[The Umbrella Expedition]

It’s a wiping update today. A new dawn for servers that brings updated dungeons, weapon attachments, performance improvements, and more. We also have an update on the upcoming XP system.

XP System

I’m still working on this. It’s not live with this patch, but it’s playable on the pre-release branch on Steam. On there I’ve gone through and rebalanced the tech tree and I’m happy-ish with it from a gameplay perspective thus far. I’ve also written some code that calculates the cost of items based on the level they unlock at as well as how many other items are unlocked at that level. Basically, I’ve made it so when things become eligible for unlocking, you’ll be able to afford 66% of the items in that level. This will give players some choice. Do you unlock something that will help at that moment, or bank that XP so you can afford to unlock something better later on? Next week, I’m going to work on making the system a little more intuitive and adding proper “gamefeel”, so you know when you’re leveling up and whats available. I’m also going to add several new ways to earn XP (when players use tools you crafted, when players use resources you gathered, when crafting items, etc.) and tone down or eliminate the XP you get from simply hitting trees and rocks.

There’s going to be some obvious oversights, and I’m patching the tech tree several times a day and adjusting as we go. Response on prerelease has been great so far and I’m constantly requesting feedback on the server, so please give it a try and let me know your suggestions. The sooner we get this balanced the sooner we can push it out to main!

Muzzle Mods Added

Thanks to a bunch of attachment bugs being fixed we’re pleased to launch the two new muzzle modifications for weapons. As stated in the previous devblog, the muzzle brake allows you to stay on target a lot easier at the expense of some errant shots (think more CoD style spread), while the muzzle booster increases the fire rate of your weapon. I know for a fact this will need rebalancing next week so I will be listening.

Attachment Costs

I’ve gone ahead and lowered the cost of weapon attachments by about half (apart from the Scope). They really weren’t being used enough, and when they were it was only by people with so much HQM to spare that they may as well waste it on them. This should lower bar for entry to poorer players as well as increase their usage in general.

Attachment Bugs (lol)

Wow this is embarrassing.
For the longest time the modifier effects for attachments were active even if they weren’t set to enabled. This means the Scope was doing things like lowering bullet velocity by 30%, and the Silencer was increasing fire rate. Haha. Now we get to see how unbalanced (or balanced?) the game will be now that everything is working properly. Rage on.

Dungeon Art

This time I had the chance to finish a couple of interesting structures. There’s the pigeon nest, a structure you can find in canyon and water treatment plant. Remember bird poop? There’s plenty of it on that tower, and it will lead you up the tower, marking places that you can jump on. I did make the climbing of the tower easier to achieve by tweaking a few of the jumps, and it’s now more predictable where you gotta jump from and land now.
I worked on the sewage tanks that you can traverse in the water treatment plant, pretty much only cosmetic changes for those. There’s a few things that might still be a bit rough around them but we’ll get that sorted over time.

Also since this week’s patch is a wipe you benefit from all the previous dungeons artwork for this month.

Heavy Armour

I tentatively started work on the heavy armour that Paul concepted a few weeks ago. It’s still in a very early stage, and the design space for this one is very delicate. It should definitely feel like a niche choice based on circumstance and not be objectively better than other armour choices. I’ll probably take my crappy blockout and stick it in game next week to make sure the armour set is suitably vulnerable to a flanking attack, especially if the wearer has poor mobility.

Floating Ration Box Art

I’ve finished off ration box art! Rations include beans, chicken dinner and mashed potato, water, and fuel. The essentials for surviving Rust, especially the mashed potato (all will be available individually). Have spin with the preview above and below is a pic of how it’ll look when added to the game.

Changelog

Fixed bug where a gun’s magazine would spawn out of thin air in 1st person during reload
Dungeon art monthly progress
Weapon mods can both offset and scale all weapon stats
Fixed weapon hip aim cone parameter being ignored
Fixed that only the first weapon attachment was receiving the weapon aiming state
Added layer.toggle, layer.show, layer.hide and layer.culling admin console commands
The restart console command now takes the number of seconds as an argument
The default restart timer is now 5 minutes instead of 60 seconds
Calling restart -1 cancels the server restart
Don’t try to update Steam stats if Steam is not initialized (server error)
Fixed projectile weapon repeat / reload delay inaccuracies
Optimized entity linking on both client and server
Fixed a no clipping exploit
Player model state is now updated and verified once per frame instead of once per tick
Fixed an exploit to access the F1 menu admin tools
The object quality slider no longer uses far too low quality meshes at close range
Suicides are displayed in separate column in the stats console command
Weapon attachments are no longer invisible when attached to the held weapon
Fixed being able to stack boxes partially inside walls
Fixed admins getting violations when disabling no clipping while moving very fast
Added flyhack_protection mode 2
Increased projectile LOS penalty for player to player damage
Building blocks store a unique building ID
Buildings have to keep a distance of two meters between each other
Fixed sign update issues for clients with slow connections
Stripped the .prefab extension from death screen kill messages
Procedural Map: Fixed holes in mountains
Procedural Map: Increased distance between mountains
Procedural Map: Increased monument and road density
Procedural Map: Increased minimum powerline distance
Procedural Map: Tweaked airfield and cave monument topology
Procedural Map: Increased overall number of caves on the map
Procedural Map: Decreased minimum distance between caves
Procedural Map: Enabled shore wetness on the road material
Procedural Map: Tweaked water to landmass ratio
Fixed revz related particle issues; e.g. missing fly swarm
Fixed scattering related particle issues
Added experimental large scale occlusion
Added Muzzle Booster
Added Muzzle Brake
Halved (more or less) attachment costs