12:00am EST - Rust development moves forward as we approach the halfway point for the month. With optimizations, more hackweek projects, expansions to tea mechanics, and further progress on the Naval Update, there are some exciting things on the horizon!

Hackweek Continues

The latest hackweek rolls into its second week, and there’s no shortage of fun experiments in the works. This time around we’re seeing a variety of new concepts getting attention: a personal safe, flaregun, sea mines, a fresh spike trap, a primitive throwing weapon called Boleadoras, and even some fancy new volumetric godrays. As always, no guarantee any of this makes it in — but it’s a cool glimpse into what the team’s cooking up behind the scenes.

Naval Update Progress

Work on the upcoming Naval Update continues to move forward. The developers are building out several new features including boat construction, RHIB scientists, a new ship called the Trawler, and even a floating city monument. This week’s focus seems to be on sails — with several types in the works. Still no confirmed release date, but we’ll keep you posted as more surfaces.

Tea System Expansion

The tea system is being expanded with new advanced and pure variants for effects like health, ore gathering, crafting, harvesting, and even warming/cooling. Recipes on the mixing table have been updated to reflect these changes, and armor slot weighting has been adjusted to better balance the buffs. This stands to add more depth to how teas can be used strategically in different situations.

Silencer Shifts

Some fresh updates to suppressors are in the works. Two new craftable silencers are being added: the soda can silencer, which has super low durability (about 12 AK shots), and the oil filter silencer, which lasts a bit longer (around 48 shots). Both function the same as the standard silencer — but with durability tradeoffs.

The regular silencer is no longer craftable, and these new ones are now appearing in loot. Numbers may still shift a bit, but this should shake up how suppressors are used going forward.

Performance and Optimization

A bunch of backend improvements have gone in recently to boost performance and speed things up, especially around prefab and asset loading. Prefab processing has seen a big optimization — cutting down the load time of things like the lighthouse prefab from 96ms to 46ms. Asset warmup times have also been slashed, dropping from around 39 seconds to just 4.5 seconds. On top of that, foliage instancing has been tightened up with fixes for underwater plants, steep terrain visuals, and more efficient cell updates. These changes should help everything run a bit smoother across the board.

Other stuff

Various improvements and optimizations to jungle elements
Improvements to the treasure hunt (6 hour time limit added, new spawn locations, reduced min distance between mission points)
Chicken coop crafting coat increased - now requires 1 rope and 75 metal fragments
Wooden Barricade stacksize reduced to 5 from 10
Honeycomb stack size reduced from 100 to 20
Burlap gloves now offer small amount of bullet protection
Beehives craft now require sheet metal
Changed Waterpump protection to metal and increased HP
Major fixes for RTL (right-to-left) language support in input fields
Arabic and Hebrew language support fixes for chat
Convex mesh collider warnings resolved
Hotreload settings fixes
Missing script warnings fixed
Storage monitor improvements for Container IO and vending machines
Cross-hair interaction modes with customizable settings
Phrase update process improvements with cancellation support
Wallpaper system updates with floor materials