We've added horse equipment, Crafting, Inventory, Map and Death screen improvements and various other fixes, balances and improvements ...

Horse Equipment
Horses now have their max health and speed affected by their breed type. There's also a new information panel, which will allow you to equip them with various types of horse equipment.

Horse armor will grant the horse additional protection, as well as protect the rider from incoming damage. This might seem like it isn't very realistic, but it doesn't matter - it feels good in the game. Mounted riders should be something to be feared, not just sitting ducks. It is important to note that the rider protection does not stack with your existing armor, rather it reduces the incoming damage by a percentage, before it is processed by player armour.

Horse shoes will grant additional movement speed to the horse.

Saddle bags can be equipped to increase the size of the horse's...

The new Transport Helicopter arrives along with changes to auto turrets and various other fixes and optimizations

Transport Helicopter

The Scrap Transport Helicopter has arrived!

It's not as nimble as the Minicopter but boy you can fit a lot of people in the back. It doesn't use a traditional vehicle seating model and to board the rear you simply walk on board. You'll have free movement and crouching while it is in flight similar to movement on the cargo ship or Excavator arm.

Merch Store
Our merch store opened last week. I appreciate that a lot of you are nakeds so won't be interested, but we've got hoodies, tshirts, hats, cups.This has been a bit of an experiment for us and it's been a lot of work settling on designs that we've happy with. We've tried to straddle the line between designs that are gamey and designs that you can't really tell are from a game.

Horse Improvements
Horses now use a queue...

Excavator monument and more optimizations and fixes

Excavator
The Excavator monument is complete and is now in-game!

This isn't just a static prop, it is a fully functioning mining excavator powered by Diesel. You can find the required fuel at the Junkyard, Oil rigs and at the top of the Dome.

You can also exchange low grade fuel for diesel, but it isn't cheap.

To use the excavator, you'll need to clear out the scientists guarding it and make your way to the engine room. Once you've added the fuel, you can power up the engine and make your way along the catwalk to the control room and select a resource type to mine. The mined resources will be deposited in equal amounts at two drop points. This means you'll need at least 4 people to operate it without a chance of someone stealing either the fuel or the output.

Also take note that RF #4777 will be activated as long as the engine is on, so watch out for counter raids...

Horse breeds and hitching posts, client and server optimizations and more

Server Physics Optimization
We've been plagued by a lot of performance problems on the server. After careful analysis we found and fixed these main causes:

• Collider batching is no longer in use, but the code to check whether or not a collider is batched was still running and was extremely slow since there are now hundreds of individual colliders in any area of the map instead of the previous handful of batched colliders
• Optimized code to get entities in a radius
• Optimized code to look up entities from game objects or colliders
• Optimized physics transform sync by batching FixedUpdate calls on identical components instead of executing them in a random order
• Optimized player server updates by only doing a single transform synchronization for all players on a server

This all sounds very technical, but at the end of the...

Players of our game Chippy on Steam will get an exclusive Chippy Arcade machine to play with in game. Plus some optimisations and bug fixes for everyone.

Chippy Arcade
To celebrate the launch of our new incubator game Chippy, which we was released a week today on Steam, we've added the Chippy Arcade to Rust.

The item is rewarded to accounts automatically that have played Chippy for at least half an hour.

We did consider giving it only to people that have beaten Chippy - but the game is that hardcore that so far only one person in the whole world has done that. And that guy fucking hates Rust.


If you get the item and then refund Chippy, you will lose the item and rebuying won't bring it back. So stop.

Network Interpolation Improvements
There was a...

Horseback riding, Balance changes, a New UI and more!

Horseback Riding
Horseback riding has been added to the game.

This is only a first pass so it works in a pretty rudimentary way. Horses with saddles spawn in the world instead of the traditional horses. Eventually we'll add taming and hitching and armor and all that but first, let's just see how they function as a new means of transportation in the rust world!

Walk up to a horse and press [E] to mount it. ASDW controls the steering, Space to exit, and Shift to sprint.

Horses are going to need to eat.. A lot.

Above your health bar you will notice a yellow stamina bar while mounted. This bar indicates how long the horse can sprint for. When the bar runs out, the run speed will be reduced to a trot while it recovers. Stopping will help your stamina recover quickly.

There is a secondary bar which indicates the maximum stamina your horse can recover to. This can be...