01
Dec
2022

Changes to Quarries and Pumpjacks

Effective from the FacePunch forced wipe of 1st December 2022, there are two changes being introduced that probably won’t affect most players.

This is has been done to reduce the huge amounts of resources being produced by *some* players in a very short time and causing the game to be unbalanced. I don’t think it will completely solve the problem and I may have to take further steps, but that’s for another day. I don’t think that even on a 5x or 10x server that it’s right that players should have MILLIONS of high quality metal, metal frags and sulfur within the first couple of days of a wipe.

The changes:-

1) You will now only be able to deploy 2 quarries and 1 pumpjack.

2) Quarries and pumpjacks will only operate while you’re online.

I’ll explain this in more detail.

For number 1 I think it’s fair to say most players won’t notice this limit as many people put down a couple of quarries and that’s enough, but some just can’t stop placing them down and the output gets a bit silly with them all running 24/7. If this change isn’t enough, I’ll reduce the number to 1 quarry per player. The good news in this is you can still upgrade your quarries and pumpjacks in the quarry/pumpjack interface by clicking the upgrade button. Each upgrade will consume a quarry or pumpjack from your inventory.

Which brings me onto number 2 where the quarries and pumpjacks will now just turn themselves off when you disconnect, and turn themselves back on again when you reconnect.

I know that some people won’t have read this post and it will be a surprise to them, but everyone will know soon enough that these changes mean a change in game strategy.

If you don’t already do it, then the first thing to do is to find good quarry locations that output most or all ores and upgrade them, and then finally build a base near those to protect them. Good use of pipes (/p command) to pipe out the ores as they’re created should get the resource into your bases, where you should have put plenty of scrap into your Tool Cupboard to stop players from offline raiding you. This means if your quarries and pumpjacks have built up an excess of resource while you’re online, when you disconnect and they turn themselves off, the remaining resource will be piped into your base where it’s safe.

Comments here or in Discord please.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates
28
Nov
2022

Possible Changes to GameKeeper Servers

I’ve been a little concerned this last few weeks that maybe I’ve made it a little too easy to gather resources due to quarries being a little bit over powered, and I’ve been looking for ways to fix this without removing personal quarries altogether and I’ve come up with a couple of changes that I’ll be testing.

The first is to put a limit on the amount of quarries and pumpjacks you can place down, and I’ll probably set that limit for both to two or even one per player. You can still upgrade those quarries and pumpjacks to make them perform better by using the upgrade button in the quarry interface.

The second is to make a change so that personal quarries and pumpjacks will only operate when you’re online. When you disconnect, they’ll turn off until you reconnect again. That will surely stop over production.

I think these changes are fair and a good idea to stop some of the ridiculous amounts of resource that some players have been creating. I will test this out tomorrow and if all is good it will be implemented this coming forced wipe on Thursday 1st December.

Comments here or in Discord please.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates
09
Nov
2022

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
19
Oct
2022

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
09
Oct
2022

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
10
Sep
2022

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
07
Sep
2022

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
05
Sep
2022

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
05
Sep
2022

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
23
Aug
2022

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