Rust gets Motorbikes, Bicycles, Handcuffs, and More with the last update

MOTORBIKES

Motorbikes can now be found at several monument locations. One is a single-person bike and one has a sidecar as well, where a second player can sit and use weapons.

These are relatively fast and nimble vehicles, useful for quickly traversing the map using low grade fuel. If damaged, they can be repaired with a small amount of Metal Fragments.

BICYCLES

Bicycles can now be found across the map on roadsides, and also at several monuments. The standard bike takes one player, but a three-wheeled variant allows a second player to sit and shoot from the rear.

The bicycles aren’t as fast or strong as the new motorbikes, but they’re easier to acquire, and they don’t use any fuel. Instead, they slowly consume your own food and water levels.

Holding Sprint while biking will have the driver stand up and give you a bit more temporary power and speed. Sprint mode will also automatically engage if you’re struggling up a hill. This feature wears out after a few seconds and needs time to recharge.

HANDCUFFS AND PRISONER HOOD

Take your enemies captive with the new Handcuff and Prisoner Hood items!

Use the Handcuffs on a surrendering (friendly gesture) or downed player to take them prisoner – restricting their inventory, belt, use and interact options.

Handcuffed players can be pushed around and forced into vehicles and other mountables.

Place the new Prisoner Hood on your victim to block their vision and disable their map access, preventing them from seeing where you are taking them.

Handcuffed players can hold their attack button to progress the unlock minigame. Fill the progress bar and the Handcuffs break, releasing you! Unlock progress is tied to the Handcuff item condition so that you can always eventually get free – but being damaged or pushed will temporarily interrupt your breakout attempt!

Additionally, performing the friendly gesture – at any time – lets other players inspect your full inventory and modify your belt – a great way to show you’re not a threat or hiding something valuable!

TRAVELLING VENDOR

We’ve added a brand new event! The Travelling Vendor. The vendor will spawn naturally on maps with ring roads (4000+) and traverse the roads.

The vendor sells a selection of wares: from basic building materials to some of the best items in the game. Each time the vendor spawns a random selection of items are chosen to sell, along with a different price each time. If you’re lucky, the vendor will decide to sell something at a discount, so keep an eye out!

To get the vendor to stop just run up to it, but don’t stand blocking its way for too long or you will be ignored. It can’t wait on you forever! It doesn’t take too kindly to gunfire or selling to hostiles so make sure you’re on your best behaviour.

I want to say a huge thanks to the Rust Discord Community for their incredible work in helping debug and improve the vendor.

QUALITY OF LIFE CHANGES

Ceiling lights IO points are now easier to target

Can now place barricades on rocks and dirt roads

DYNAMIC VENDOR PRICING

To introduce a little more variety into the NPC vending system, this month we have introduced a change that increases or decreases the sale price of items purchased with scrap based on that item’s popularity.

The way it works is we now keep a running total of the average number of items sold every 6 in-game hours. Every 6 hours if the number sold is less than the average then the price of the item will drop by 5% for the next 6 hours (down to a minimum of 50%). If the number of items sold has increased above the average then its price will be increased by 10% (to a maximum of 100% extra, or twice the price). We will be starting prices at 200% so they will likely drop for a while before settling to the “market” price.

An example of the logic:

• The average amount of SAM sites purchased in a 6 hour window is 150, and the current price has no increases or decreases.
• At the end of a 6 hour window we check and see that 155 SAM sites have been purchased.
• Since the average has gone up, we raise the price by 10%.
• Since the price is now more expensive, sales drop to 120 over the next 6 hours.
• Since this is below the average we then drop the price by 5%, which results in a 5% price increase in total.

You can see the current discount and price when looking at an item on the map or in-person, the price displayed is the final price and there’s a small indicator that communicates what the current price change is and what that item’s initial price was. You can easily tell at a glance what items are cheap and what items are expensive, as well as how much they’ve changed price to make informed purchasing decisions.

We’ve only applied this to sales where the currency paid is scrap – vending machines that offer scrap in exchange for items (fish market, resource exchange, etc) are unaffected. This will also not apply to player created vending machines.

Why are we making this change? We believe the NPC vending meta can be shaken up a bit and this seems like a fairer change than us just arbitrarily changing a bunch of prices across the board. This way the prices will increase and decrease based on player behaviour and will vary from server to server. As usual we’ll monitor how this goes over the next month and make changes as necessary.

Building on last month’s work to reduce the overall number of objects in Rust to save memory, this month we are rolling out even more improvements. We applied the same principle (reducing the number of objects by combining them when possible) but at the project level, so that most assets are already combined and streamlined in the build and don’t need to be processed when starting the game up. The streamlining process we use here is even more aggressive and results in even greater memory savings while also reducing time spent processing assets.

