The headline says it all: Rust, the game about waking up naked and alone on a strange island, mere hours away from death due to exposure and starvation, now has tubas. And not just tubas! The game's first paid DLC, announced last month, also includes a piano, a drum kit, guitars, a trumpet, a pan flute, and other cobbled-together instruments—all of them fully playable—of the sort you'd expect to find on a Gilligan's Island with guns. I'm sure no one will annoy anyone with these.
The Rust Instrument Pack goes for $10/£7/€8 on Steam (although it's 10 percent off until December 12), and in a nice touch you don't need to own the DLC in order to enjoy the tunes. You'll have to purchase the pack to be able to craft the instruments, but once made they can be shared between all players or taken off of corpses as regular inventory items. Static instruments are also available on a new music stage in the Compound so everyone can give them a try.
Unlike the squeezebox and fiddle in Sea of Thieves, for instance, which play preset tunes on a button press, these instruments in Rust can be manipulated more finely: "They all use a completely overhauled music system that allows you to play specific notes (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) across multiple octaves," developer Facepunch explained. And if you happen to have a MIDI-compatible device lying around you can plug it into your PC and use it to interact with the instruments in a more musical manner. The acoustic guitar already in the game has also been converted to work with the new system.
Here's what you can craft, and what it costs to do so:
- Wheelbarrow Piano (200 Wood, 100 Metal Frags)
- Junkyard Drum Kit (200 Wood, 100 Metal Frags)
- Shovel Bass (50 Wood, 75 Metal Frags)
- Sousaphone (100 Metal Frags)
- Jerry Can Guitar (25 Wood, 50 Metal Frags)
- Xylobones (50 Bone Fragments)
- Plumber's Trumpet (75 Metal Frags)
- Cowbell (35 Metal Frags)
- Canbourine (25 Metal Frags)
- Pan Flute (20 Metal Frags, 5 Cloth)
The update also enables legs, which Rust developer Garry Newman gave us an unexpectedly horrific behind-the-scenes look at last month. "Legs" sounds simple enough, but like most things involved with game programming there's a lot more going on than meets the eye.
As usual, there are a number of other fixes, changes, and additions in this update. Loading times have also been improved (although Newman noted, accurately, that if you really want to speed things up, buy an SSD), and horses are now better able to navigate rocks and radtowns—although they might sometimes do weird things like, say, teleport onto signs (this is being worked on). And for owners of Garry's Mod, there's a new GMod Tool Gun, a hammer replacement to celebrate that game's 15th anniversary. Full details are up at facepunch.com.
