Community Gaming, Fair Play, and Mutual Respect
Today’s update is coming out soon. We’re seeing some pretty kick-ass new features:
– Hackers automatically get their bases (and anything they placed) deleted.
– Vending machines are IN!
– Furnaces are a little more friendly and are only accessible where the furnace is open.
– Water negates fall damage.
– Flame Turrets now debuff player speed!
– Armored door hatches now work!
Rustafied, as ever, has some of the best coverage for the mechanical changes coming out in this month’s wipe, along with the implications of those changes. Rather than rehash their work here, I’ll give a very quick summary of what’s changing, and you can pop over there to see the longer discussion of what these changes are, what they mean, and why they’re coming.
Pay to Win get out of the way. Play to Win is here. It’s February, which means a new wipe as well as a new special event. Starting today, we’ll be on an all-new map, keeping the current 3.5km size. Rather than filling up that area with non-player raid bases, or trying to do big give-away events when I can find the most people online, we’ll be focusing on filling that space up with new and old faces. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we’re encouraging players to bring a friend to Serenity Valley, and to make some new friends while you’re here. February marks our first recruitment event, with participation in the first wipe of the month (2 Feb – 15 Feb) making big gains for the second wipe (16 Feb – 1 Mar) of the month! How this will work is on a milestone or achievements system. As players reach more and more of these milestones, they trigger greater awards for themselves and their recruits! Recruiting new players who join the server and are active–not merely logged in an AFK–for at least 14 hours during the wipe will award both the recruiter and the new player their first milestone. At 20 hours played and every 10 hours after that up to 40, another level is achieved. Those new recruits can of course recruit friends of their own, and so on and are encouraged to do so. We also recognize that the players are the main component of Rust’s content, and many of the milestones for this event are awarded to everyone who is online, active, and participating in the month’s activities! When the server undergoes its next wipe, you’ll be able to start with the sum of the awards you accrued during this wipe, with bonuses if the friend you’ve recruited returns with you.
If someone manages to score more than the 10 milestones above, we’ll discuss customized/individual rewards at that time.
Fort Williams, the infamous non-player raid target managed to secure 87 deaths over its life, between its pit traps, mines, and auto turrets. Total loot retrieved from the fort included a total of 300 satchel charges, 100 timed explosives, 2 M249’s, hundreds of rifles, dozens of armor loadouts, hundreds of mines, thousands of grenades, and nearly a quarter million rounds of ammunition. With the exception of the unfortunate few who managed to wander, unawares onto the island, all those folks that I had the pleasure of speaking with after exploring the area were resoundingly positive.
It was a lot of fun to build it for you all, and even more enjoyable to hear your feedback. Given the positive response from this event, we can anticipate seeing more events like this in the future.
Rejoice, Rustians! It’s update day, and we’re seeing a whole host of great new additions.
First of all, and of monumental excitement to me: Skins are (supposed to be) coming back! In addition, we’re seeing the very early phases of the game made far easier, with tweaks to recipes, crafting times, and the ability to find low grade fuel in oil barrels! Several weapons have had their crafting times cut in HALF to include: Assault Rifles, Bolt-Action Rifles, Semi-Automatic Rifles & Pistols, Thompsons, and Custom SMG’s. Arrows now take 25% of the time they did before, and we’ll also be seeing the craft time for bear traps and turrets reduced significantly!
It’s not just time we’ll be saving, though–Double Barrel Shotg
uns, Mines, Metal Barricades, and Bone Knives all got cheaper this update. How much cheaper is still a little bit up in the air for some of these items, but we know that they’re cutting down the component cost on a lot of items, including the complete removal of components from Landmines, less blades for Barricades, no springs for grenades, and so on!
The biggest change comes with the continued work to the farming system: Watering your plants now not only expedites their growth, but dramatically increases the yield of those items. If you’re watering your crops, you can see up to 40 cloth per hemp plant, 3 pumpkins per vine, and 6 corn per stalk! Couple that with last week’s clippings system and genetic families, and you can find yourselves producing MASSIVE amounts of food, even in a cave, with very little effort. What a marvelous modern time we live in!
There are a number of smaller changes, all discussed in greater detail over at rustafied.com, but this looks like it’s going to be another very positive update.
Each day, I’ve been restoring about 50% of destroyed mines and turret
ammunition and around 10% of taken loot. With today marking the half-way point through the wipe cycle, restorations cease–but there will be slow, steady upgrade starting at the fabled Armory treasure room, and spreading outward through the fortress.
As of last night’s survey, about 60% of the defenses have been destroyed, 40% of the prize loot has been taken, and around 80% of the buildings have been entered/raided. Several little tricks and secrets are still in place, and the main loot room is untouched.
