12:00am EST - It’s a fresh month for Rust development and the team is cranking on fixes and forward progress!

Turret Minigun Fixes

Some solid improvements are being worked on for the attack helicopter’s turret minigun and autoturrets using miniguns. For helis, the gun now needs to be spun up with the primary fire button before it can shoot. If there’s no shooting input for 10 seconds, it stops spinning. It’ll also spin down if the gunner UI is exited for 10 seconds, the passenger dismounts, or the heli engine is turned off.

Autoturrets fitted with miniguns will now work much like players using them: the minigun starts idle, spins up when a target is found, and spins down after 10 seconds without a target. This brings a bit more realism and balance to how these high-powered weapons operate.

Modding Prefabs

Some fresh tools are on the way to help expand what modded servers can do. Based on the branch name, these look set for a July release. The new prefabs include things like an ai_obstacle (which blocks AI pathing), a monument navmesh zone, dedicated animal spawners for creatures like boars, bears, tigers, crocs, and more, plus NPC spawners covering heavies, oil rig NPCs, and other loadouts. Should open up a ton of creative options for custom maps and mods.

Scientist AI Improvements

Work continues on the major overhaul of scientist AI, building on weeks of tweaks and fresh behaviors. Previously, the team has added things like using suppressive fire, opting to reposition more smartly instead of hiding, and avoiding flanking too aggressively outside of their zones. They’ve also been working on new audio cues, headshot indicators, and better cover usage.

This week, a fun little fix popped up: scientists will no longer twist their spines unnaturally to look at a player behind them while sprinting away. Just another step toward making their reactions look and feel more believable.

Various Fixes

There are a bunch of other fixes in the works. Most of these will likely go live with the August update.

Fixed metabolism (hunger & hydration) ticking too fast (this went live with hotfix shortly after the update)
Fix player nametags being visible through ceilings
Fixed twig roof gibs flying excessively far
Fixed crafting menu search results being lost after closing and reopening the menu
Tweaked propane tank world model lod, was culling too early
Fix the player becoming stuck in a specific place when reskinning the legacy wall to specific variant
Fixed featured skin cart button size
Fixes to compass in 3rd person
Fix coconut armour head, torso and pants ingredients differing from default wood armour
Hitting the following static objects no longer flag the player as hostile bbq chair, drumkit, hobo barrel, vending machines, water catcher, workbench 1, xylophone, clan table, repair bench, food crate 1 and 2, crate basic, mine cart, food crate normal, medical crate, underwater crates

Other Stuff

Add heat source to Small Oil Refinery to make it behave like the furnace/campfire when its on.
Further progress on the Naval Update (including work on a Ghost Ship)
More work on the upcoming Pilot Hazmat DLC
More work on the new menu (live on the closed AUX3 branch)
Can now pickup research table when not empty, gives you back the content
More optimizations to Auto Turrets
Reduce the number of log messages kept in memory from 64K to 1K
More work on the fog for jungle biome
Improve no build zone visual by adding a ring that gets brighter as you get close to it at any height