A small Monday morning update for you guys, getting it out of the way in the hope of bigger things later on this week.<ul><li>Fixed unicode not working in name tooltips</li><li>Fixed people using colours in name tooltips</li><li>Removed ‘hatchet to gather’ tooltips</li><li>Added whitelist servers</li><li>Fixed broken explosives</li><li>Fixed being killed by harvesting resources</li></ul>

The whitelist system is as simple as we could make it. If a server assigns itself to a Steam Group you need to be in that group to join it. Whitelist servers that you can join will show up in the whitelist tab on the server browser. We won’t ever show servers you can’t join (in both the normal tabs and the whitelist tabs).

Server owners can make their server a whitelist by doing something like this in their config file:


Servers will need to be restarted before you can join them. If you can’t find your favourite server on the server list it’s because it hasn’t updated yet.

A small Monday morning update for you guys, getting it out of the way in the hope of bigger things later on this week.

• Fixed unicode not working in name tooltips
• Fixed people using colours in name tooltips
• Removed ‘hatchet to gather’ tooltips
• Added whitelist servers
• Fixed broken explosives
• Fixed being killed by harvesting resources

The whitelist system is as simple as we could make it. If a server assigns itself to a Steam Group you need to be in that group to join it. Whitelist servers that you can join will show up in the whitelist tab on the server browser. We won’t ever show servers you can’t join (in both the normal tabs and the whitelist tabs).

Server owners can make their server a whitelist by doing something like this in their config file:


Servers will need to be restarted before you can join them. If you can’t find your favourite server on the server list it’s because it hasn’t updated yet.

Just some minor changes we put up today :

<ul><li>Resources should maybe hopefully not kill you anymore while harvesting them</li><li>Wolves should actually scare other AI when they are chasing or attacking something</li><li>Last chunk of rock should be on the ground instead of hovering</li><li>You can’t place shelters ontop of people anymore and lock them in</li><li>You can’t build stuff on top of large spiked walls anymore</li><li>You can’t build barricades on top of barricades anymore</li><li>Fixed a minor issue with spawning wildlife and resource nodes which could cause some console spam on the server</li><li>AI figures out it can’t get to you much sooner and knows to retreat</li><li>Shelters decay is active for sure and they will disappear</li><li>Metal window bars are thinner and easier to shoot out of</li></ul>


We made our own anti cheat called CheatPunch last week. We ran it over the weekend. 4,621 people have been detected and banned.

We don’t know how stable it’s going to be, so we’re testing it out on our official servers to make sure it all works before forcing it on everyone else. If you get kicked from the official servers with the message that you’ve been banned then you have been caught. You’re a naughty boy. You know what you have done. You won’t get unbanned. We know it was your 9 year old cousin. We know your computer got hijacked. We know that the CIA is getting you banned from all your games on Steam so you will join them in the hunt for aliens. We’re aiming to get a site set up for people that have been banned so they can go and see proof that they’ve been caught.

CheatPunch isn’t the answer to all of our prayers. It’s a stop gap solution. It’s going to get rid of a bunch of cheaters, but it’s not hard to get around (by design). We fully expect cheats to be touted as ‘CheatPunch proof’ quite soon. That’s cool. We’re never going to be finished fighting.

If server owners want to run it on their servers they can do by updating to the latest version and running with “-cheatpunch” on the command line.

Just some minor changes we put up today :

• Resources should maybe hopefully not kill you anymore while harvesting them
• Wolves should actually scare other AI when they are chasing or attacking something
• Last chunk of rock should be on the ground instead of hovering
• You can’t place shelters ontop of people anymore and lock them in
• You can’t build stuff on top of large spiked walls anymore
• You can’t build barricades on top of barricades anymore
• Fixed a minor issue with spawning wildlife and resource nodes which could cause some console spam on the server
• AI figures out it can’t get to you much sooner and knows to retreat
• Shelters decay is active for sure and they will disappear
• Metal window bars are thinner and easier to shoot out of

We made our own anti cheat called CheatPunch last week. We ran it over the weekend. 4,621 people have been detected and banned.

