I tend not to have more than 10 or 20 hours of consulting work a week, so I do have a good deal of time to spend (obviously). That being said, I'm starting to build some teams around Rustafied to help it grow and thrive. There are several teams I am looking to build:

Server administration
Unfortunately, the admin tools in this version of the game are very limited for non-modded servers. I can set moderatorid which gives full permissions to all server variables and settings. I cannot give a couple people limited access to kick and ban. It’s all or nothing at the moment.

That doesn't mean, however, that I can't have a team of people who help me admin the server. That would look like having direct ways to contact me when something is wrong and taking videos of hackers when they are on the server.

Help with the guides
These guides take a lot of time to create. Also, given how often the game changes, they need to be updated multiple times a week. I'll be honest, the majority of my time recently has been focused on the daily updates and keeping the server running smooth. As a result, the guides are getting out of date. I've started on the new building guides, but they are not close to complete. I would love some assistance with getting numbers together and testing certain use cases when things change.

How to apply

If you would like to participate in one of these teams, email me at rustafied@gmail.com. Please include the team you're interested in and roughly what amount of time you'd be willing to invest on a weekly basis.

Tip of the day - Improve fps by turning off ground textures

This is one that appears to only work on Windows (and maybe not for everyone). PVT has been disabled and replaced by atlas. However, if you bring up F2 and toggle PVT a couple of times while looking at the ground texture, the textures will disappear and be replaced by sand. This should improve your FPS drastically (even though it may look a bit weird).

Credit to Sniper! Grenade! for this one.

Note on tips:
You'll notice I don't always have tips of the day. I would love to have them daily, however, I don't always have a good enough tip off the top of my head. I'd love to have people start collecting useful tips so that we have a queue of them to pull from for every update. So, if you have a good tip of the day, please email rustafied@gmail.com with the tip and your steam name. I'll be sure to credit everyone for their tips.