PLAYER MADE BOATS
Player-made boats are here, providing a new way to explore the seas, including the Deep Sea!
Place the new Boat Building Station deployable in the water and get building with your shipmates! Use the new Boat Building Plan to construct your dream boat, utilising a new set of boat-specific building blocks.
Add a steering wheel, anchor, sails, engines, planks, ramps and cannons to complete your vessel and head off into the Deep Sea!
Careful consideration and placement of your engines and sails is important if you want a seaworthy ship, as they will affect its handling and speed. Sails and engines can both be reversed using the radial menu options for some nifty reverse parking.
Be sure to set a lock code on your steering wheel to stop unwanted access or theft of your shiny new boat.
Regular deployables can be placed on your boats. If they work on the Tugboat, they'll work here too.
Need to make a change after realising your boat just goes in circles? Use the Deploy & Edit mode (not available in the Deep Sea) to quickly and easily deploy a Boat Building Station around your boat.
Have fun building and exploring the seas!
NEW BOAT DEPLOYABLES
To get your vessel sea worthy, we've now got some new deployables - specifically for your boat!
Boat Building Station
The boat-building station is placeable in deep water, it's used to build and edit your boat.
Building plan
The boat-building plan is similar to the building planner you know and love, but for boats.
Sails
A sheet of toughened fabric rigged to catch the wind and help propel the boat forwards.
Helm
A must-have for any seaworthy boat. Used to steer and control your direction, with a built-in lock to keep your vessel secure when you’re not at the wheel.
Engine
A powerful motor that runs on low grade fuel and burns through it fast. Loud, thirsty, and inefficient, but invaluable when you need to escape danger, chase down other players, or muscle your way out of a bad situation. Sometimes speed is worth the cost.
Anchor
A heavy anchor used to stop your boat drifting. Drop it to hold position and keep your vessel exactly where you want it. Without it, your boat may drift to shore.
Canon
A powerful naval weapon used to sink other players’ boats. Load it with cannon balls.
Small Ramp
Bridge gaps and create quick access points. Ideal for boarding other ships or reaching land from the water.
Plank
Used to bridge gaps, board other boats, and settle minor disagreements by pushing friends into open water.
THE DEEP SEA
The Deep Sea is a new offshore region you can travel to using boats. It’s high risk, high reward, and intentionally unforgiving.
You can access it by sailing toward the edge of the map using a strong boat such as player-made boats, RHIBs or the new PT boats.
This is not a place to live: you cannot build, and nothing respawns. First come, first served. The deep sea will open and close intermittently, like a world event.
Inside, you can explore new content detailed below in this blog:
Tropical islands
Floating cities
Ghost ships
Boats controlled by scientists
We have lots of plans to expand deep-sea and use it as a bridge between worlds.
GHOST SHIPS
Similar to monuments, Ghost Ships are stationary ships scattered throughout the deep sea and filled with loot for people to scavenge while navigating on their boats.
Each Ghost Ship is protected by scientists, both on the ship and nearby patrols who will try to keep you off the ship. Some Ghost Ships also contain locked crates, which you'll need to hack while being under pressure of other players and scientist boats.
We hope that Ghost Ships, along with other loot locations such as tropical islands provide enough incentive to visit the deep sea often.
DEEP SEA FLOATING CITIES
While exploring the deep sea, you may come across the Floating Cities. Built from abandoned barges and the framework of an unfinished oil rig, these ramshackle monuments serve as safe haven for all types of players.
Currently, there are four variants of Floating Cities that can spawn on a server with each floating city offering the same type of facilities. These include docks where you can secure your boat and various NPC vendors selling weapons, equipment, food, and medical supplies.
A nearby farming barge can be accessed for a small fee, giving you the chance to harvest fresh crops. Throughout each monument, familiar safe-zone amenities are scattered among the platforms, including recyclers, workbenches, research tables, and refineries.
At the center of every floating city is the Deep Deck Casino, an inviting space offering entertainment and a place to relax to all weary sailors. Here you can meet fellow survivors, unwind in the pool, enjoy music, and gamble away your scrap to your heart’s content.