We don’t know how stable it’s going to be, so we’re testing it out on our official servers to make sure it all works before forcing it on everyone else. If you get kicked from the official servers with the message that you’ve been banned then you have been caught. You’re a naughty boy. You know what you have done. You won’t get unbanned. We know it was your 9 year old cousin. We know your computer got hijacked. We know that the CIA is getting you banned from all your games on Steam so you will join them in the hunt for aliens. We’re aiming to get a site set up for people that have been banned so they can go and see proof that they’ve been caught.

CheatPunch isn’t the answer to all of our prayers. It’s a stop gap solution. It’s going to get rid of a bunch of cheaters, but it’s not hard to get around (by design). We fully expect cheats to be touted as ‘CheatPunch proof’ quite soon. That’s cool. We’re never going to be finished fighting.

If server owners want to run it on their servers they can do by updating to the latest version and running with “-cheatpunch” on the command line.

<center><img src="http://playrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/nozombies.png" /></center>Yep. We did it. We decided we couldn’t hold off any longer. The longer we keep zombies in – the more complaints we’d get about removing them. We are forcing ourselves to deal with it. We are no longer a zombie survival game! They’ve been replaced with red bears and wolves. You hate them. We know. They’re just plugging a gap for now. All will be revvvealed.

<center><img src="http://playrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/wildlifeplus.png" /></center>
<ul><li>No longer exploitable by walking backwards</li><li>Fears hostile wildlife</li><li>Reacts to gunshots</li><li>Hostile wildlife retreats if it cannot find a path to you</li><li>Wildlife should not jump up and switch to random angles anymore</li><li>Removed white wolf</li>
</ul>
<center><img src="http://playrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/oreicon.png" /></center>
<ul><li>Added new models for wood & stone resources</li><li>Wood & stone resources change model to indicate their quantity</li><li>Added another stone resource – contains mostly stone</li>
</ul>
<ul><li>Fixed bugs with the level (such as rocks intersecting buildings)</li><li>The ‘oil tank’ area has been modified with cover</li><li>Workbenches make you craft faster when standing next to them</li><li>Added new player animations</li><li>Improved melee attack animations</li><li>Grass textures have been improved</li><li>Footstep sounds will never play the same sound as the one previously played</li><li>Added locked backpacks and lockpicks test ( off by default )<ul><li>When you die your backpack is locked for everyone else but you for a time</li><li>Someone else can use a lockpick tool to bypass this time</li><li>Lockpick tools are a default blueprint</li><li>You can’t use lockpicks on doors</li><li>The amount of time the backpack is locked for is per-server and can be set to 0</li></ul></li></ul>

<center></center>Yep. We did it. We decided we couldn’t hold off any longer. The longer we keep zombies in – the more complaints we’d get about removing them. We are forcing ourselves to deal with it. We are no longer a zombie survival game! They’ve been replaced with red bears and wolves. You hate them. We know. They’re just plugging a gap for now. All will be revvvealed.

<center></center>

• No longer exploitable by walking backwards
• Fears hostile wildlife
• Reacts to gunshots
• Hostile wildlife retreats if it cannot find a path to you
• Wildlife should not jump up and switch to random angles anymore
• Removed white wolf

<center></center>

• Added new models for wood & stone resources
• Wood & stone resources change model to indicate their quantity
• Added another stone resource – contains mostly stone

• Fixed bugs with the level (such as rocks intersecting buildings)
• The ‘oil tank’ area has been modified with cover
• Workbenches make you craft faster when standing next to them
• Added new player animations
• Improved melee attack animations
• Grass textures have been improved
• Footstep sounds will never play the same sound as the one previously played
• Added locked backpacks and lockpicks test ( off by default )
  • When you die your backpack is locked for everyone else but you for a time
  • Someone else can use a lockpick tool to bypass this time
  • Lockpick tools are a default blueprint
  • You can’t use lockpicks on doors
  • The amount of time the backpack is locked for is per-server and can be set to 0

The second one of these. Here’s what’s on our minds.

