5:30pm EST - A couple awesome late day commits just now: Meat / medkits are now stackable and the roof building piece has been added.

1:57pm EST - It is a new week in Rust development and the team is off to a great start. Some big gameplay changes have been introduced, mainly: A new, cheaper first tier and no more building health regen. These changes are currently live on the development branch (how to access), however, we probably won’t see them hit main till the end of the week. Let’s get into it...

New building tier

The new first tier of building has been added, dubbed the twig set. This tier will be cheaper and have less health than the current first tier (logs). Although balance is definitely still needed, it looks like the average cost of the building parts is closer to 100 wood and the average health is 100. Once you’ve placed this first tier, you can upgrade to tier 2 (logs) like you normally would (it looks like the cost / health of the log tier is still the same). Word of warning to anyone playing on the dev branch today: this tier can currently be knocked down with one hit of the hatchet.

Building health

For weeks, raiders have lamented over the wonkiness of the building health regeneration system. People can damage a wall slightly causing the regen rate to go through the roof till the next restart. This makes it impossible to raid many buildings.

That will all soon change as Garry has turned off health regeneration completely and made it so placed items immediately go to their max health. This is a huge game changer because it makes raiding a consistently viable option again. I’ll be compiling some demolition numbers as the week progresses.

Chat improvements

Garry has also made some key improvements to the chat system:

• There is now a scrollable history for chat
• Clicking on a user's avatar will open their steam profile (not yet working for me on the dev branch)
• That annoying bug where the chat window will reopen again after to send a message has been fixed.

F2 updates

A couple toggles have been added into the F2 menu, now allowing users to easily turn off chat, branding and the hud all together.

Item drops

Currently, items can be lost if you craft something and don’t have room in your inventory. This can also happen with full campfires and furnaces. Thankfully, items which would previously have been lost will now be dropped on the ground instead.

Tip of the day

Use exact change when crafting a cupboard. Reports have been coming in of cupboard taking all the wood in your inventory when crafting them (instead of the 1000 cost). This appears to be a sporadic occurrence, but just to play it safe, deposit all but 1000 wood into your storage prior to crafting a tool cupboard.

Question? Comments? Join the conversation at Rustaforum.com