PPlank

As we can't all spend 24/7 on one of our favorite games, I've installed some plugins that protect players against offline raiding on the Clans and Solo servers.

One of the biggest reasons for players leaving the servers (I've been told) is because new players start playing Rust, spend a while building their first base, logoff and when they get back on the next day, they've been raided and lost everything. They leave and never come back. For me, I've always wanted revenge in that situation, but I get why some players say "fuck this" and never play Rust again.

To help all players but especially new players, there are now some changes I've made which I think are fair. Please let me know if you disagree.

New Players

EDIT: Not working as it should, all players are getting 100% protection. I've removed the plugin and informed the dev, now we wait.

All NEW players to the PvP servers now get 6 hours of ingame playtime where their base is 100% protected. So if they play 1 hour a day for a week, they've used all their time up. If they play for a couple of hours and leave the server forever, then after 5 days their base becomes unprotected again. There is a check made to see if they really ARE new players by checking their Steam in game time.

This doesn't reset at wipe, it's a one-off kindness. 🙂

After that time, their base is raidable like anyone elses.

Door Closing

The next change I've made is to automatically close all your doors when you go offline, so if you have autodoors turned off and forget (some players do) you should still be okay. You can toggle it on and off with /ofd.

Offline Raiding

The last change I've made is to make offline raids more difficult. Not impossible, just a little more difficult. Effective immediately, when you go offline your base becomes stronger after a little while, causing the raider to have to use more explosives etc.

This is how it works.

• When you go offline (can also be AFK for 15 minutes), then for 15 minutes your base is at the same level of protection as it would be if you were online. After 15 minutes of being offline/AFK, your base gets a boost to 100% protection for 45 minutes.
• After that first hour has passed, then for the next 48 hours, your base protection is reduced to an additional 50% over normal and now needs to take more damage to be raided.
• After 48 hours it returns to normal amounts of damage.
• After 168 hours (7 days) of being offline your base is now weakened by 50% than normal and only needs half the explosive etc, to raid it.
• That helps keep the server clean from abandoned bases if a raider cleans out the TC. The dead base will then decay naturally over the next 48 hours.

You can check a players status by using the /ao <PlayerName> command in chat.

So my thinking behind these changes is to keep players playing. I've seen many new players to the servers leave after a day or two because they've been raided and lost everything. These changes give them a slight boost that they may need while they're learning the basics. If they give up, then their base becomes more easily raidable after a week.

To balance the frustration that more experienced players may have, before the April wipe we'll be seeing automatic server-generated raidable bases appearing on all the servers. These will appear as events and will have decent loot and be protected by NPCs.

Watch this space.

Migration of the Rust servers has completed and we're now in a new home for the forseeable future.

Clans Rust Server - steam://connect/144.76.153.229:28065

PvE Rust Server - steam://connect/144.76.153.229:28015

SOLO Rust Server - steam://connect/144.76.153.229:28075

Talking about the future... New servers, new plugins, custom maps, custom entities. That's the way forward I think. Watch this space.

All Rust servers now have much more scrap than they did before. I've gone through each container and doubled the amount, and added scrap to some containers where it wasn't there at all before. Even all scientist types now carry scrap, and heavy scientists carry double the amount of scrap of the regular scientists. So, apart from barrels and crates, it's now possible to farm scientists and zombies etc for their scrap.

Please note that it is always a random amount of scrap that can be found in every container, but the minimum and maximum amounts have been doubled. Sometimes you will find the minimum, sometimes the maximum.

At some point, scrap will be exchangeable for RP (Reward Points) in the /s store, and then you can use the RP to purchase in game items like guns, blueprints and other useful stuff. That will take a lot of balancing to get right, so don't chase me about it as there's a lot of simpler changes I'd like to make first.  😉

I've made the first of many changes coming to the servers by increasing the number of level ups from 25 to 100 and decreased the amount of XP loss when you die from 50% to 10%. This means it will take slightly longer to achieve maximum rank on anything, but if you die, you don't lose massive amounts of the ranks that you've worked for. The suggestion was made by Meteostorm and I think this is a good change for everybody as it rewards players who stay on the servers for longer and doesn't punish them as harshly on death.

As a reminder we use four of the levelling up methods:-

Mining - Gathering all types of ore
Woodcutting - Chopping wood, cactus
Skinning - Gathering animal products
Aquire - Collecting wood, mineral drops, plants

You'll notice that Crafting isn't included in the level up system purely because it doesn't work with any other plugins that modify crafting. (It used to, but it doesn't any more.) I've always used another crafting plugin to slow down the production of C4, explosive bullets etc so that new players to the server don't get immediately raided off the server by players who have been on there a while and driven away. On modded servers like GameKeeper it's extremely easy to get resources like sulfur once you find a sulfur spot and place a quarry on it, so I had to come up with some method of restricting explosive production.

As a side-effect the crafting for simple items such as a Tool Cupboard can be reduced from 60 seconds to 3. I was considering making everything else instacraft as I know that's what many players like but I'm a bit torn as I feel it makes the game a little bit boring to have everything handed to you on a plate. Currently most things only take a second or two as I've set the crafting speeds to 5% of vanilla, which means the longest duration of crafting (e.g. high towers) drops from 180 seconds to only 9.