Rewards System Updated

New command /rr which opens a desktop GUI. From there you can see the RP you can earn from harvesting, killing etc. You can also set a banner or icon notification to show you how much RP you earn for each action, e.g. killing a boar, chopping down a tree, or gathering hemp etc, I have mine set to “icon” and it appears for less than a second so it’s not too distracting. Or you can turn it off.

I know it’s taken a while to get my attention, and I apologise for the delay, but at last the Reward Points (RP) system has been updated. It took me 4 hours to carefully transfer the old values to the new system. What a PITA but it’s much better now

You may find a few of the values are slightly different, and it’s a work in progress. If you spot anything a little strange, please let me know in Discord and I’ll take a look.

Posted by PPlank in Rust Servers, Server Updates

TP and Home Limits

Effective immediately (I just made the change) home limits for vip+++ ranks have been increased from 12 to 20. Also the number of teleports of any kind have been increased from 99 per day to 199 per day. All other ranks remain unchanged

This should make it more convenient for those players who spend a lot of time on the servers and do a lot of teleporting around. 😉

Posted by PPlank in Rust Servers, Server Updates

Halloween Minigame

You will have noticed the Halloween mini-game starting every so often. It's worth playing.

Collect candies as they appear in front of you and earn goodie bags. These can be upgraded to produce better and better items.

To make it easier and more competitive, I've added the Scarecrow Wrap and the Pumpkin Bucket to the Rewards Store (/s) at a cost of 1 RP each.

Wear the Scarecrow Wrap and you will see more candies appear at a faster rate. Hold the Pumpkin Bucket in front of you and hold down the Left Mouse Button (LMB) as you run around to pick up candies instantly, there's no delay at all.

I'm fairly sure most people don't know you can do this as I have yet to see anyone other than myself in the #1 slot. My all time record is 104 candies. Beat that.

 

 

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers

Rust Wipe 2nd September

These are links to all the maps that will be used for the 2nd September wipe. Note that the main PvP server (Clans) has now been increased back to x4000. This month’s FacePunch map algorithm change seems to be to have greatly reduced the number of underwater labs to about 3 per map.

GK PvE (x4000)
https://rustmaps.com/map/4000_1214?staging=true

GK PvP Clans (x4000)
https://rustmaps.com/map/4000_793464?staging=true

GK Solo (x3500)
https://rustmaps.com/map/3500_1909558951?staging=true

Duo (x3500)
https://rustmaps.com/map/3500_1707586840?staging=true

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates

New Donation Store is Live

The new Rust donation store is now live.

Key Points (tl;dr)

o All donations are now in euros rather than dollars
o Instant upgrade upon donation completion, day or night, 24/7
o Lifetime perks are available such as bigger backpacks and auto tool repair
o Memberships continue to be vip+, vip++, vip+++
o Memberships are available as monthly, quarterly and annually
o Donations are not subscriptions and will expire
o Annual membership is the best value for money
o RP included in every membership applied across ALL Rust servers
o Clear and easy to understand comparison chart for both benefits and kits
o Server voting will be enabled shortly and is a WIP (Work In Progress)

Donations now in Euros

As most (but not all) players are from the EU, it made more sense to me to flip to euros rather than dollars. Also, many of the monthly services I have to pay for are also in euros and I was losing money on currency conversions from dollars to euros. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it all adds up, and is money that can better be spent on plugins and other software for the servers.

Instant Upgrades

If you donate for a perk or for a membership, you will now get instantly upgraded. I am using the CraftingStore service to do this, and while it has a monthly cost, it’s very small at €9.74 (inc VAT) compared to the Tebex service. As far as I can see CraftingStore has all the features of Tebex but for a third of the price.

Lifetime Perks

Lifetime perks are available such as bigger backpacks and auto tool repair. Bigger backpacks are likely to be most popular and you can see in the image below that they are currently half price, as is everything in the donation store until Monday 26th at 9.00am. You also get bigger backpacks included with each membership, but these expire when your membership expires. The lifetime perks never expire.

rust backpacks donation comparison

The Auto Repair Tool lifetime perk repairs all your tools and weapons automatically and for free. You need to have learned the blueprint for that item, but for example the chainsaw and jackhammer don’t require to be learned and so will repair themselves automatically when the health gets to 10%. In addition it will only lose 1% of total condition (red bar) meaning they will last for a very long time before breaking completely.

Bulk craft (instacraft) is something that’s been asked for a lot and is now available for donators as a lifetime perk. With this Bulk Crafting perk, you will be able to craft a whole stack instantly rather than each item one by one.

Memberships and Donations

There are no changes to membership ranks and they continue to be VIP+, VIP++, and VIP+++.

You can now donate for 30 days, 90 days, and 365 days.

With the VIP+ rank and above, you also get a personal minicopter locked to you that you can spawn and despawn at will with the following commands. This may get added as a lifetime perk at some point in the future if I get enough requests, but don’t hold your breath.

/mymini ~ Spawn a mini copter
/nomini ~ Despawn mini copter
/wmini ~ Find mini copter
/gmini ~ Get/fetch mini copter

Donations are not subscriptions and will eventually expire. Annual membership is always going to be the best value for money and as of today includes 1,680,000 RP (Reward Points) which are yours to keep forever until you spend them all. RP is now included in every membership and is applied across all Rust servers, so if you flip to Duo from Solo, you will have the same original amount of RP available to you. RP is NOT transferrable across servers and never will be.

