Epic Bradley, Diary, Gather

Hey Bumfuzzlers! I’ve got a full plate of server changes! I’ve spent some time further balancing gather rates, making zombies more dynamic, adding some protections for newly joined noobs, adding a story aspect, making the Bradley APC more challenging, and various fixes like Blood kits, skull-crushing and more. Read on!

Player Challenges

When the Zombie Survival Arena (/arena) was implemented it became apparently kills were counting in Player Challenges (/pc).

This would obviously allow players to rack up the NPC kills and win challenge kits.

That should now be resolved.

If you haven’t yet checked out arenas, they give you the opportunity to do 1 v 1’s, deathmatch, sniper battles, or zombie survival where you take on waves of zombies. You don’t need to bring any weapons or anything so there’s nothing to lose. Just type /arena and chose your mode.

Gather Rates

When you factor in Z Levels, nighttime gather rates, SuperSkins, Turbo Gather… Sulfur Ore has probably been out of control.

So, it’s time to nerf some.

Here’s what I changed.

• I’ve lowered the results of mining sulfur ore by 25%
• I’ve lowered night time gather rates from 4 to 3 times what the day rates are.
• I’ve lowered day rates across the board by 10%
• Quarries keep the same multipliers, but won’t have nighttime bonuses any longer

Take note that I’ve consolidated plugins for some gathering functions. Please let me know if you find anything strange with quarries as I admit I didn’t do heavy testing with them.

Hopefully, this achieves a little more balance and it’s not too much of a change. Obviously this isn’t the final resting place for gather rates. They need to be balanced further based on feedback and review.

Thanks for the feedback Autobot161

More Ore

I lowered resources a little but decided to mess with ore counts a bit.

I’ve raised ore counts across the board, even in snow and desert, by 10%.

So you may get a little less when mining, but ore should be a little easier to find.

Why is it?

For a while now, I’ve been trying to understand a few things.

I sometimes see players who join the server and leave after literally 3-5 minutes and I’m trying to understand why. That’s not so easy.

My guess is either one of the following things:

1. They don’t like spawning with items
2. They don’t like the gather rate
3. They don’t like Z levels
4. Zombies kill them immediately
5. They broke a barrel and didn’t like the loot
6. They’re Mom called them for supper
7. They don’t like to have fun
8. They’re mean and nasty people
9. They…

I feel like if a player plays on the server for just a little, they’ll realize it’s a very unique Rust experience and they’ll stick around to become a loyal member, but in 5 minutes no one will learn anything about the server.

I can’t believe it would be #1 since that’s not really a big deal, #2 and #3 are possible, #4 is definite – and I’m working on that as you’ll see later in the post. #5 is possible.

What are your thoughts? I’d like to hear your opinions. What can we improve for new players?

Skull Crushing

The spam was real. Every time you killed another player you’d get so many skulls to crush.

While the varied messages for skull-crushing are fun, spam isn’t.

Now when you kill wolves and other players, you should only get only one skull. There’s a chance you could get more in certain situations, but it won’t be 36 lol

Thanks to Autobot161 for helping me test by donating his skull to the cause.

Supply Drops

I had a few more features at my disposal so I figured I’d use at least one.

I’ve added a spinning siren light on top of airdrops for nighttime. That should make them easier to see – for you and others.

I have the ability to show smoke coming from them and even add an alarm, but I stopped there.

Super Bradley

We used to have a SuperBradley equivalent to the SuperHeli, but for various reasons, he went back to just Bradley.

Well, I’ve revisited this and it’s about time.

I’ve always believed the Heli and Bradley should be a little more challenging, especially for solo players. If you’re going to take down the Patrol Helicopter or the Bradley APC, you should be damn good or you should have help from friends.

So I’ve taken a look at both the SuperHeli and the now new SuperBradley.

Here’s what I did:

• Both Patrol Helicopter and Bradley APC will give 6 crates with similar loot.
• The loot for both Patrol Helicopter and Bradley APC has been improved.
• In comparison to the Patrol Helicopter, the Bradley APC will take slightly more direct resources to take down. By resources I mean gunpowder. This is because you don’t need to build a tower to battle the tank. You can simply hide behind indestructible structures.
• The Patrol Helicopter has had its health increased by about 50%
• The Bradley APC has had its health increased by about 350%
• The Bradley APC does a little more damage, but not that much more (I don’t think)

Overall, the resource to loot ration for both of these vehicles is extremely good. You should get a lot for your investment.

Keep in mind the way loot works. You get 6 crates, but the loot setup has multiple groupings of items. Each crate now has 4 items, but they are improved. There’s more LRs, more guns, more ammo, etc. but they will vary. For instance, you may find 5.56 ammo in a crate, but the crate is set to give a range between 75 and 250. You could get 75 or 250 or 110. It’s luck. Items like barricades and face masks have been removed. It’s almost 100% ammo, weapons, and other high-end stuff.