As well as these optimisations, we’re going to be making last month’s renderer improvements now enabled by default.

We believe this approach combined with last month’s improvements has resulted in about a gigabyte of reduced memory usage on a fresh server.

This was a huge effort as it involved manually modifying hundreds of assets across the entire game. Thanks to the valiant efforts of our QA team we’ve identified many cases where slight unintentional material and colour changes occurred but it’s possible some more snuck through into the release so please let us know if you see anything that looks incorrect!

Just like last month, we have more improvements in the pipeline for next month including memory improvements to monument foliage and a new process for loading monuments that will hopefully reduce loading times and further reduce memory usage.

UNDERWATER VISIBILITY

Underwater visibility has been messed up for a while now. It was an unintended consequence of us rewriting the way we shade things underwater, to make it more flexible.

That low visibility has now been fixed, but we might continue to tweak it some more in subsequent patches.

ANTI-CHEAT UPDATE

Since our last anti-cheat update back in April, we have banned an additional 65,181 accounts, 10,297 of these were temporary, and the remaining 54,884 were permanent bans. Here’s the breakdown per patch:

• 14,949 permanent bans
• 5,898 temporary bans (86.39% of which were automated)
• 117,554 reports

• 19,876 permanent bans
• 2,755 temporary bans (91.80% of which were automated),
• 111,094 reports

• 20,059 permanent bans
• 1,644 temporary bans (94.67% of which were automated)
• 96,473 reports

NOTES

• Patch-specific report data is only from Facepunch Official servers due to data reliability originating from non-official servers, the total number of reports across all server since April is 3,645,165.
• Bans that were later reverted are excluded from these metrics.
• Bans are placed for multiple reasons. The numbers above do not strictly reflect only cheat-related bans, but cheat-related bans make up the vast majority of bans.
• A single player can receive multiple bans, for example, if a user is temporarily banned and then later switched to a permanent ban, this is counted as 2 bans in the above metrics.
• Over the last 31-days, we’ve had 1,751,457 unique players, and close to half a million daily active players. Using the metrics above, it could be interpreted that 1.2% of the player base are cheaters, it’s very common for cheaters to use many accounts over the course of the month. Cheaters often receive an account suspension, get another account, receive another ban, rinse and repeat inflating the true number.

The above is to provide context and transparency, not to state we’re doing a good job, there is much more to be done in this area, and we are continuing to work on it.

NEXT

In the last anti-cheat blog update, I discussed how we’ve limited the information cheaters can read and abuse from network data, such as knowing players health and buried stash locations, authorization lists from turrets and tool cupboards. The holy grail would be not networking nearby players and items you can’t see.

If a player is behind a hill and you can’t see them, don’t network the player. If a tool cupboard is inside a base, don’t network the tool cupboard. This is server occlusion, and it’s difficult to get perfect. We’re currently experimenting with this and hope to do a slow rollout over the coming months, pending further internal testing.

Additionally, we’re currently working on many experimental features to disrupt cheats, some of these changes are nearly completion and will be deployed Soon™.

Last month, we teamed up with a third party to handle takedowns on our behalf. One of the core objectives is aimed at cheat-related material. The takedowns will be made at the request of Facepunch staff after manual review. There is no automation, and there is no room for innocent content to be taken down.

• In the past 30 days, we’ve taken down over 300 cheats-related media on social platforms
• We’re working on several other legal fronts, which are too early to discuss

The next anticheat update will be in November

CREATIVE MODE

Creative mode is a new set of native tools Paddy and I have added which allows players to freely build, place and experiment without needing additional plugins. You can enable creative mode for everyone on your server using the server convar “creative.allUsers” or enable it just for a specific player using “creative.toggleCreativeModeUser PLAYERNAME”.

Once enabled, there are several convars you can enable which overrides standard build and placement restrictions:

• creative.freeRepair

  – allows resource free repairs and bypass the repair cooldown

• creative.freeBuild

  – makes all building blocks free and adds the option to spawn blocks in a specific grade. Also allows the Hammer to upgrade and downgrade blocks for free.

• creative.freePlacement

  – removes most placement restrictions when deploying objects. Will allow building in building blocked zones, in other TC zones and when intersecting other objects.

• creative.unlimitedIO

  – allows an unlimited amount of line points and raises the distance limit when wiring IO entities to 200m. Also adds an invisible colour option in the colour wheel.

This was originally made to help our Media team more efficiently build and film content, but we also see this being helpful for QA purposes as well. Hopefully you find it helpful too!