PPlank

Backpacks Blacklist on PVP Servers

Sometimes I am naive when it comes to human nature. I’ve just had to take action as a vip+++ player on one of the PvP servers has been taking advantage of that ranks ability to keep the contents of the backpack upon death.

It seems they were attacking bases as a naked while storing huge amounts of resources (guns, ammo, sulfur, C4, rockets) in their backpack knowing that if they died they would still have the contents of their backpack available to them. This is therefore classed as an exploit and so I’ve had to take action to fix it.

I’ve now blacklisted all firearms, ammo, sulfur and sulfur ore, charcoal, gunpowder, explosives, etc. from being placed into backpacks. In other words, anything that gives a vip+++ player on PvP servers an unfair advantage. This will take effect from the mid-monthly wipe on 17th November.

 

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers

Halloween Zombies

With October 31st imminent, Zombie Hordes and the Halloween Event have been enabled.

As you might expect, zombies are roaming about the servers in hordes, waiting to attack you. They don't spawn at monuments but that doesn't mean they won't chase you there.

For the Halloween Event, collect candies as they appear in front of you and earn goodie bags for the top players. These can be upgraded to produce better and better items. To make it easier, I've added the Scarecrow Wrap and the Pumpkin Bucket to the Rewards Store (/s) at a cost of 1 RP each, so everyone can join in.

If you wear the Scarecrow Wrap, you will see candies appear at a faster rate, and more of them will spawn. Hold the Pumpkin Bucket and then hold down the Left Mouse Button (LMB) as you run around to pick up candies instantly instead of waiting for them to be picked up. Try it with and without the bucket and you'll see what I mean.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers

Furnaces Fixed, Upgraded Smelting

All furnaces now have the same look and feel to them as they did prior to the 1st September update.

This is effective immediately, following on from the bloody annoyance of the new furnace design and usage…

/rant FFS FacePunch! What a waste of time and effort for everybody concerned. Just because you have an idea doesn’t always mean it’s a good one. Creating a new interface for something like furnaces for newbies just pisses off the existing very loyal player base. /rant-over

Furnaces look and work good again on GameKeeper servers.

Better than that, at some point I’ll be adding upgraded capacities to everything that can burn or smelt stuff from free vip all the way up to vip+++ in increments. That means the higher your vip rank, the bigger your furnaces, camp fires, barbecues etc.

From testing it looks like once a furnace is placed, it keeps its capacity even if the plugin config is set to be smaller, but will happily increase if you’re a higher VIP rank. I have yet to confirm this to see if it will survive a server reboot. (It shouldn’t affect anyone but testers.)

The new style furnace-for-newbies-interface is gone, and we’re all back on the much more sensible old style furnace, pre-1st September. In addition, automatic furnace splitting is now back, yay!

Put resource into your furnace and click “Run Splitter.”

The resource automatically gets split into the correct amounts and the correct amount of wood is calculated. Wood calculation has never really worked before, but with the new plugins (3 of them) it seems to do it correctly based on the resource placed in the furnace. For example, sulfur is smelted slower than HQM ore and metal ore, so more wood is placed into the furnace if you have sulfur in it. This means it’s a good idea to only smelt sulfur in its own furnace, and not mix it with HQM and metal ore.

Turn the furnace on and all of the ore starts to smelt at the same time like it used to do. TF. I am really pleased with this.

While the furnace is running, you can at any time walk up to it and click “Run Splitter” again and it will remove all the smelted output and charcoal into your inventory. That’s fantastically useful.

Finally, you can also put (hide) loot in your furnaces, treating it like a regular box.

The new style furnace interface is no longer available and we’re on the old one again but upgraded. Good riddance to the new one.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates

WorkBench Range Extended

As of 10th September 2022, the WorkBench range has been extended to cover the entire base. You will need a ToolCupboard somewhere in the base in order for this to work.

The plugin may be a little buggy, and if it’s found to be problematic it will be removed.

That is all.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates

Furnace Nightmares Almost Fixed

It’s been another long day. I spent it by updating one of my test servers and then removing all plugins except for those that affected furnaces and smelting speeds, etc.