I am worried that that Bradley was filling an achievable need for players who were not yet ready to take the SuperHeli so there’s a chance I might reduce the SuperBradley’s health by half and cut the crates back down to 3 while leaving its damage buff or buffing it further.

We’ll see. As always, this will be tweaked with time. Give me feedback.

SuperSkin Splits

It turns out there was an issue unstacking stacks of SuperSkins.

I fixed that issue, then that fix caused a worse issue, then I thought I fixed both issues… nope lol. After all that, I reverted back and finally discovered the issue so I believe it should be resolved.

You should now be able to stack SuperSkin items without fear of losing items.

Thanks to Shloshed for posting a video showing the original issue and to Chaos for giving me thorough instruction to reproduce the second issue.

Tasty Brains

I’ve been tweaking zombies for a few weeks now and I doubt I’m finished.

I first reduced them by about 30%, but then decided to make them more dynamic.

Now, zombies will adjust based on the day of the wipe.

• Will not spawn until day 3 of the wipe
• On day 5 they will increase by 15%
• On day 7 they will increase by 15%
• On day 9 they will increase by 15%
• On day 12 they will increase by 15%

So, over the entire wipe, they’ll increase roughly 75%. However, they will continue to spawn individually unless they merge when they meet each other.

I also removed the Bunny Zombies so the zombies are more realistic. That’s just seasonal stuff anyway.

Noob Brains

While it’s perfectly fine for Zombies to eat the brains of veteran Bumfuzzlers, maybe not noobs.

So, I’m working on making it so the first time players join the server they won’t meet an absolute death by zombies. Once a player joins a second time, eating brains is on like Donkey Kong.

I’ve had some setbacks, but I am continuing to work towards the goal. I’m hoping to have something by the next wipe or before.

What else would help noobs when they join? Keep in mind I’d rather not give them crazy kits or anything like that.

Survivor Diary

In conjunction with the Zombie increases, I created a storytelling feature.

Now, on each day or so, you’ll see text at the very bottom of the screen that will give you a little diary entry of what’s happening in the world that day.

For instance, on one day, you’ll see the following messages:

“Damn those…zombies? …are fast. I used to be able to outrun them easily.
I killed one of them with a knife to the head. Was lucky the others lost my scent.
There seems to more of them lately and they’ve become more aggressive.”

This will not only provide you with a story element, but it will indicate that zombie counts have increased and possibly their speed.

I would like to add more dynamic events so that the world changes as the wipe cycle continues, but this is just a start with the framework.

If you have some fun ideas send them over. I can think of a bunch of different things to do, but I don’t want to mess with gameplay too too much.

Metal Quest

There’s a quest for High-Quality Metal and maybe it’s set a bit too high.

I’ve lowered the requirement for the quest from requiring 20k and rewarding 10k to requiring 5k and rewarding 2,500.

This should make it more achievable.

Thanks for the feedback Autobot161

Loot Despawn

A while back I set loot to take longer to despawn inside tool cupboard range. In fact, 2.5 times longer.

This was meant to make it harder for players to despawn loot on raids because…well…that’s really jerkish.

At that time, for performance reasons, I also cut in half the despawn rate for everything outside the tool cupboard range.

After review, I’ve changed the despawn rate outside of the tool cupboard range back to default so now you don’t have to worry about losing items when you die…for instance at the outpost. Holster that thing!

Thanks Autobot161 for the feedback

Blood Kit

At various Loyalty levels (/loyalty) players will get a new kit to spawn with. It’s not much, but something to help you out.

This kit isn’t something OP as mostly just the clothing varies in skins, but it appeared Blood Level 30 (/loyalty), wasn’t getting anything.

This should now be resolved.

Thanks to Myerr and Cannonfodder for the feedback and Chaos for testing

Wipe

Yes, it’s a 5 Thursday month so we’re going to wipe this last week because 3 weeks is just too damn long. I know 1 week short, but…

The map will wipe, but I’ll keep blueprints and economy so it shouldn’t take too long to get up and going even on a 1-week cycle. I estimate it will happen between 3 PM and 5 PM EST. I’ll communicate in Discord when it’s going down.

This will be a good opportunity to try out some of the new setups and see how things go. Between the new gather rates, ore increases, zombie changes, and noob nerfs I’m thinking there’s going to be some balancing to do, but hopefully some balancing done!

As always, thanks to all you Bumfuzzlers who regularly provide me with feedback and suggestions. I truly appreciate your time and effort and hopefully, it means your favorite Rust server just gets better!

FYI, here are some of the things you may see in the next Rust patch from Facepunch.