12:00pm EST - Day 2 of Rust development for the week and the team is trucking along. I just updated our development server, so if you want to test any of this weeks changes, make sure you opt your client into the development branch. Otherwise, you can wait till Thursday for all these changes to launch to main. Let’s get into it...

Screen overlays toned down

Last week, along with the introduction of climate and some big changes to metabolism, several screen overlays were added. The general consensus was they were awful because they broke immersion and distorted vision way too much. Thankfully, Garry has heard our complaints and toned down the overlays significantly.

Building grade changes

In conjunction with the addition of the new top tier metal building components yesterday, Garry is doing some work today on building grades. He has changed how they work to make balancing less granular and allow for skipping of grades. Currently, you can upgrade a twig tier to metal. My hunch is, although you may be able to skip some tiers, upgrading from tier 0 to tier 4 will not be allowed. I’ll be testing these changes out on dev later today as they go live, expect more info on this in tomorrow’s post.

Lock upgrades

As I mentioned yesterday, some more changes to locks are in store. Helk is underway on this process, working on a lockupgrades branch. Although the commits are pretty vague, it does appear people will soon have a way to upgrade their key lock to a code lock.

Underwater sounds

Swimming will soon be a bit more immersive as Alex has added sounds for underwater. He’s also done some tweaks on the distant sound mechanism which should help fix that awful sound when you demolish a twig building part. This is good stuff, but I still can’t wait for them to add the ambient sounds back in!

Procgen6

Andre is continuing his progress on the procgen6 branch. As you may remember from last week, this is a large body of work aimed at unsucking the environment. Including rivers, bridges, and a whole bunch of changes to how the procedural map generation works, these changes stand to make the landscape much more interesting. Last I heard, the goal is to include these changes in this weeks update, so keep your eyes peeled for a merge into main.

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