I now have most of it fixed except for the furnace sorting/splitting – it’s going to need an update from the devs on that front. One of them is having a real problem with the changes FacePunch has made and the other was questioning whether furnace sorting was necessary any more.

Well, it is necessary and I’ve told the dev who was questioning it that we still need a sorting plugin.

I have removed all of the old plugins and installed three new ones – one of them is a find by SinKoh. Good job that man.

The first one optionally returns a very similar interface to the one we had last week before FacePunch wrecked it for us (SinKoh’s find). The second one allows smelting in all slots simultaneously, just like it used to last week. The third one replaces the old smelting speed plugin as it doesn’t work correctly with the other two plugins.

The result is a very nice experience again. You can either use the furnaces as they are now, or issue the /furnace command and switch to the old style of furnaces. You have to place down a new furnace once you’ve switched, or pick up and place down an existing one. When you open it you’ll see (almost) a replica of the old furnace interface again.

Here’s the new interface, ready to start…

…and here’s the new interface smelting all items just a few moments later (no lightning bolts yet though)…

…and here’s the metal finished but the sulfur still running a minute or so later.

 

And now for the old style interface on a large furnace with more smelting slots available (than the 5 above in the new interface) that we’ve all been accustomed to for a long time…

…this is what it looks like after…

…and here’s what it looks like a few minutes later.

Finally, small furnaces, old style.

A few moments later…

 

Remember, the old style furnace interface is OPTIONAL for every furnace you place down, and you can have both old and new style furnaces together.

All we need now is an updated sorting plugin to make it all easier again.

Before you ask, yes sulfur smelting is deliberately slow in an attempt to reduce the amount of boom-boom produced on the accelerated servers (x5, x10), but that shouldn’t be an issue as you can just fill up a furnace with sulfur in many slots.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates

Furnaces and Smelting

Following the changes to the way furnaces work (and other things it seems) by FacePunch, I’ve gradually discovered LOTS of problems with plugins interacting with each other to cause strangeness and I’m still not totally convinced I’ve found all of them.

So, pre wipe I was using PowerSmelt for smelting things and it’s worked fine to speed up smelting times since I bought it. After the wipe I discovered it now wouldn’t play nicely with camp fires after the protocol change, so I removed it and of course smelting went to shit. With a lot of trial and error today I finally worked out it was one setting that caused the food cooking problem. It was the ability to cook meat in furnaces. I’ve now removed that very nice ability.

“Cook In Meat Furnaces”: false,

However, while trying to get smelting working at higher speeds, I purchased another plugin, Oxidation’s Smelting Controller. That is now currently the plugin controlling smelting as of 6.00pm GMT/BST today. I’ve tweaked and tested and compared it against PowerSmelt until it’s working in a very similar way. Fast smelting of everything (x10 furnace etc multiplier) plus short cooking times, and longer smelting of Sulfur. Yeah don’t argue, we’ve always done it like that because PvP servers are x10 and too much easy to access boom-boom means 1 or 2 players raid everybody and clear the server of other players. (Also see offline raid protection to help prevent that – it seems to be working in most cases.)

You may need to restart your furnaces / campfires / barbecues to get the faster speeds.

While this has all been going on over the weekend, in an attempt to make the furnaces work like they used to, I also purchased the FurnaceReturns plugin despite the dev saying it needed PowerSmelt (or similar) to burn multiple stacks at once. Which seemed a bit strange to me as there’s nothing in the PowerSmelt config that implies it does that. So today I’ve been testing that out with the PowerSmelt plugin on the Clans server.

I can’t get it to work – it’s a different interface (like the old one) but it still only burns one stack at a time. I feel there’s probably another plugin interacting with PowerSmelt and FurnaceReturns preventing it from working properly. I’ve raised the issue with the dev of FurnaceReturns and I’m waiting for him to get back to me.

So… this is all ongoing furnace related stuff and it’s not a final answer. I have the feeling if enough players F7 report a bug and complain in forums, then FacePunch might do something about it and make it so that multiple additional slots are available and they all burn at the same time again. I don’t have a lot of confidence in this, but it might happen.

