7/18 @ 3:30pm EST - It's a fresh week and we're seeing work on the Bradley, music, and navmesh. Check back for a full article on Thursday.

7/13 @ 4:59pm EST - Devblog 168 just went live! Also, our US Prime server just wiped.

7/13 @ 4:50pm EST - Client update just hit! Updating our servers now.

7/13 @ 4:30pm EST - Slight delay in today's update. Stay tuned...

7/13 @ 4:20pm EST - Still waiting on the devblog and client update. Added some more pictures of the new Bradley tank below in the mean time.

7/13 @ 3:15pm EST - The server update has hit. Client and devblog still pending.

7/13 @ 2:50pm EST - Bit of a slow news week so we took the update stream down early. Update and devblog are still pending, follow @Rustafied to see when they hit!

7/13 @ 2:00pm EST - Our update stream is live! twitch.tv/rustafied

7/13 @ 1:50pm EST - The Bradley tank model has been added to the game. It doesn't do anything at the moment, but can be spawned in by admins with 'spawn bradley'.

7/13 @ 9:00am EST - It doesn't appear there are a whole lot of forward facing changes coming in the update besides rocket factory fixes, optimizations, and new sounds for barrels. We'll keep you posted as we get closer to patch time.

7/11 @ 1:35pm EST - It’s a fresh week for Rust development and we’re seeing progress on NPC’s, improvements to Rocket Factory, optimizations, and more. Let’s get into it...

Bradley APC model in!

Helk has committed a first iteration of the new Bradley APC. It doesn't currently do anything, and you won't see it around the map (only admins can spawn it with 'spawn bradley'). Helk did shared that it'll patrol the roads at Rocket Factory once fully added.

Humanoid NPC progress

We are several steps closer to seeing armed scientists roaming the Rust landscape as the humanoid NPC branch has been merged to main. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to be getting stalked by boys in blue hazmat suits this week - there is still a lot of work to be done.

If you recall from devblog 166, one of the biggest hurdles is navmesh fidelity. High resolution navmesh caused server hangs on start, so a lower fidelity one has been used. This is good for server hangs, but not for AI movement (particularly near dungeons). With that in mind, we’re seeing a bunch of tweaks and improvements to navmesh this week.

There is no set time for when scientist NPC's will be in game. At the moment, they are not spawning at all on the staging branch. The only visual difference so far is the hazmat suit is blue - but that’ll probably change back shortly as blue suits are intended for NPC’s, not players. As always, we’ll keep you posted as this project progresses.

Rocket factory improvements

After going live last week, the newest dungeon, Rocket Factory, is getting some optimizations and bug fixes. Along with tweaking a bunch of culling and render issues, many LODs have been changed to use less overhead. There are still some bugs in play - like falling through the elevator if there is any slight server lag - so expect more tweaks and improvements to this over the coming weeks.

Optimizations

Rocket Factory isn’t the only place we’re seeing optimizations this week. Vincent has done a pass on many environmental assets to reduce shader complexity and texture memory consumption. Keep these performance enhancements coming! It’s not like you ever heard someone say, “Damn, I just have too much FPS!”