Just remember to play nice while you're there - stir up trouble, and the security turrets will remind you why that was a bad idea.
DEEP SEA ISLANDS
For years, the ocean has just been a blue void between you and the Oil Rigs. With this update, we are introducing a brand new biome in the Deep Sea, the Tropical Islands.
These micro-islands are fully distinct from the mainland. Expect white sands, dense palms, and even a new delicious natural treat. You won't see any pine trees here.
Their semi-procedural nature will yield different experiences. Some of them might have old ruins, others a motherlode of ore - or both.
But tread carefully. You aren't the only one seeking a fortune out there.
SCIENTIST BOATS
We've added a new boat - the PT Boat. Only found in the Deepsea - It's slower than the RHIB and consumes more fuel, but is stronger and packs a punch.
Beware, the Deep Sea is filled with the new Scientist Boats. These vessels (including RHIBs and the new PT Boat), are crewed by scientists who roam the Deep Sea in coordinated groups looking for players to engage. You might find them protecting the Hacked Crate on board a Ghost Ship. Each boat can be cleared of Scientists and stolen by the player.
We wonder what you'll find on-board?
Each PT Boat comes equipped with two turrets. One packing dual 50 caliber machine guns, and the other with a single more precise 50 caliber gun. Each can be reloaded with standard 5.56 rifle ammo.
RHIB REFRESH
The RHIB has been in need of a little TLC, and there's no better time to do that than the Naval Update. The model and textures have been updated, along with a new storage box model.
The RHIB now comes equipped with a working compass and map display screens - helping you navigate the ocean.
NEW SCIENTIST AI ON OILRIGS AND AT SEA
If you fought a lot of scientists, you know trying to sneak or flank them is the perfect way to get killed.
The always know where you are, and will instantly 180 and beam you if you try to play smart and outmanoeuver them.
Because of this, it's very tempting to either snipe them from very far away, or camp behind a bottleneck and wait for them to inevitably rush in one by one.
This makes taking a monument guarded by scientists a test of resources with a low skill ceiling.
It boils it down to: do you know the cheese, and do you have enough ammo and bandages to grind through them?
New scientist AI is progressively coming out, but only to oilrigs, ghostships and deep sea islands for now.
You can tell them apart from their naval camo outfit and square visor.
Unlike their cousins they don't see through walls, and need to rely on noises and recent sightings to find you.
This means you can bait them by peeking or making a noise, then go around and shoot them in the back.
This is further facilitated by their lower reaction time.
If you appear at an angle they didn't expect, they'll be surprised, then you can shoot them down before they can even react.
Additionally they won't rush down into bottlenecks to be slaughtered by a camping player, instead they'll try to flank, throw smoke grenades and rush together, or just wait in ambush on the other side.
They'll also be a lot more cautious against snipers, if they're hit or hear a shot they'll all dive into cover and wait.
We'll keep a close eye on your feedback and keep tweaking them.
Where they're in a good enough state, we'll consider switching the other scientists on the main island to the new AI.
BUILDING PLAN VIEWMODEL
We think it would be nice to have what everyone else sees match what you see so we've added a Viewmodel to the planner.
NEW MISSIONS
We have 5 new naval themed missions in this month's update. These can be picked up from a mixture of new and existing mission provider NPC's. Some of these require you to venture in the deep sea, some keep you rooted at the mainland.
This update brings in a lot of work to improve how we create and modify missions internally. There is still more we want to do with missions, but we are in a better place to work on them now than we were before. This work additionally brings in several QOL fixes and improvements to existing missions and NPC conversations, as well as related background optimisations.
LARGE OILRIG BOATS
Scientist boats will now spawn at Large Oilrig with the crate - giving players an additional challenge when taking oil from the sea.
The RHIBs will patrol around Large Oilrig, preventing any players from getting close. These respawn each time the Oilrig resets.
You can kill the scientists and steal the loot on board. Stolen boats will stay around after the Oilrig reset.
ARTIST PACK DLC
Rust has one of the most diverse playerbases of any popular game, from hardcore PVPers to friendly and not-so-friendly RPers. To reflect this, we’ve cracked out our finest digital brushes and created the Artist DLC Pack; a collection of cool and clever items designed to help you express yourself no matter if you want to paint a charming portrait, or tag up your neighbour’s base.
Paintball Gun and Overalls
Turn tactical assault into art with the Paintball Gun and Overalls. Featuring a unique ammo type, load the hopper with paintballs, select your team colour and make a scene. Comes in 5 colours for multiple teams.
Paintballs do different damage amounts depending on if both the hurt player and instigator player have overalls equipped. There are separate server convas to scale these if admins desire, 'paintballstandarddamage' and 'paintballoverallsdamage'.
You can of course also use the paintball gun to tag up whatever you want, not just other players! Additionally, the paintball overalls have a unique feature where the hood is dynamically up or down depending on your choice of headwear.
Paintable Reactive Target
Light up your own targets with this deployable skin for the Reactive Target. You can paint on both the target board and the bucket helmet. As an added feature the bucket acts like a player’s head, allowing you to hone your headshot skills.
Ornate Frames
Bring a touch of class to your base with these Ornate frames. Paint on them or add a photo, and once you’re happy with your masterpiece, give the frame a unique description. Comes in 5 size varieties from small to extra extra large.
Light-Up Frames
Put your artwork up in lights with this collection of 5 light-up frames. Supporting IO, you can display these lights off or on, which will highlight your work for all to see.
Shutter Frames
Unroll your designs with the shutter frames. Coming in 5 size variates, you can roll-up and down the shutters both manually and with IO, enabling endless possibilities from an RP Gameshow Contest to the ultimate trap base reveal.
Frameless Canvases
If the extra large frame isn’t big enough for your ambition, look no further than this set of 5 frameless canvasses. You can use these to create murals of truly epic proportions.
Portable Easel
Take your talent to the great outdoors with this new unique deployable. You can mount any frame up to Large size and paint to your heart's content taking in the crisp air downwind of Fishing Village. In paint-mode, you can toggle the background and even the canvas itself, helping you in your creative vision. The easel supports any colour you want to use, even black…
Paintable Window
Whether you want to make stained glass, a fish tank, a store window or a Home Alone-style decoy, this paintable window will come in handy! This deployable is a skin for the Strengthened Glass Window.
Rosette Award Sprays
Last but not least, awarded with the Artist DLC Pack are 4 custom sprays usable with the Spraypaint tool. Included are sprays for 1st Place, 2nd Place, 3rd Place and… Last Place. Use these as you see fit.
NEW WORKSHOP SKINNABLE: SKS
This month, we're introducing the next workshop skinnable: the SKS
The SKS has been a popular request from the skinning community, and we’re happy to oblige! As one of our newest weapons, we can’t wait to see how the community works with its updated visuals.
To make your own SKS skin, head over to the in-game workshop and locate the SKS weapon item. From there, you can download the model file and add your own materials.
SERVER PERFORMANCE
If you've been following development of this update you'll likely know that we had to postpone it last year due to some concerning server performance issues. Since then we've been extremely focused on getting server performance as close to it's pre Naval update levels as possible. While a lot of the issues were in new content, we didn't stop there and have made a lot of improvements to older performance bottlenecks.
A lot of these explanations might be a bit technical but we thought it might be interesting to see the process we go through when working through these issues.
COOKING/OVEN PERFORMANCE
We noticed some large frame times attributed to the Oven process - this is any campfire, furnace, BBQ, etc. On closer inspection this had a few issues. The cook process runs every 0.5s with no randomisation, so if a lot of ovens were running at once they would likely bunch up and cause large spikes. In an artifical test case of 500 ovens running in sync, we were seeing 18ms to work through all of the ovens.
