Rust Server Fixes: Event Timers, Skin Freezes and Sleeping AI

Rust servers should run a little smoother soon. Facepunch commits from October 25 to 28 make event timers survive server restarts, fix freezes from repair bench reskins and first crafts of skinned items, fix AI sleep zones that were broken since May, and start batching every kind of network packet. Most of these are already merged into the main branch.

None of this has a release date. Main branch fixes usually reach players in a monthly update, but Facepunch has not said which one. Here is what changed and why players should care.

Cargo ship no longer resets on restart

This one players will notice. Before, if the cargo ship was about to spawn and the server restarted, you had to wait the full cooldown again. A commit on October 28 saves the hours remaining for scheduled events, and it names the cargo ship as the example. The commit says "event schedule events", so other events on the same schedule should keep their timers too. Servers that restart every day will see events on a steadier rhythm.

No more repair bench freeze

Reskinning an item at the repair bench could freeze the whole server for about 0.7 seconds right after a Steam item definitions update. The game was scanning every Steam definition to find the skin. Now it is a direct lookup, which the commit measured going from 1,275 ms to 0.66 ms in the editor. The commit says this was happening about 95 times a day across official servers. It is merged into main.

A related fix stops a stall of up to about 200 ms when a player crafts a workshop skinned item for the first time after a restart. The Steam item definitions now warm up on the server too, not just the client. It is also merged.

AI sleep zones fixed after five months

Rust puts NPCs to sleep when no one is near them to save server time. A commit on October 27 says AI sleep zones have not worked right since May. An earlier race condition fix meant every zone that was not inside an entity failed to set up, so only the underwater labs worked. The commit links before and after pictures from a fresh map.

A second fix from October 28 stops sleeping AI from running a wasted movement tick when they spawn. They never had a destination, so the work did nothing. Together these mean fewer NPCs doing useless work when nobody is around.

Packet batching for everything

Jake_Rich is working on a branch that takes the idea of batching position packets and applies it to every packet type. Packets get queued each frame and sent together after the frame's work is done, on the network thread, with a console setting to turn batching on and off at runtime. Later commits keep position packets unordered but still batched and wake the network thread once per flush instead of after every batch. This is still on its own branch, not main. For players, the hope is less server load on busy servers. This is our guess, as the commits do not give a number for the gain.

Smaller fixes worth knowing

• Water junk piles. A work queue for water junk piles leaked about 150 entries an hour until its budget filled up. Fixed, and work queues can now enforce a minimum gap between passes.
• Bigger item pool. The item pool went from 512 to 2,048. The commit says they were "consistently overflowing it." Item removal and loot container resets now run in batches.
• Cargo ship navmesh. The navmesh no longer builds on top of the cargo ship.
• Death screen bags. Sleeping bag buttons on the death screen no longer overlap and snap around on hover, which caused misclicks.

For more on the speed work, see our earlier post on the network LOD and FPS push.

When will these fixes ship?

No date yet. Rust's monthly updates land on the first Thursday of the month (see how Rust updates work). The event timer, repair bench, workshop skin and sleep zone fixes are merged into main. Packet batching is still on a branch.

FAQ

Will the cargo ship timer reset when a Rust server restarts? Not after this fix. The server now saves the hours remaining for scheduled events.

Why did my server freeze when someone reskinned at the repair bench? After a Steam item definitions update, the reskin scanned every Steam definition. It now does a direct lookup.

What are AI sleep zones? Areas where NPCs go to sleep when no players are near. They were mostly broken since May and are now fixed.

Sanguine Rust

Sanguine Rust is a PVE server with zombies, bosses and skill levels, where a lot of NPCs share the map with players. We test every Rust build on a test island before moving our islands over. See what Sanguine Rust is about.

Source: Facepunch commits