<h1>Cheating</h1>Cheating is still a huge priority for us. Thousands of people have already been VAC banned. Even though VAC is doing a great job, a lot of people think it’s not responsive enough. What use is a hacker being banned in a week, when he’s on the server annoying you right now? We agree.

So we’ve been talking to a few different companies about other anti-cheat solutions. If we go for one of these, we want it to be super super lightweight. We don’t want to force you to install an obstrusive third party program. We don’t want to make you sign up for another system.

We’re also taking steps to deal with some of the more obvious of these problems ourselves. This is something we’re hoping you’ll start seeing the results of quite soon.. but please understand that we’re doing this from scratch – and these things take time. The very last thing we want to do is rush out a system that accidentally bans legitimate users – and then have to unban everyone. There needs to be no doubt that a specific steam account has been used to cheat.

It’s important to realise that there’s a lot about our anti-cheat measures that we can’t talk about, for obvious reasons. So it might look like we’re not doing anything about cheats. But please keep in mind that making the game as cheat free as possible is in our interest just as much as yours. It’s our game, of course we care.

<h1>Early Access</h1>We feel like we aren’t making it clear enough that the game is Early Access. Rust is still in development. This isn’t 95% finished, like a regular beta. This is 10% finished. We’ve got the bare bone foundations of a game here. We’re still developing it.

This isn’t just is trying to make excused for putting out a buggy game. This is how it is.

<h1>Update Speed</h1>We really feel like we’re letting you down with the slow release/size of updates. We’ve been trying to throw out weekly updates, but this isn’t consistent.

We’re looking at our work-flow and trying to identify ways to get stuff done faster. A lot of this is us thinking to ourselves “is spending 2 hours tweaking the colour of that texture a good use of my time”. But there’s a lot of ways we want to enpower the community to help us out. These are things we’re thinking about right now, and stuff we hope to be experimenting with in the future.

<h1>Trello</h1>We have a Trello up with issues and stuff. This is just for us. You can see what we’re working on, and we’re trying to post updates regularly on the cards so you can experience the progress. This isn’t all we’re doing, we have a private board too – to hide some surprises/secret stuff we’re working on.

This isn’t somewhere for you to post bug reports, issues or requests – but you can certainly sign up and give us a vote on the cards you think are important or are looking forward to.

<h1>Server Stability</h1>The huge attacks we were seeing on our servers a month ago seem to have stopped. We have reports of people attacking individual servers, this doesn’t seem to be any more of an issue than in a game like TF2.

Servers do start to suffer once they’ve had 200 people building stuff on them for a week or so. This is something that was impossible for us to test before we had 200 people that wanted to play. We are looking into performance issues, and fixing them where we’re can. This is an ongoing thing.

<h1>Server Hosts</h1>We’re not looking for more GSP’s right now. We’re happy with the small group we’ve got. We’ll make a news post appealing when we’re looking for more.

<h1>Popularity</h1>We are blown away by the popularity of Rust so far. It doesn’t even seem real yet. Our original plan was to release on Steam Early Access, without making a big deal of it, and slowly build up a bigger fan base by releasing regular updates, until we reached a point where we felt the game was ready for a bigger audience – and then start advertising it and bringing more people in. The unjustifiable popularity is both a blessing and a curse.

It’s a blessing because we’ve sold 750,000 copies in a month and a half, and this is an amount we never even imagined selling over the game’s lifetime. We’ve been the number one best seller for two weeks, we never imagined ever being listed. Rust has already made us 2/3rds the amount of money that Garry’s Mod has made in 8 years – and we never imagined reaching GMod’s popularity ever again. We’ve been the fourth most played game on Steam at points, reaching 50,000 online players – this is more than we could have ever dreamed of.

