Rust Servers

02
Apr
2021

Quarries and Pumpjacks can now be Upgraded (QoL)

You can now upgrade your quarries and pumpjacks with other quarries and pumpjacks.

When accessing the fuel storage on quarries and pumpjacks, you’ll now see a small “Upgrade” button.

When you click it you’ll see this:-

You can see in this case that IF YOU HAVE ANOTHER QUARRY in your inventory, you can upgrade this existing quarry to the next level up. The other quarry in your inventory will be consumed and added to the existing one.

There are 5 level upgrades. As you level up your quarry, new mineral resources are also added. So you may start with just a stone quarry, but end up with a quarry producing all minerals. A level 2 quarry will produce the same amount as 2 level 1 quarries. Same for pumpjacks. Every quarry level will also unlock the next tier of production. Level 3 will unlock metal, level 4 sulfur and level 5 HQM if your quarry doesn’t already have these.

I’ve asked the developer if he’ll also add non-standard output such as wood and he’s looking into it.

The benefit of this is the production increases for each level you go up, and you now don’t need quarries everywhere, you can just create one “uber” quarry.

You can purchase quarries and pumpjacks in the /s store, or find them (rarely) in hackable crates, or (slightly less rarely) in hackable crates on the cargoship.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates
02
Apr
2021

Switches now Lockable (QoL)

Here is the first of a series of Quality of Life (QoL) changes to all the servers.

You can now add a codelock to your switches and generators so that they can’t be turned on and off by unfriendlies. 🙂

/el ~ Display enable/disable status with instructions
/el on ~ Enable locked switch/generator placement (switch with an associated lock)
/el off ~ Disable locked switch/generator placement (standard behavior without lock)

On first use, the player must enable it first via the chat command /el on.
This setting will remain ON until the player enters /el off.

Switches or generators are placed normally via the Rust user interface. Be sure to leave enough room below switches for the lock.

When the user attempts to pickup the lock, access will be denied. However, they can pickup the switch or generator as they would normally, and the lock will also be removed. A player cannot pickup or toggle a locked switch or generator.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates
01
Apr
2021

Easter Eggs Because it’s Easter

This is an easter egg basket, an easter onesie, and bunny ears. They’re all available in the /s store for 1RP each.

You use the basket to collect eggs. Arm yourself with it and left click to pick up eggs when the egg hunt event starts.

If you wear the onesie and the bunny ears while doing this, you’ll see MORE eggs. My top score is 91 eggs picked up. And I scored that tonight.

See how many you can pick up. Don’t blame me if you get eaten by a bear while concentrating on eggs though. 😉

UPDATE 15-04-2022:

My top score is now 130 eggs as of this Easter.

 

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers
31
Mar
2021

Raidable Bases Update

I’ve failed. My target was that RaidableBases would appear on all the servers tomorrow after wipe. It will now be more likely Monday 5th or Tuesday 6th April. It *might* take longer than that. Did I say it was a HUGE plugin? The video explaining it is a very wordy 45 minutes long where most plugin videos are under a minute.

The problem I have at the moment is I have a pretty big collection of bases that can be raided, but they all need work on them. For example the roof might need upgrading, the loot boxes have to be emptied, turrets neeed to be replaced (these are old base designs) and so on.

It’s not something I want to hand out to anyone else either – I think I need to do this myself as it’s the only way I’ll be satisfied. Once the first couple of bases are being auto spawned, then I think I’ll hand it out to anyone that’s interested in creating a base or editing one of the bases I have. I will certainly try to add a new base every few days.

One of the things I’ll probably be doing with the RaidableBases (RB) is preventing ladder use. RB will create a “no-ladder” zone around the bases it spawns. This will make the bases more of a challenge, and you may need 2 people to raid them. I may also prevent the use of minicopters around them, I haven’t decided.

So… Another few days to wait I’m afraid. We’ll get there.

In the meantime, I have some simpler and faster changes I’m going to make which should make the servers more interesting.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates
30
Mar
2021

RP Changes for Supply Drops

Effective immediately and for a while at least (this may change without warning), when you loot a supply drop you’ll earn 30 RP (Reward Points) instead of 5. This is to incentivise competing over the supply drops as I’ve noticed that fewer players are going for them. With that in mind here’s some extra info that supply drop loot is in the process of being upgraded after it changed following the change of loot methods from FancyDrop loot to AlphaLoot for everything. Watch this space.

The intention is to make many more items available in the /s Rewards Store (e.g. all 3 card keys are in there now), and here’s a reminder that RP is also being carried over between wipes, so anything you earn will be there in your RP account until you’ve spent it. You can see how much you have at any time by doing /s in chat.

RP is earned for all sorts of activity such as mining ore (nodes), shooting animals, gathering, etc. The more you collect, the more you’ll have to spend in the store. I’m even considering a trading rate for scrap to convert it into RP (maybe 10 scrap to 1RP, to be confirmed). If I implement this it means that before wipe you’ll be able to convert everything to scrap and then convert it to RP which will carry over into the next wipe cycle.