Ovens now use a maximum budget of 0.25ms a frame to smooth out the cost when running at scale. This would just make the system run slower so we also made some optimisations to get each Oven running faster. When creating an output item we used to make a new item (eg. 1x metal frag), and attempt to add that item to the output (which would usually add +1 to the existing stack and then delete the newly created item). It's much faster to check if there is already an item in the output and just increase it's count, bypassing the new item creation process (we've used this trick on the Industrial system for a while). Each oven was also iterating over all of it's items to find the fuel each tick, that's now cached. Finally, the oven was marking it's inventory dirty every time it updated the cook process (to update the animated progress on the item icon), this now only gets dirtied when passing a threshold (5%, 10%, etc) which dramatically cuts down the overhead from sending out the updated inventory.
These changes bring the artificial test of 500 Furnaces smelting Metal Ore down to a maximum of 0.25ms, often less than that and with no visible changes to players.
INDUSTRIAL PERFORMANCE
The Industrial system has always been a challenge when it comes to server performance. Base and pipe designs have been getting even more elaborate and complex over the years which exposes new bottlenecks in the logic. This month I was able to get a copy of an extremely poor performing base from one of our live servers that was a useful benchmark. In some cases this base was spending 20ms/frame to fully evaluate the entire Industrial system which is obviously a problem on any server.
The main gains here involved reducing the number of times we had to iterate over item containers and other arrays. At this scale simply getting an item from a container can be slow as the order of items in memory may not match the order of items in a container, so we potentially need to iterate over the entire container to find what item is in a given slot. Multiply that by every slot in every input evaluating ever slot on every output and the cost adds up quickly. Making a quick lookup that we can refer to during the Industrial process was a huge gain, in some cases bypassing over 20,000 enumerations.
Checking items passed filters was also costing us time, running the whole input container through the filter a single time at the start of the process allowed us to bypass even more enumerations, it also meant we could remove a couple of layers of nested for loops. The end result is that the above base would now peak at 3ms for a frame. Still quite a while, but a marked improvement over the original case.
RELATIONSHIP SYSTEM
The RelationshipManager system controls the Contacts system - taking images of players you meet and keeping track of your relationships. It's relatively limited in functionality, but it was taking quite a while on heavily populated servers.
This was iterating over every player in the server, finding any players in range, checking if they are visible (using a physics check) and creating a new relationship if needed. It would also go through every existing relationship a player has, calculate how many players have marked a player as negative and flag them as hostile by default (ie. their nametag will be red). This was happening every 1s with no protection for lots of players triggering this in the same frame, so this could lead to occasional very long frame times - up to 0.75ms on busy servers.
I've updated this process to use a budgeted queue so we'll only do a maximum of 0.15ms of processing in a frame, if more players need an update it will wait for the next frame. Since this logic doesn't need to be perfectly up to date a slight delay is acceptable and will likely not be noticeable. I also updated the hostile calculation to only run if a player has modified a contact (marked friendly/hostile/neutral) as in most cases this calculation was getting the same result every time. Finally I updated the line of sight check when creating new contacts to use the server occlusion system as a first pass, which means we can skip the physics calculation a lot of the time.
PLAYER COLLIDER SIZES
We support changing the size of the player collider in select scenarios - when downed, sleeping, mounted to vehicles, etc. This was being applied by iterating over every player on the server, every frame and updating it as needed. On a moderately populated server this was taking 0.25ms, even though in most cases it didn't need to update the collider size.
I've improved this to use a budgeted queue so it will only update 0.05ms worth of players a frame. Since the player collider size is quite important, I've gone through and added a manual size adjustment when the player changes state (eg. goes to sleep) so the size should still be updated immediately and not delayed by a few frames.
PARENTING VOLUMES
We have a system in Rust called "parenting volumes" - as the name implies, these volumes detect if a player or other entity is in the vicinity and should be parented to another object. As there are a lot of edge cases, we also run extra checks(like physics queries) to avoid issues.
