Rust update throws out zombies, improves nature

In some ways, Rust is like a big, pastoral representation of life. Your ramshackle hut, built through sweat and tears, stands for the your accomplishments. The weighty rock you use to crush an interloper's head like a grape? That's just being a friendly neighbor. And the zombies...well, I still don't know what the zombies mean, but they're pretty annoying. So much so, in fact, that Facepunch's latest update yanks them out of its sandbox survival-thon entirely—replacing them with less-stupid animals.

"The longer we keep zombies in, the more complaints we'd get about removing them," Facepunch writes in the patch notes. "We are forcing ourselves to deal with it. We are no longer a zombie survival game!"

Instead of walking corpses, we'll now meet red bears and wolves with a similar appetite for eating your face off—a temporary swap, Facepunch assures, until the reveal of something fresher in the future. The patch also fixes wildlife calmly standing around in the vicinity of gunshots and predators along with numerous bug squashes and performance tweaks. Oh, and we get more rocks.

Here's the rest of the changes:

• Fixed bugs with the level (such as rocks intersecting buildings)
• The "oil tank" area has been modified with cover
• Workbenches make you craft faster when standing next to them
• Added new player animations
• Improved melee attack animations
• Added locked backpacks and lockpick test (off by default)
• When you die, your backpack is locked for everyone else but you for a time
• Someone else can use a lockpick tool to bypass this time
• Lockpick tools are a default blueprint
• You can't use lockpicks on doors
• The amount of time the backpack is locked for is per-server and can be set with the command player.backpackLockTime seconds ( can be turned off by setting player.backpackLockTime to 0)
• Footstep sounds will never play the same sound as the one previously played
• Grass textures have been improved

Rust is pretty cool —and it's already generating its fair share of memorable moments —though it still shows some rough spots in its alpha state. Rust's Steam page houses the update's full notes , if you want to take a look.