Cruel yet compelling survival sim Rust released one of its biggest updates in recent memory yesterday, making sweeping changes to the game’s gunplay that for the most part seem to have been welcomed by players (even if some of those players seem happy mainly because the update will make other players unhappy).
The headline changes revolve around gun recoil, which Facepunch say will give more of an advantage to players who get the drop on others but will make things tougher “for people who could spend thousands of hours training their aim, or morally bankrupt individuals who would choose to use scripts to gain an advantage.” A gradient-based aim drift replacing pattern-based recoil, and automatic weapons will lose accuracy the longer you hold the trigger.
Plenty of smaller quality-of-life changes have been made to the combat, including a crosshair, a ‘hit cross’ that appears in the middle of your sights when you hit an enemy, and clearer blood splatters on your screen so you can see where an enemy is shooting you from. It should add a bit of accessibility to a game that’s notorious for welcoming new players with the same kind of courtesy as suckling pigs are greeted at an abattoir.
Among the myriad other changes in this update, the most noteworthy there is now an ammo mixing table, which lets you batch-craft basic ammo in much less time than before.
The update also sees the return of Hapis Island, the classic but buggy map that was removed just over a year ago following a major graphics update. The map has been revamped, with a few outlying islands added and the desert in the south of the map getting expanded.
This all sounds great, but my return to the game will be dictated by whether my friend is still tearing his hair out following every three-day Rust binge and questioning—after hundreds of logged hours—whether he’s actually enjoying it. I sincerely hope this update brings him some kind of peace in his tortuous relationship with this game…