12:00pm EST - I will start by saying: All is ok, the game is running solid, locks are working on restart and the shitstorm is over.

Yesterday was one of the most hectic Fridays on record for Rust development. We saw an update which broke multiple aspects of the game (couldn't place items, building's invisible, spawning in the air to name a few). After a couple patches, the game came back to a stable state. If you're interested in the details, see my wall of text updates on yesterdays post.

Here's some info on where the game is at today...

Locks are fixed!

Since the coded locks came out a week ago Friday, we have been plagued by them disappearing when the server restarts. To compound the problem, many servers were experiencing mass drops daily, forcing server restarts. I was wiping the server whenever this happened and people were losing their shit (both figuratively and literally).

I am very fucking happy to report: the lock bug is fixed on the current build of the main branch. How do I know this you ask? Not only did Garry tweet me to let me know it was resolved (Thanks Garry!) but I spawned an updated test server, placed a coded lock, locked it, waited for the map to save and restarted the server. Low and behold, the lock was still there, in its locked state! This means we should get back to our normal wipe schedule now (which is everytime an update forces it, keep an eye out for protocol++ on @RustUpdates). This fix puts the game in a much more playable state and I couldn’t be happier.

What else included?

I’m getting a lot of questions like: How do I craft a tool cupboard? How do I fish? Patience my friends. This update did not include the construction2 branch (which is the rewrite of the building system). According to the devblog, they are working on getting this to the development branch sometime next week. This means we can expect to see it live on servers by end of next week or the week after. Fishing is in the same boat (no pun intended), we can expect to see it in game in the next week or two.

Other notes on the current build

Animals not moving
It appears the animal AI did not get plugged into the build. Animals are just standing still and letting you kill them. In the grand scheme of bugs, this is not a biggie in my book. Here is the bug report for that one.

Fps is lower
People are reporting their FPS has gone down since the last update. As many of you know, this is par for the course in any game in development. Things are simply not optimized yet. Until they are, I recommend running on a lower resolution and turning things like terrain quality down and reflections / motion blur off. For more on improving FPS, see our guide.

PVT wont go off
One of the culprits of lower FPS may be that PVT is permanently turned on. Procedural virtual texturing is what makes the transitions between snow, grass and sand look more realistic (as opposed to a gradient transition). It does look nicer but holy shit is it an FPS hog. Currently, clients are unable to turn it off both in F2 and console. I have posted a bug report for this one. Please upvote for visibility.

Correction: I just heard back from Diogo on the support ticket. Turns out PVT is indeed disabled (commented out of the code in fact). What we are seeing is a new terrain shader called atlas. There are still optimizations to be done, however, it is stable and more efficient than PVT. As more optimizations are completed, we should see our FPS improve.

Update: Diogo has responded saying he's going to make some new LOD levels for the ground shader today, making the lowest one super simple and fast. Awesome, can't wait to see how this improves FPS! 

Tip of the day: How to jump through windows

Jumping through windows has been a hit or miss thing in experimental. When windows first appeared, they were very easy to jump through. Then for a while, you couldn't get through them at all. Now, it is possible but a tricky process. Here's the best way I've found:

• Stand about a foot away, lined up with the window opening
• Crouch and hold
• Press forward and jump at the same time

It may take a little practice, but once you do it a couple times it gets a lot easier.