All of this is always subject to change as we try to keep things balanced while making it fun for people who know all the little wrinkles of the GameKeeper servers.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates
25
Mar
2021

PvE Quarries Now Auto Protected

I’ve removed the QuarryLocks plugin on PvE as it was a bit clunky and was missing features I wanted such as being able to prevent players stopping and starting other players quarries.

A new plugin has just been released which is much better. All your quarries and pumpjacks are automatically protected from other players removing the contents, and they can’t start and stop your quarries either. Yay!

There’s a chat command too.

/quarryteam – Enables a players team to access their quarry that the player has placed.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates
24
Mar
2021

Heli Crashes Fixed

So it turns out there were a LOT of helicopters crashing all of their own accord. Which means free loot after killing the defending scientists, and I hate that. Only kidding. 😉

But, I have fixed that problem now. After a lot of head scratching and experimentation I worked out what was going on and I’ve made changes which so far look like far fewer helis in general. It was all down to 3 plugins interacting with each other and causing the generation of a lot of helis, and one of the plugins was then bringing them down ALWAYS between 5 and 10 minutes. I suspect config options being added when a plugin gets updated which are on by default, but I’ll never know, I could just be incompetent. (I’m not.)

So, HeliControl was spawning a heli (now disabled), vanilla was spawning a heli (now disabled via AutomatedEvents – I think), and Automated Events (the preferred plugin) was spawning one too – I’ve set AutomatedEvents so that 2 players are required to be online before a heli spawns now – not sure if this is working or not yet. Time will tell.

On top of this, PilotEject was randomly ejecting pilots from ALL helis between 5 and 10 minutes of them spawning (now disabled). PilotEject is now set to spawn an eject heli every 90-180 minutes but only if 2 players are online.

So 3 plugins and vanilla were all spawning helis which were aborting within 10 minutes.

There should now be fewer helis, and pilot ejecting should be rare. We’ll see. :wink: This is a pefect example of plugins interacting with each other and causing problems.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates
24
Mar
2021

Crafting Lock-on Smoke Rockets

You can now craft lock-on (smoke) rockets, but it takes a chat command to do so.

To craft one, you need to make sure you have 1 basic rocket and 3 tech trash in your inventory. Then issue the command:-

/craft.lockon

If you have enough resources for several lock-on rockets, you can specify how many you want to craft:-

/craft.lockon 5

Crafting is instant.

The current plan is to re-add lock-on (smoke) rockets back into loot shortly, and possibly also add them to the /s Rewards Store. I can’t guarantee I’ll do that when I look more closely at the situation, but at least you can now craft them and use them to take down the broken cargo planes.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates
23
Mar
2021

Quarry Changes

Well, I’ve just spent 3 hours trying to sort out the output of quarries as they’re a bit OP. There’s a plugin that handles quarry and pumpjack output, and I’ve been fiddling with it to reduce the output and it wasn’t making anything other than minor changes.

I couldn’t figure it out.

So I unloaded the plugin and then ran the quarries for a minute (6 lowgrade) and they were STILL ouputting massive amounts. wtf?

Then came headscratching time and I finally thought the correct thought.

“Do I have another plugin installed that could be affecting the output?”

Well, yes I do. Because this is a 10x server I was testing on, the gather rate was 10x, so pickups, mining, etc. I opened up the config and sure enough there’s a variable that affects quarries and pumpjacks and it was set to 10. Gah!

I’ve changed it to 1 on all PvP servers. PvE servers are set to 5 as usual.

The good news is I also set the value of the Giant Excavator to complete a cycle in 120 seconds instead of 600 (I’d nerfed it a few weeks ago when I heard of an exploit) and also doubled the gather rate to 2 instead of 1. I have yet to check this out as it’s just a first stab.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates
23
Mar
2021

Loot Table Changes

Effective immediately, changes to the loot tables mean that there are 3 rare items that you can only get by buying them from the /s store, or via Hackable Crates.

Quarries and Pumpjacks are now 2500RP, and Test Generators are 3000RP in the /s store. (RP = Reward Points.)

You can also get all 3 items from Hackable Crates, but they’re very rare – you have about a 1 in 20 chance of getting any one of them from a single crate. They’re a little less rare in Cargo Ship Hackable Crates – about 1 in 7, but still difficult to get.

It’s easier to farm animals and build up your RP early game and then purchase any of the items you need.

These new loot tables apply to all servers right now, but by next wipe, there should be PvE specific loot tables where it’s easier to get these items.

Other upcoming changes to the Rewards Store are the ability to sell wood and stone (and maybe a couple of other things) for a higher price than they are now in order to gain RP. And also for all 3 key cards to be available for purchase too. (Don’t hassle me about it, all this takes time and testing)

As always, have fun.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates