Rust’s next monthly update has landed. The survival game’s December offering ushers in a bunch of varied changes and content, with “massive” production buffs for the excavator, a revamped first-person spectator mode, some AI improvements, and more. Plus, there’s a Christmas-themed bash coming up soon.
Facepunch has revealed that the Excavator monument – which can be used to produce useful materials – has received some big ol’ buffs that mean one unit of diesel fuel will now power the contraption for two minutes and produce a high new volume of yields. These are 100 high-quality metal parts, 2,000 sulfur ore, 10,000 stone, and 5,000 metal fragments, which is a pretty big climb from the previous quantities.
The newly revamped first-person spectator mode, meanwhile, should give players looking to catch a look at the action a “more pleasant experience”. The devs reveal that they’ve looked to mimic the perspective of actual gameplay as much as possible to improve the mode, with support for “proper weapon view models, better camera perspectives, alt looking, and much of the standard game HUD like the compass, vitals, hotbar and, teams”.
This new mode kicks in automatically when you’re doing a spot of Rust spectating in first person, and it also functions if you play back demos. Alongside this, with the update you’ll now get to spectate specific players by hitting a button in the admin UI tab. “Hopefully this will make spectating players more enjoyable for admins, as well as providing some new cinematic options for demo users,” the studio says in a press release.
Elsewhere in this month’s update, there are AI improvements that tweak some animal and human behaviour, fixing some “annoyances” and increasing their responsiveness. The devs have also been able to remove two more of the game’s AI setups to get more of it running on one system – the latest step in their ongoing plan to get the game’s AI streamlined into one place going forward.
While there are a handful of other nifty updates in this month’s patch – which you can read about in full in the latest dev post – December in Rust also means there’s a festive bash coming up soon. On December 16 at 11am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm GMT, Rust will see a mandatory server and client update kick in to set live the game’s 2021-style Christmas event and “festive features”. There’s no news on what these will be just yet, but at least you know when they’ll be heading your way.