But it’s also a curse because the amount of people playing has kind of given us a sensory overload. We see all these amazing things happening, voices from all directions, ideas, bugs, cheaters.. and we’re scrambling to catch up with everything. So please don’t be offended if we’re not doing what you want us to, if we don’t respond to emails or tweets, if we’re not administrating the servers properly. We are still adjusting our trajectory, there’s still a lot we want to do.

The second one of these. Here’s what’s on our minds.

Cheating is still a huge priority for us. Thousands of people have already been VAC banned. Even though VAC is doing a great job, a lot of people think it’s not responsive enough. What use is a hacker being banned in a week, when he’s on the server annoying you right now? We agree.

So we’ve been talking to a few different companies about other anti-cheat solutions. If we go for one of these, we want it to be super super lightweight. We don’t want to force you to install an obstrusive third party program. We don’t want to make you sign up for another system.

We’re also taking steps to deal with some of the more obvious of these problems ourselves. This is something we’re hoping you’ll start seeing the results of quite soon.. but please understand that we’re doing this from scratch – and these things take time. The very last thing we want to do is rush out a system that accidentally bans legitimate users – and then have to unban everyone. There needs to be no doubt that a specific steam account has been used to cheat.

It’s important to realise that there’s a lot about our anti-cheat measures that we can’t talk about, for obvious reasons. So it might look like we’re not doing anything about cheats. But please keep in mind that making the game as cheat free as possible is in our interest just as much as yours. It’s our game, of course we care.

We feel like we aren’t making it clear enough that the game is Early Access. Rust is still in development. This isn’t 95% finished, like a regular beta. This is 10% finished. We’ve got the bare bone foundations of a game here. We’re still developing it.

This isn’t just is trying to make excused for putting out a buggy game. This is how it is.

We really feel like we’re letting you down with the slow release/size of updates. We’ve been trying to throw out weekly updates, but this isn’t consistent.

We’re looking at our work-flow and trying to identify ways to get stuff done faster. A lot of this is us thinking to ourselves “is spending 2 hours tweaking the colour of that texture a good use of my time”. But there’s a lot of ways we want to enpower the community to help us out. These are things we’re thinking about right now, and stuff we hope to be experimenting with in the future.

We have a Trello up with issues and stuff. This is just for us. You can see what we’re working on, and we’re trying to post updates regularly on the cards so you can experience the progress. This isn’t all we’re doing, we have a private board too – to hide some surprises/secret stuff we’re working on.

This isn’t somewhere for you to post bug reports, issues or requests – but you can certainly sign up and give us a vote on the cards you think are important or are looking forward to.

The huge attacks we were seeing on our servers a month ago seem to have stopped. We have reports of people attacking individual servers, this doesn’t seem to be any more of an issue than in a game like TF2.

Servers do start to suffer once they’ve had 200 people building stuff on them for a week or so. This is something that was impossible for us to test before we had 200 people that wanted to play. We are looking into performance issues, and fixing them where we’re can. This is an ongoing thing.

We’re not looking for more GSP’s right now. We’re happy with the small group we’ve got. We’ll make a news post appealing when we’re looking for more.

We are blown away by the popularity of Rust so far. It doesn’t even seem real yet. Our original plan was to release on Steam Early Access, without making a big deal of it, and slowly build up a bigger fan base by releasing regular updates, until we reached a point where we felt the game was ready for a bigger audience – and then start advertising it and bringing more people in. The unjustifiable popularity is both a blessing and a curse.

It’s a blessing because we’ve sold 750,000 copies in a month and a half, and this is an amount we never even imagined selling over the game’s lifetime. We’ve been the number one best seller for two weeks, we never imagined ever being listed. Rust has already made us 2/3rds the amount of money that Garry’s Mod has made in 8 years – and we never imagined reaching GMod’s popularity ever again. We’ve been the fourth most played game on Steam at points, reaching 50,000 online players – this is more than we could have ever dreamed of.

But it’s also a curse because the amount of people playing has kind of given us a sensory overload. We see all these amazing things happening, voices from all directions, ideas, bugs, cheaters.. and we’re scrambling to catch up with everything. So please don’t be offended if we’re not doing what you want us to, if we don’t respond to emails or tweets, if we’re not administrating the servers properly. We are still adjusting our trajectory, there’s still a lot we want to do.