To date, the Fort appears to have claimed 62 lives, with 34 turret kills, and 28 landmine kills. Animal and cold related deaths that happened on the island are not tracked.
I’ve included a poll on the forum where you can share your feedback and vote for future non-player raids at this link.
Today’s our second wipe of the month, and we’re seeing some pretty excellent updates to go with it! Today, we’ll see the much-anticipated release of the Python Revolver. If you’ve been keeping abreast of the developer blogs, you’ll have seen some of the models for this monster coming along. Simply put: It’s a hand cannon. It’s going to take 3 pipes, 3 springs, and 10HQM to make, leaving it as a pretty expensive weapon, but it will take 3 attachment slots, it’s got impressive range and accuracy, and did I mention that it’s A HAND CANNON?! Head shot damage isn’t listed as numbers on this monster. Instead of a number, it’s listed as “kill.” Keep away from pistol duels when your opponent is packing this monster. With this patch, we’ll see some further optimizations, added farming abilities (such as taking clippings of high-performing plants and copying their traits to a new plant) and some improvements to animations.
For the new wipe, we’ll be doing a new server event that will last all wipe-cycle long. There will be a massive stronghold built toward the north-center of the map. This area will feature a very dense, very hard to defeat base, and at its center will be a loot room jam-packed with weapons, armor, and ammunition–enough to make a third-world despot blush. I tell you this now: Think. Strategically. Decide among yourselves if it’s more important to capture the base, or to keep your enemy from getting it? Is it better to set up nearby to counter-raid attackers, or to stay far away and hope that you’re never found? Ultimately, how you and your group decide to handle the presence of such a ferocious presence is up to you–and will heavily impact the endgame in this wipe.
This week’s changes are described as “small but significant” by Rustafied. This doesn’t even begin to cover just how big these changes are for our players! Based upon how our players tend to build–particularly with the appearance of small, hidden bases. Starting after today’s patch, you only see the “Building Blocked” message if you have a deployable or building tools in your hand, meaning that simply running past a small house hidden in some rocks won’t give up its location. Additionally, when building anything, the game now checks not just player location, but the actual building location, meaning you can no longer stand just outside of tool cupboard range and build inside a build radius. This means less need to place piles of cupboards outside your building perimeter, and a little more forgiving build, particularly in rough terrain.
On the topic of raids, online raids just got a lot easier. Prior to today’s patch, reviving a player was a slow, often buggy process where you’d have to stand, staring at a downed player, unmoving, and VERY close to them, because if they squirmed the wrong way, it would break the revival mechanic. No longer! Revives are a little faster, and don’t break so easily now, so that if you’re in a firefight, it’s a lot easier to get your buddy back up and into the fight.
Finally, and of benefit to everyone, Grass Displacement is back in the game after a year-long absence! What this mechanic does is it smooths out and pushes down the grass around you in the environment, making it look a little more natural as your character pushes through the grass–and more importantly, it makes it easier to see dropped items in grass. No more losing your gun to the grass demons after a death or excess ammo during a long craft session and inventory overflow!
Today’s update has yet to deploy, but we should be seeing it within the next couple of hours!
There has been some very understandable concern in the wake of some of the server’s weekend events that something fishy is happening, when people get raided, and they then find caches of loot listing 100% ownership from me. I’ve gotten some questions on the topic, so I wanted to take a moment to address the concerns with the group, rather than waiting for them to roll in periodically.
I’m sure if you’ve been here for very long, you’ve already noticed, and if you haven’t, or if you’re a new player I’ll offer it directly: We do things kind of differently here at Serenity Valley. My administration philosophy involves a very fair, light touch, with periods of direct intervention. I try each week to present different events that have 3 objectives:
As a part of many of these events, there is a loot component, either given out as prizes in the case of the Caveman Arena, or as part of the participation in the event, such as the Labyrinth or Airdrop Mayhem. We even have smaller, more low-key events during the week to offer something for players that don’t want to get into all the hub-bub of the bigger events, such as Giina’s brilliant offline raid bases, or some of the little sniper hunt events we’ve done.
The benefit to the players of the admins doing these events is that you can all completely let loose, and we aren’t losing anything. The materials and the prizes for these things are spawned in by the server, so that we can give you all something different and hopefully fun and exciting to do, without having to worry about other players getting salty. If you raid your neighbor, they might get pissed and come back with a rocket launcher or worse. If you raid one of the bases Giina’s built for us, or you come and shoot up an admin that’s sniping as part of an airdrop event, that’s AWESOME. We’re there as game content–Doom has AI demons that run around and try to burn you. Terraria and minecraft have zombies that try to eat their way into your house. Serenity Valley has a couple of people who get out there and make themselves available for the hunting and killing so that you can be a bloodthirsty murderhobo without the repercussion of your fellow players getting salty and coming after you.