The upcoming player-made boats depend on it, and also utilize it quite a bit more than anything else in the world. During development, we've discovered that it adds a large cost to server processing. Here's an example of 100 boats made out of 3 blocks and 3 sleeping players:
And here's how much it costs - 3.5ms, which is a lot for something that's not actively in use:
I've taken time to rewrite this logic that runs if TriggerParent.TickMode is set to 1 (which is default). It now:
Uses it's own processing queue instead of Invokes, reducing stalls if physics world changes between individual invokes
Used batch processing and Burst jobs to overlap work across threads where possible
Skip work if volume and it's contents haven't moved/changed
As a result, the above scenario now takes:
1.4ms(-61%) if every boat is moving
0.25ms(-93%) if every boat is static
PROCEDURAL SPAWNING SPIKES
While looking through our performance telemetry I've noticed that we've been experiencing weird, frequent massive lag spikes every minute or so:
Turns out our entity-population system was struggling to respawn all missing entities (specifically junkpiles). It works by tracking a population's density on the server, and running a bunch of random samples of the world, filtering invalid ones, then finally using those positions to spawn entities.
I wrote a tool that simulates population refilling(spawn.dump_map <popname> [count=100]) visualizes how the sampling works and why samples get rejected. Various rejection reasons are color coded, with only "Green" being success. Here's the before fixes visualization - 25000(max limit) attempts to spawn 800 junkpiles:
Turns out, we had a couple bugs that would both prevent spawning new entities as well as still samples even if we don't have any entities to spawn. Fixing those and running the tool again we get 3019 attempts to spawn 800 junkpiles (need to zoom in to see pixels):
This also had a positive effect on our max-frametime telemetry - lagspikes are much rarer now:
AUTOTURRET PERFORMANCE
Auto Turrets are consistently a huge drain on servers. This is because they do frequent angle updates every few seconds, this happens for each turret on a server. Each of these angle updates were being constantly synced via the network to all nearby clients. This was flooding the clients with a bunch of unnecessary network overhead.
The graph below shows the execution time difference of the SendAimDir() method which was used to send these values over the network. The patch dropped at 10 PM on our staging servers ( you can see the harsh drop after implementation). This change also affects the Ballista and the new Cannon, reducing both of their networking overheads.
These angle updates were also being performed for every turret on the main thread without much load balancing or throttling.
To combat this I've introduced two new budgeted loops which will prevent a bunch of Auto Turrets from over-consuming server resources. This will be more obvious on larger servers. Each of the server budgets for turrets can be configured with the Convars below:
NEW - tick_update_ms (default 1) - Max milliseconds can be spent per frame on turret angle updates and general updates
NEW - ammo_update_ms (default 0.1) - Max milliseconds can be spent per frame on turret ammo checks
scan_budget_ms(default 0.5) - How many milliseconds can be spent per frame on gathering turret angles
BUOYANCY PERFORMANCE
In preparation for the Naval Update, we needed a way for our water systems to be able to support a large amount of floating objects within the deep sea, this not only includes the new player boats but also existing buoyant objects like corpses or loot.
The buoyancy code itself was already fairly optimized and using some of our newer APIs for getting things like the water height or checking collisions. However each buoyant object was running simulations for itself, which means they ran all of the individual steps for buoyancy one by one.
Instead of running checks one by one, we can batch these buoyancy checks together to run across all objects using multiple worker threads. Previously, in simplified logic, we check water heights for multiple points on each object, then added some forces to move the object towards the water surface. We now get all the heights for all buoyant objects at the same time on multiple threads, calculate their forces, and then finally apply their forces back on the main thread.
This ends up being 4x faster in a scenario with 200 boats (each boat having multiple buoyancy points), and scales better than it previously did as you add more objects.
CUSTOM UNITY / PHYSX
Physics has been the bottleneck for Rust server performance for a long time. Beyond reducing the number of the colliders in the world, we've not had a way reducing this cost by any significant margin. Last year however we we gained the ability to make custom changes to our own version of Unity Engine and deploy updates to the game using it.
You can break down the physics tick in a lot of different ways, however the largest bottleneck for Rust is called the broadphase. This is the part of the physics tick where you quickly find pairs of colliders that may potentially be colliding, before then performing more expensive calculations to find accurate contact info in a later stage. Simply due to the size of the map in Rust and the density of colliders that large bases have, this ends up being an expensive operation.