<h1>Shared Doors</h1><ul><li>You can now set a passcode on a door and share it with other people – Hold E to set the passcode</li><li>Once they’ve entered the passcode they can open and close the door until you change it.</li><li>This also works on gates.</li><li>In addition, you can set a door to be unlocked so anyone can use it without a passcode.</li></ul><img width="100%" src="http://playrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/shareddoors_demo.jpg">

<h1>Grass Improvements</h1><ul><li>Grass runs twice as fast as it used to</li><li>Grass looks way better</li><li>Grass shouldn’t flicker on ATI cards anymore (but let us know if it does)</li><li>Grass has improved sound effects</li></ul><img width="100%" src="http://playrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/newgrass_demo.jpg">

<h1>Beds & Bags</h1><ul><li>Sleeping bags now reset the use timers of all your other sleeping bags in a 100m radius. This prevents base “zerging”</li><li>Beds were added! – These can only be placed inside a house with a roof and act like the old sleeping bags did</li></ul><img width="100%" src="http://playrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/bed_demo.jpg">

<h1>Other changes and fixes</h1>
<ul><li>Added vsync option</li><li>RCon now receives msgid 4 containing all console output</li><li>Opening boxes no longer resets decay – old things should actually disappear now</li><li>Added HUD indication so you know when you’re voice chatting</li><li>Fixed exploit where mouse sensitivity reduced weapon sway</li><li>Added a delay to repairing objects after they have been damaged</li><li>Metal structures now need metal to repair instead of wood</li><li>Fixed random headshot sound that would happen when shooting near the top of inanimate objects</li><li>Camp fire particles are no longer visible at long range (should help with performance)</li><li>You can only repair something 5 seconds after it last took damage</li><li>Servers can now be added to favourites by clicking the star on the left</li></ul>

Atrium Carceri, the artist who made the initial music we had in the very very early alpha is a pretty cool guy. When we started selling rust we decided to remove his music because we hadn’t worked anything out with him. But recently we talked to him and he decided to make a few tracks inspired by rust as a demo. We’ve put them in game and will listen to the feedback, if you guys like it we will get him to do more! If you’re not a fan of music in games you can always turn it off in the options ( or press pageup )

• You can now set a passcode on a door and share it with other people – Hold E to set the passcode
• Once they’ve entered the passcode they can open and close the door until you change it.
• This also works on gates.
• In addition, you can set a door to be unlocked so anyone can use it without a passcode.

• Grass runs twice as fast as it used to
• Grass looks way better
• Grass shouldn’t flicker on ATI cards anymore (but let us know if it does)
• Grass has improved sound effects

• Sleeping bags now reset the use timers of all your other sleeping bags in a 100m radius. This prevents base “zerging”
• Beds were added! – These can only be placed inside a house with a roof and act like the old sleeping bags did

• Added vsync option
• RCon now receives msgid 4 containing all console output
• Opening boxes no longer resets decay – old things should actually disappear now
• Added HUD indication so you know when you’re voice chatting
• Fixed exploit where mouse sensitivity reduced weapon sway
• Added a delay to repairing objects after they have been damaged
• Metal structures now need metal to repair instead of wood
• Fixed random headshot sound that would happen when shooting near the top of inanimate objects
• Camp fire particles are no longer visible at long range (should help with performance)
• You can only repair something 5 seconds after it last took damage
• Servers can now be added to favourites by clicking the star on the left

Atrium Carceri, the artist who made the initial music we had in the very very early alpha is a pretty cool guy. When we started selling rust we decided to remove his music because we hadn’t worked anything out with him. But recently we talked to him and he decided to make a few tracks inspired by rust as a demo. We’ve put them in game and will listen to the feedback, if you guys like it we will get him to do more! If you’re not a fan of music in games you can always turn it off in the options ( or press pageup )