Just know that I am trying to make things better again. 🙂

There will be additional test, tweaks and changes until I’m satisfied.

Posted by PPlank in Rust Servers, Server Updates

Containers Within Containers

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could reduce the number of chests in your base, while still having the same capacity of storage?  Well now you can. And there’s no need to be using coffins either, unless you like coffins of course.

Back in April 2022 I added a new plugin that allowed players to add additional “virtual containers” within a container and then promptly forgot to announce it. Very few players have been using them since – hopefully with this post word will get round and more players will get the benefit.

You may or may not have noticed some icons/buttons to the bottom right when you open a chest. The magic + button will allow you to add additional virtual chests to a single chest, which are then numbered 1, 2, etc. The M button is your Master chest – the default view of any chest you may open, while the 1, 2 chests are the additional chests you can create with the + button.

As you might guess there is a small cost to creating a new container, which you can see by clicking the i button.

As of today (5th September 2022) this method replaces the old method of upgrading containers as there is no need for that plugin any more. At some point, probably next forced wipe on October 6th 2022, the Chest Stacking plugin will be removed as there’s no need for that plugin either – correct me if I’m wrong and I’ll leave it in place.

Posted by PPlank in Rust Servers, Server Updates

Scrap Exchange Plugin now Removed

Because of multiple reports of the Scrap Exchange plugin not giving players their Reward Points (RP), I’ve now removed the plugin. Instead I’ve now made it so that you can sell your scrap in the /s store at the same rate as the scrap exchange in vending machines. I really don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.

All you need to do is do /s in chat to bring up the store, then go to the Sell page and select Scrap. You’ll then see the interface for adjusting the amount of scrap you want to sell. By default it will select all of your scrap, so you may only want to sell some of it. Just click the minus (-100, -1000) buttons and the amount of scrap you want to sell will reduce.  When you’re ready, click Sell Item and you’re done.

Make sure not to have any small amounts of scrap as less than 10 and you won’t get any RP for them. Stick to at least 10 scrap at a time in order to get 1 scrap.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates

Offline Raid Protection

Effective immediately, Offline Raid Protection has now been added to Solo and Duo. To protect your base while offline, add scrap to the Tool Cupboard. Before then you will see that you have no protection in the Tool Cupboard GUI.

There is a 10 minute delay (600 seconds) after you go offline before the 100% protection kicks in. Scrap is drawn from the Tool Cupboard as required and you can see your level of protection by typing /protection while near your Tool Cupboard.

In the example above you can see that in a small building of just 13 building blocks, it costs 103 scrap per hour. So it’s quite expensive but I think that’s the way it should be.

EDIT: After feedback, it turns out that it wasn’t that expensive after all, so the 90 base cost per hour has been increased to 400. Also apparently the default 90 base cost that came with the plugin was for vanilla-like servers, and all the GameKeeper PvP servers are x10 gather PLUS Zlevel increases as you rank up, so 400 isn’t so expensive as it seems.

When the scrap runs out, your base is no longer protected. This should stop all the offlining, but I expect to see some whining from some players, and we’ll all find out who the offliners are.

If this is successful I’ll add it to the Clans server too. EDIT: Done. Now active on Clans.

Please note that you are NOT protected from the effects of the AutoPurge plugin. With current settings if you don’t connect within 5 days your base will be purged. (I’m still hoping the AutoPurge plugin dev will take up my suggestion of removing resources from the Tool Cupboard rather than purge the base immediately so that an abandoned base will decay away using the regular Rust method.) I have also put in a request on CodeFling for a dev to create such a plugin.

I fully expect that plenty of players won’t read the Welcome Message that states that Offline Raid Protection is active and so will still be raidable.

That’s life. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates

Rust Red Text Errors

If you get red text errors in Rust when you start it up, or at any other time, this is the fix. It started happpening to me with a new PC build and a new Rust install and was driving me mad.

F1 -> Console and then enter:-

console.erroroverlay false

That is all.

Posted by PPlank in Rust Servers, Server Updates