12:00am EST - With one week till the big update, there are some exciting things on the horizon. The devs are tearing it up with improvements, optimizations, and awesome additions to the game, including: horseback riding!

Our update preview stream starts at 3pm EST. Follow @Rustafied for news throughout the day.

Horseback riding added

At long last, horseback riding has arrived (in a rudimentary form). Helk, making good on his promise from a couple weeks ago, has put in the first stages of riding horses into the game. Still a work in progress, there are some issues to be resolved before every Newman can take to the plains of Rust on their trusty bronco.

Nevertheless, we have a glimpse of how this will function. First, you’ll need to tame a horse by approaching it and pressing ‘E’. The exact requirements of taming still seem to be up in the air. Advance too quickly and that wild mustang will buck and kill the fuck out of you. Alternatively, it’ll just run away.

Once on a horse, you’ll be able to navigate around using the WSAD keys. To dismount, you simply press the spacebar. Also, pressing control makes the horse kick! At the moment, movement can be a bit wonky, and traveling over hills and rocks doesn’t work so great. That said, this will of course be cleaned up prior to release.

No word on if this will definitely make it in the June update, but I’d expect more horse play commits over the coming days. As always, we’ll keep you posted as work progresses.

Note: If you’d like to test riding horses on staging (and you have moderator access on the server) you can type ‘spawn testridablehorse’ in console to spawn a black horse which you can mount and ride around. It doesn’t look like the normal horses around the map are controllable quite yet.

Lowered research costs

That old scrap grind has been reduced significantly this week. After putting it to a vote, Helk has lowered the research cost for rare and very rare items. Curious which items are in which category? Check out this handy list. Here is a lowdown of the cost changes:

Rare

Old cost
250

New cost
125

Very rare

Old cost
750

New cost
500

In game store added

As part of his restructuring of the main menu UI, Garry has added an in game store for purchasing skins. No longer can you only purchase skins from the item store website, now you can easily buy your skins without ever leaving the game.

UI Improvements

As you may recall from last week, Garry has been overhauling the UI as a continuation of his work on redoing the Steamworks integrations.

This week, along with fixing several bugs (drag dropping not working, server favorite weirdness, vitals in wrong order, etc.) he’s added videos to the background instead of static images. You can now expect a peaceful looping video of several scenes when loading the game.

Improved fonts

Garry has also dramatically improved the look of some text in game. Using an asset from the Unity store called Textmesh Pro, he’s enhanced the look of both in game chat and player names.

Environmental shaders

Vincent continues his work on a branch called ‘env-shaders.’ It’s not ready to be shown off yet, however, he told me we can expect some big changes once it’s ready to go. That said, he cautioned it’ll be a while before it’s ready to hit main.

Preprocessing optimization

A new name has shown up on the commits list for Rust. Rohan, a member of the Facepunch team, is now working on a new branch called ‘preprocesscopy.’ Long and short, this is an experimental body of work aimed at optimization. Huzzah! A new person working solely on optimization… music to my ears!

Oil Rig fixes

Alistair has been banging out some fixes for the Oil Rig monuments this week. In the realm of shooting, he’s fixed projectiles being rejected by anti hack when shot through stairs along with one way shooting through a window on large Oil Rig. He’s also fixed getting stuck and triggers for flyhack violations when jumping in certain areas.

Other stuff

• Fixed CraftingQueue staying after disconnected proper

• NPCs no longer inherit the network group from their parent (similar to players, should greatly reduce cargo ship networking overhead)

• More work on weapon texture and VFX optimizations

• Optimized looking up items by short name

• Fixes to player step detection glitches on stairs

• Server print when connected / disconnected from Steam

• Watchtowers can no longer be placed under terrain (exploit fix)

• Key lock no longer uses code lock guide mesh

• Removed placeholder cube and used building plan while deploying locks