We've made targeted changes to the physics engine (PhysX) which drastically speeds this portion of the physics tick up. Parallelizing the broadphase was the biggest impact change that we could make, splitting each region up into its own task that is scheduled across all available job threads before the results are combined again on the main thread.
The chart above shows the average time spent on the physics tick over a long period on one of our most active servers, the midpoint of the graph is when we switched over to the new Unity version with our custom PhysX libs in. The performance improvement is pretty drastic.
To make sure that these changes were safe, we pushed a server update prior to the naval update with just the switch to the new Unity/PhysX version. Naturally, all these performance gains turned into player caps being increased and the cycle begins again.
I've got further PhysX/Unity improvements in the works for the future, so things will improve from here.
MOUNTED PLAYER PERFORMANCE - BOATS
When a player was mounted we were constantly setting their position to the mounted position every frame rather than instead just parenting the player. Parenting would automatically move the player to the mounted position for relatively cheap/free, whereas our setting method is pretty expensive. There's a few codebase reasons why we need to set each frame (relating to parenting volumes), but I've managed to get past enough of them that we can roll out mountable parenting to a select few mountables. At the moment it will just be boats, but I'm confident we can get it on more mountables in the future. This cost was also being increased by AI that are mounted to vehicles, which was increasing by a bunch this patch. Thankfully these improvements also fix AI increasing the cost.
Before, showing a test server (approx 0.6 ms being spent per frame moving players) with a low amount of players (around 20~):
With hundreds of AI we are now hitting 0.02ms on the parent method of MountedPlayerSync and MountedPlayerSync itself isn't even called:
CABOOSE PERFORMANCE
Last month I notice some unusual performance drop when running around Outpost, turned out the static caboose train was using an excessive amount of canvases, this is now fixed.
This also impacted players in the vicinity of caboose train wagon in the wild.
SHOTGUN TRAP/FLAME TURRET PERFORMANCE
We've noticed some unusual spikes caused by flame turrets and shotgun traps. It was happening every few seconds in large bases without any TC. Quite rare, but fixed nonetheless.
I’ve also reduced the networking overhead of flame turrets. They were sending their rotation to every player in network range every 0.1 seconds, which was unnecessary.
SERVER PROFILER - IMMEDIATE MODE
Couple days before internal lockdown I've rolled out an experimental improvement to ServerProfiler - the ability to capture specific regions of code. This should be useful when chasing lagspikes or measuring infrequently running code. Here are a couple usage examples:
// record Run() and all internals, then export a snapshot
using(ServerProfiler.RecordScope("IndustrialQueue",
RecordIndustrialQueueServerVar))
{
industrialQueue.Run();
}
// OR
// keep recording and export only when expend more than 5ms
using(ServerProfiler.RecordScopeIfSlow("IndustrialQueue",
TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(5), RecordIndustrialQueueServerVar))
{
industrialQueue.Run();
}
in both cases it'll produce a IndustrialQueue.json.gz file, which you can find locally in server/<ident>/profiler/. In order not to flood with snapshots and not to have too much overhead(recording still slows down performance, export is async):
It is strongly recommended to have a flag whether scopes are active or not (RecordIndustrialQueueServerVar in example)
ServerProfiler has an internal 30-minute wait period after export where the scopes are inactive. Configured via profile.ExportIntervalS, interval can be reset with profile.ResetExportInterval if you don't want to wait it out
Entire feature can be disabled via profile.ImmediateModeEnabled(default enabled)
It's designed for code that runs in 0.05ms or more, so don't use it to profile something cheap (setting up profiler and installing profiler hooks costs)
TWITCH DROPS - HOME BREWED 4
Twitch Drops are back!
February 5th - 15th!
Tune in to view incredible streams from some of our favourite rising creators in the Rust community! Be sure to sync up and claim your Drops after watching these fantastic creators on Twitch.
SAVE 50% OFF RUST
Ahoy! To celebrate the long awaited release of the Naval Update, Rust is now half price for a limited time! Grab it from Steam and gift it to a friend to get some new crew mates on board!