Rust - March 2022 Update

This month’s patch does not have a lot of new features, but instead Facepunch has focused on polishing the game in various areas such as lighting, music, vehicle body visuals, world models, and general quality of life improvements. This does not mean there is no room for plugin developers to help server admins achieve ultimate modification nirvana!

The changes to decay, fuel and missions may create a need for server admins who do not agree to setup their servers as they like.

Decay

The NoDecay plugin will handle decay for vehicles such as cars, snowmobiles, submarines, minicopters and it even extends to other items such as watchtowers, barbeques, SAM sites, traps and more. However, it would be a great addition to include the newly decay-capable water catchers and barrels so admins could control how long they persist in the world.

Admins with high population may want to speed up the decay while others may want it lessened.

Fuel

Facepunch has modified a couple of fuel related settings that admins may not agree with which creates a great opportunity for plugins that modify those settings.

The junkyard magnet crane was modified to use more or less fuel depending on the state it is in.

• Fuel consumption at idle reduced by 80%
• Fuel consumption when not holding anything reduced by 25%

This makes sense to help players practice using the crane, but I can see reducing these even further, especially on build and practice servers.

Also, the snowmobile now will no longer come with any fuel by default. This is a change that makes sense, especially on vanilla servers, but I can imagine some admins will want their players to get up and go quickly using vehicles.

Vehicle Fuel Manager looks like it is the perfect plugin to handle this task as it allows you to set default fuel amounts and fuel consumption for everything from modular cars to RHIBs to Hot Air Balloons. All it needs is a slight adjustment to handle snowmobiles.

Missions

Quests are the original way to get missions and the Quest System plugin provides you with a log of flexibility to create the missions you want. At the same time, I can imagine a plugin that also modifies the built-in Rust missions in terms of what needs to be done and the rewards. Facepunch just changed the oil hunt mission reward to 50 scrap, but it might be nice to adjust the amount of oil hunted for and the amount of reward especially on a server with high gather rates.

Certainly there are some great opportunities out there for plugin developers to add to their existing plugins and create new offerings!

• NoDecay plugin might include decay settings for water catchers and barrels
• Vehicle Fuel Manager plugin might include fuel settings for snowmobiles
• New plugins may be created to allow better mission control

What ideas do you have? Stay well and keep flinging code