Comparison Chart

There is now a clear and easy to understand comparison chart for both benefits and kits. This enables you to make the best decision as to membership.

Hint: it’s an annual membership at VIP+++ rank.  😉

Posted by PPlank in General

Personal Minicopter for VIP+

As of today, there is now a personal minicopter available for all VIP+ ranks and above.

You can summon or despawn your minicopter with the following commands:-

/mymini — Spawn a mini copter
/nomini — Despawn mini copter
/gmini — Get/summon mini copter

I’m not yet sure what will happen if someone flies off with your minicopter and you despawn it or summon it to you. It probably means a fall for the pilot. 😉

There is a 60 second cooldown to prevent spamming.

Posted by PPlank in Rust Servers, Server Updates

Clan EZ Banned

After several complaints and some players saying they wouldn’t play on the Clans server while EZ (an Italian clan) were on, I took a look and found the complaints to be reasoned and reasonable. EZ (Awsaf and Master) had suddenly gone from “shit” to “they always seem to know where we are and can get constant headshots” as one player put it. That kind of improvement doesn’t happen naturally over night.

Next up they seemed to know exactly where the loot in bases was stored and raided the same huge honeycombed base three times and each time went directly to the loot (in different places), ignoring the rest of the base. An obvious use of an ESP cheat. It’s sad that some people will do anything to appear good at something they’re actually very poor at, instead of acknowledging their failings.

But for me the clincher was when I checked Awsaf’s list of homes. He didn’t have any. In fact when I looked closely at all the entities on the server, he didn’t have ANYTHING.

Awsaf knew the game was up. He’d killed himself (and renamed himself to [EZ] 1010001110 01001110) and had NOTHING on the server. No homes, no buildings, no stashes, not a thing. You can’t go raiding when you don’t have any explosives to do it. Master didn’t have much either, even in the small stashes he’d squirrelled away – there just wasn’t enough to do a decent raid with (11 C4, no rockets). I could see which boxes Awsaf had been into, which TCs he’d authorised on, and he wasn’t the owner of any of them.

I’ve “sticky” banned the EZ clan with RustAdmin for using ESP – it will follow them around from server to server, and other admins will ban them from their servers too.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers

How to stop Edge from opening links

It’s very easy, download and install Edge Deflector, then follow the instructions after install to amend the protocol so that it uses EdgeDeflector instead. All this great little program does is what you wanted in the first place – it opens your preferred browser instead of Microsoft’s. It does this by intercepting Microsoft’s call to Edge and instead redirects it – you don’t even need to specify a preferred browser, EdgeDeflector will detect your system default.

Here’s a copy and paste from the post installation page (which may open in Edge).

  1. Open the Windows Settings app.
  2. Go to Apps: Default apps.
  3. Scroll to the bottom and click Choose default apps by protocol.
  4. Locate MICROSOFT-EDGE in the list and click on the program icon to the right of it.
  5. Select EdgeDeflector from the list. Confirm the change if asked to.

If you like this tool as much as me, then go buy the author a coffee here.

I’m not sure how long this will keep working given that Microsoft have been behaving like complete dicks by actively ignoring your browser preferences and instead opening Edge at every chance they get. The latest to hit me was the sudden appearance of a “News and Interests” app next to my system tray after doing a Windows 10 update. It’s annoying that something has changed on my desktop that I haven’t asked for or actively installed, but okay I’ll give it a quick look before removing it. I immediately found that when you click anything in this app it opens with Edge. That then prompted me to go searching to find something that would stop this overbearing behaviour. I shouldn’t have to do this, but MS still seem to think they stand a chance in the browser wars.

(Incidentally, Edge brings my dad’s 3 year old PC to a halt by using all the CPU – a Celeron something-or-other with 4GB RAM – plenty for what he needs the PC for. I bought him the PC because he likes to browse stuff and troll family and friends. At some point a Windows update had changed his browser preference to Edge and essentially rendered his perfectly good browsing PC to a piece of junk. It took me 15 minutes to change the settings back as I had to wait until Edge closed, but next time I visit in a couple of weeks, I’m installing EdgeDeflector so that Edge isn’t a problem for him any more.)


Postamble

Microsoft have annoyed me many times over the years with their aggressive behaviour and unwanted changes, and their behaviour hasn’t seem to have matured. They’ve wasted countless hours of everybody’s lives.

Posted by PPlank in General

Next wipe is HDRP

Edit/Update:

It’s great.


Thursday 6th May when the servers wipe and Rust updates, there’s a nice surprise waiting for you. FacePunch have introduced HDRP to Rust and many of their monuments and other prefabs have had a shiny new high resolution update.

HDRP stands for High Definition Render Pipeline and is a Unity thing. It’s supposed to enable higher resolution models (prefabs) in game with almost no hit to frame rates. Oo-er. I’m thinking that newer GPUs will benefit but I’m a bit concerned my 4GB RAM GTX 970 might have some problems.

We won’t know until we try. It’s exciting, and if it works the way it’s supposed to, it will be fantastic.

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates

Codelocked Hackable Crates now open faster – QoL

I thought I’d already done this, but maybe I’d just tested it without applying it to the servers. Anyway…

Codelocked Hackable Crates now open in 7m30s, or should do anyway. The one I tested did.

If you find one that’s not opening at that speed, please let me know.

(hackablelockedcrate.requiredhackseconds 450)

Posted by PPlank in General, Rust Servers, Server Updates