The exchange for this is that the prizes for those events–the reward side of the risk vs. reward equation–are going to reflect as having been our personal stuff during the event, or looking like something that admin spawned for another player if it’s after the event and it leaves us with the question of how best to address those issues. Do we risk creating a situation that appears to be an admin abusing Rust’s systems or forego carrying out events for the server altogether? In order to create the server experience that I’m hoping to create for our players, it means having some gear in circulation that appears a little bit fishy. I would much rather have to remind people that we host little narrative-driven events here and deal with the occasional cries of unfairness from those who have chosen not to read up on the server’s activities than to just have any other rust server.
I recognize and respect that this may well rub some folks the wrong way. You want a 100% pure environment where we just turn on the server and let it run, and whatever happens, happens. That’s not the server I’m running. There’s nothing wrong with someone having a different vision or looking for another product. In fact, if there’s something that you’re looking for in particular in a Rust server, let me know and I’ll gladly direct you toward some great communities that have what you’re looking for. If however, you’re looking for a community with some action, admins that you can play directly with and who are easy to approach, play, and deal with, where everyone gets a voice and a say in how we conduct the server’s activities, and where the community is held to a standard of maturity and mutual respect–you’ve found the right place. Let us know what you like and dislike. Offer your say on what you feel could be being done better. Without that feedback, Giina and I cannot work to make your server better, but you can be damned sure that we’ll always try our very best to give you one of the most unique and interactive Rust experiences ever.
I definitely want to hear your thoughts on the matter. Please drop any comments on the forum thread, at:
This is just a really quick note to let everyone know that the poll for the new map has been posted on the forums. You can reach it HERE:
http://rust.ars-insolitus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=10
There’s some huge news afoot on the Rust Devblog and over at PlayRustHQ.com. Soon, we’ll be seeing new turrets, a whole new cave system, and a massive revamp to gathering crafting components. Sadly, wolves and bears are still magical ghosts that can walk through stone, but we’re seeing more and more improvements in managing the game’s biggest threats: Each other! The other news is that we’re (hopefully!) about to see TONS of new skins flooding into the game, as the workshop is opened up and more user skins are able to make their way into the system.
The DevBlog was an especially interesting read; well worth taking a moment if you have some time.
Today’s updates are listed below:
Better explosion sounds Misc sound polish Old bone armor no longer drops( will be removed next wipe) Projectile CPU optimizations Semi auto pistol damage nerfed to 40 (was 50) Pistol ammo effective distance nerfed to 60 (was 80) Fixed players sometimes appearing with wrong name, gender or skin tone Fixed various small client side network interpolation issues on respawn Added stabilityqueue server convar (building stability update time per frame) Added surroundingsqueue server convar (surroundings refresh time per frame) Fixed various issues with player model pooling Enabled player model pooling by default on 64bit systems (pool.players convar) Drastically improved entity destruction performance (less stuttering) Optimized player mesh building and refreshing (less stuttering) Fixed exception when trying to upgrade building block after it was destroyed Fixed exception when trying to rotate building block after it was destroyed
This afternoon, the Primitive Fighting Arena opened, to much fanfare! 
Straight away, /BFM/Wizard and NostradamusOP jumped in and waged very simple warfare against one another with sticks, stones, clubs, and simple bows. After several rounds of combat, Wizard was the clear winner, becoming the Round One champion! After the server restart, many more had a taste for blood, and the battle was joined by [TSAS] Spoink, [TSAS] Paella, Clawmaster aka padawan, /BFM/Wizard, and NostradamusOP. In was a vicious, furious melee with clubs, maces, and even a crossbow flinging death across the arena floor. In the end, after multiple rounds of respawns and bodies being looted for arrows and medical supplies, Clawmaster came out on top as Saturday’s arena champion!
Both winners won a small present and a large banner on a pole as winnings, giving them bragging rights and a trophy to place at their base as a warning to all: This is the home of a prize-fighting, take-no-names, gladiator.
If you fancy a go in the arena or you have something to sort out with one of your neighbors, or just want to set up a fun, organized fight with your clan, you’re welcome to visit! The door is unlocked and ladder hatches open. The arena itself is located on the island in the far southwest of the map, at coordinates B21. Be sure to check back on our feed! There will be more events and more arenas coming, with at LEAST one new feature each week.
Discuss the event, share your thoughts, and let us know how to improve on the forum by clicking here.
With the wipe only hours away, I wanted to share a preview for the giveaways and events we’ll be seeing during the month of September! Nothing is set in stone, and we may see some changes based on the needs of the server. However, barring any changes, here’s some idea of what kind of stuff to expect for the coming month!
Giveaways:
![2015-06-05_00031[1]](https://i0.wp.com/rust.ars-insolitus.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2015-06-05_000311.jpg?resize=300%2C169)
