12:00am EST - Work continues trucking forward as we pass the halfway point for Rust development for the month.

Outpost Spawning

Spawning at Outpost appears to be on the horizon. This upcoming feature will let players respawn at Outpost — but not right away. From what we’re seeing, it’ll need to be unlocked first via a mission (so brand-new spawns won’t have access), and it comes with a long cooldown. Most of the work so far is behind-the-scenes setup for shared spawn points on the map. We’ll keep you posted as it develops.

Scientist AI Work

The overhaul to Scientist AI is still chugging along, and this week brings even more tweaks to make them behave smarter and more aggressively. New behavior includes chucking grenades at players who sit in one spot too long, avoiding sprinting while flanking so they can keep eyes on their target, and adding suppressive fire — shooting toward a player’s last known location even if they don’t have direct line of sight. These changes should make fighting scientists a lot less predictable and a lot more intense.

Hardcore Refresh

Hardcore mode is getting some love soon with updates that allow more fine-tuned item restrictions per game mode. These changes let the devs control whether certain items can be crafted, looted, or used — all depending on the specific rules of the mode. It builds off the system used for Primitive mode and should give Facepunch more flexibility to tweak hardcore gameplay in fresh ways.

Other Stuff

A couple more commits around the upcoming Party System (more on that next week)
A bunch more work on the Naval Update including boat building, floating cities, and more
Resource dispensers respect max stack size
More work on the ESC menu revamp (now on AUX3 branch for internal testing)
Work on tweaks to the Patrol Helicopter behavior
Various fixes for indirect instancing
More work on the upcoming M15 pistol (part of the new Pilot Hazmat DLC)
Fix horse heads on trophies not reflecting the breed (another thing referencing the old horse prefab)
Work on some wall storage (part of a Decor Lighting DLC)
Optimizations to Auto Turrets
Fix powered water purifier accumulating a value when running on an nearly empty tank, then converting a large amount of salt water at once
Improvements to fog in the Jungle biome
Initial testing on deployable snapping which could make placing things in bases much easier