12:00am EST - The team continues work on the upcoming Naval Update, some fresh DLC’s, and more.

Naval Update

Work on the Naval Update continues as the team focuses on stability, AI behavior, and performance ahead of its February release. A big chunk of recent changes target ghost ships and scientists, with fixes that improve navigation, flanking behavior, and general combat reliability. These updates address long-standing issues with NPC zones, pathing, and underwater checks, helping AI behave more naturally during naval encounters.

Alongside AI improvements, there’s been a lot of general polish across the deep sea and Floating City content. This includes environmental tuning, navmesh and obstacle updates, small interaction fixes for boats and building, and optimizations to visuals, fog-of-war handling, and performance. Overall, it’s another solid pass of cleanup and refinement as the Naval Update moves closer to launch.

Artist Pack DLC

Work is also progressing on the Artist Pack DLC, with several creative additions taking shape. The paintball gun continues development, a new paintable reactive target is in the works, and picture frames are getting expanded with XL and XXL light-up variants. On top of that, a new tileable cardboard material option is being added, opening up more possibilities for custom displays and creative builds.

Other Stuff

Progress on the Boxes DLC
New boat planner icons added
Fixed a pool leak affecting timed explosives
Auto turret improvements and optimizations merged
Fixed handmade shells missing ammo subtype for ammo indicator icons
Painting system improvements by aligning standard shader decal texture naming
Occlusion system fixes and optimizations
Fixed issues related to skipping domain reloads
Removed leftover test cubes from Craggy Island
Removed shadow mask setting from the Graphics Settings menu as we don't use a shader mask in Rust as it's for baked lighting only
Client performance session fixes merged
Oil rig scene codegen updates and cleanup