Sanguine RustRust Seagulls and Crows: Bird Flocks That Land, Flee and Can Be Shot
Update (Nov 5): confirmed in the November update. Crow and seagull flocks shipped. See the patch notes.
Rust's coasts are about to get a lot noisier. Commits from the last week of October add seagull groups that land at harbors, oil rigs and fishing villages, crow flocks that gather over fresh corpses, and birds that scatter when explosives go off. The work, on a branch called "bird_critters", was merged into main on October 29 and several times after.
There is no release date, and details can still change. Here is what the commits show.
Flocks and groups: two kinds of birds
Most of the design is in one commit from ElliotH on October 27, the first pass at seagull groups. It splits birds into two kinds:
- Flocks are birds animated by a shader. They stay high in the sky and never land.
- Groups are real birds with rigs and animations. They come down and land at "interest points" that the level designers place in monuments.
A group is one entity with several gulls in it, a bit like the existing swarms. Unlike swarms, the gulls have hitboxes.
Startle, fly off, land again
The commit lays out how a group behaves:
- Walk close to a group of gulls and they startle and fly off.
- Once they are far enough away, they turn into a high flying flock.
- After a wait, they come back down at a new interest point and turn back into a group.
Later fixes stop groups from getting stuck while landing, keep the gulls from picking the same spots, and make them step around each other so they do not walk through one another. A server command can also force a group to startle or land, which is handy for testing.
You can shoot them
The same first commit says individual birds can be shot while they are in a group, and they fall as ragdoll corpses. Facepunch made the hitboxes bigger, even bigger while flying, so shots land. The commits do not say if gulls drop anything when killed. Our guess is they are mostly scenery for now, since no loot or food is mentioned.
Crows follow the dead
Crows get a flock of their own, with a new far distance model. A commit from October 29 adds hooks that pull flocks toward things:
- Corpses attract crow flocks for a short time.
- Timed explosives make bird flocks flee the area.
- Monuments can have "bird interest zones" to draw flocks to places that are active.
Later tweaks made flocks move more like scavenger birds, with flitting movements and less obvious circling. A crow flock over a field may be a hint that something just died there. That is our guess at how players will read it; the commits do not say it was meant as a clue.
Where the gulls show up
Seagull spots were added to coastal monuments on October 29 and 30. The commits name both oil rigs and both harbor versions, then fishing villages, harbors, the ferry terminal, oil rigs and floating cities. Flocks also got deep sea support.
The seagull groups use a population controlled by a server setting, so server owners can likely turn the number up or down. The exact setting name is not in the commits.
Sounds and performance
Sound designer diogo.c added take off, landing, flying and scatter sounds for the gulls, and fixed flock audio. On the code side, the bird logic moved into Burst compiled jobs and a budgeted queue, and the server keeps a simple list of flocks since there are few of them. In plain words: Facepunch is trying to keep birds cheap so they do not cost frames.
When will birds come out?
No date yet. The branch is merged into main, and the next monthly update is the first Thursday of November (see how Rust updates work). Our November update roundup has the rest of what is in the commits, and the livestock post covers the other animal work going on.
FAQ
Are there seagulls in Rust? They are in Facepunch's main branch, not on live servers yet. They land at harbors, oil rigs, fishing villages, the ferry terminal and floating cities.
Can you kill seagulls in Rust? The commits say birds in a landed group can be shot and fall as ragdolls.
What attracts crows? Corpses draw crow flocks for a short time.
What scares birds away? Walking close startles a gull group. Timed explosives make flocks flee.
Sanguine Rust
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Source: Facepunch commits