August ties the monuments together with a power grid. Feed Heavy Fuses into the Power Plant and the island wakes up: recyclers run hotter, roadside poles carry current, and half a dozen monuments gain something worth going back for.
MonumentsLive
The Power Plant now runs the island
Heavy Fuses restart the Power Plant, and a live grid unlocks features at monuments all over the map. It is the spine the rest of this update hangs off.
Power PlantHeavy Fuse
Facepunch calls the set Player Maintained Monuments. The idea is that monuments stop being fixed loot rooms and start being infrastructure somebody has to keep running, which means somebody else can turn up and contest it.
Heavy Fuses drop as loot and go into new fuse boxes at the Power Plant. Nothing unlocks all at once: some things on the grid need more fuses than others before they work, so a single fuse is a down payment rather than a switch.
Once the grid is live it reaches beyond the Power Plant. The powerline poles with the white transformer cylinders, the ones that run alongside roads, now carry electricity you can wire a base into. They are also climbable, so a pole is a ladder as well as a socket.
Green recyclers outside safe zones drop to 50% base efficiency, back to 60% with enough grid power, and gain a 0.5s speed buff to 4.5s at maximum power.
Yellow recyclers inside safe zones are unchanged.
A new red recycler at the Power Plant runs at 75% efficiency, usable only at maximum power.
A second loot room at the Power Plant opens once the grid has enough power.
A new Launch Site terminal lets one player steer a decaying satellite and pick its crash site. Everyone on the server watches it come down, and everyone knows where the crates are.
Launch SiteSatellite Crate
Power up the Satellite Control Computer at Launch Site with an aiming module and you get control of a satellite. Thruster buttons move the target marker, and there is no manual, so the first job is working out which button does what.
Lock in a target and the descent starts, visible server-wide. The satellite impacts and spills new satellite crates, which need to cool down before they can be looted. That cooldown is the whole design: it gives every other team on the map time to arrive.
With the grid live, a switch on Large Oil Rig pumps crude to the Dome for 20 minutes. Collecting it needs a Tanker module and a car lift, so it is a convoy job rather than a solo run.
The DomeCrude OilLarge Oil Rig
The Large Oil Rig switch pumps for 20 minutes once activated. You cannot carry the crude out by hand: you need the Tanker vehicle module to drain it, then a car lift to extract it.
Small Oil Rig has its own switch that pumps at half the rate. Both can run at once for one and a half times the crude, which turns two rig trips into one worthwhile haul.
Water Treatment Plant has to be maintained to keep the map wet
New roadside water pipes spawn empty. Getting them running means keeping two gearboxes turning inside Water Treatment Plant, and gears are consumed as they go.
Water Treatment Plant
Two gearboxes have been added inside the monument. With the Power Plant grid live, placing a gear into a gearbox and interacting with it starts the valve wheel turning, which pressurises the new intact water tank at the centre.
Gears are consumed by the turning wheel and cannot be pulled back out once inserted. When the tank hits full pressure the blades spin, the blockages clear, and water flows across the map again.
Facepunch notes that the cold start is the expensive part. Coming back occasionally to keep the pressure up is much cheaper than restarting from empty.
Airfield's new tower calls in airdrops and a Chinook crate
The refreshed control tower has two terminals on the second floor, charged from fuse boxes on the grid. One raises the airdrop rate map-wide, the other calls a resupply crate to the tarmac.
AirfieldSupply Drop
The smaller terminal increases how often air drops fall across the whole map while it is charged. The larger one calls in a Chinook to drop a crate near the airfield tarmac.
Both drain their charge slowly after being triggered. Once the residual charge is gone they are available again, so the tower is a shared timer rather than something one group can sit on permanently.
Walling off a chunk of the map is now a running cost. High walls have a static 20% upkeep, sitting between the 10% and 33% that building blocks pay.
High External Stone WallHigh External Stone Gate
This is the latest in a long line of changes aimed at wall spam. High stone walls already cost sheet metal to craft; now they draw upkeep whether or not they are attached to anything you use.
The practical effect is on external tool cupboards. Keeping an outer ring alive means either feeding those TCs properly or watching the ring decay, which should also clear old compounds off the map after the base inside them is raided.
Water well vendors are a boost again, not a farm replacement
Prices are unchanged but stock is cut hard: 2 items instead of 10, restocking every 10 minutes instead of every 2.
Vending Machine
Facepunch's example of the problem is buying ten jackhammers and ten advanced teas a few hours into wipe, which skipped most of the farming progression the tea system is built around. The extra scrap from the blueprint update made that easier still.
Cutting the stock rather than raising the price keeps the vendor useful for a single early tool or tea without turning it into an alternative to setting up farms and cloning plants.
Stock lowered from 10 to 2.
Restock time increased from 2 minutes to 10 minutes.
Hover looting a body bag did nothing when the item needed a clothing swap. In a fight that meant unequipping your own armour by hand mid-raid.
Metal Facemask
Holding ALT moves an item onto your player: into the backpack before the main inventory, worn instead of dumped in a chest, and so on. Hover looting a corpse skipped that path entirely when a swap was needed, and silently did nothing.
It now swaps properly even with the inventory locked, putting what you take off into your main inventory. If your inventory is completely full it goes into the body bag you are looting instead.
Shields can be swapped between blocking and aiming
A new bind swaps between the shield on your back with ADS available, and the shield up and blocking. There is a cooldown of a couple of seconds between stances.
Metal ShieldImprovised Shield
The bind is set in the settings panel. The cooldown is deliberate: Facepunch says letting players spam the swap would have added randomness to gunfights rather than rewarding picking a stance and committing to it.
Bags can be pinned to the compass and marked as favourites
One respawn point at a time can be shown on the compass, and favourited bags sort to the top of the death screen list.
Sleeping BagBed
The compass marker has to be enabled by interacting with the bag directly, and only one can be marked at a time. The stated aim is to free up the normal home marker on the map for something else.
Favouriting is separate and done from the death screen, which matters most on a wipe where you are carrying twenty near-identical bag names.
Ore nodes and woodpiles no longer spawn in safe zones
Nodes inside safe zones could only be hit with a rock, so they piled up and consumed the global node population, starving the rest of the map.
Sulfur OreMetal Ore
This is a spawn-budget fix rather than a balance change. Because nothing cleared them, safe zone nodes accumulated and held slots that should have produced nodes elsewhere on the island.
The headdress was too strong an early pick because it gave good head protection and still allowed a bandana. Crafting it now needs a workbench, in line with other helmets.
Wolf HeaddressWorkbench Level 1
The lunar new year animal masks always shared its stats and have been converted into skins of it. They can now be re-skinned freely between variants, which also clears the clutter they created in the crafting menu.
With the grid active, or the side generator running, the garage door works from a switch and the car lift inside becomes usable.
Gas Station 1Modular Car Lift
Lower the lift with the controls, drive a car on and use it like any other lift. Raising it again opens the way down into the cave, where car part spawns have a chance of higher quality.
The Supermarket freezer stocks chilled food while powered
A new freezer inside the Supermarket produces a steady stream of chilled food for as long as it draws power from the grid, with a larger cache every so often.
Startup is about twice as fast and servers save entities in parallel
The main menu now loads only what it needs and streams the rest. On the server side, the experimental Jobs 4 mode gains fully parallel entity saving.
Loading into the main menu was pulling in assets that were not needed yet. On most machines Facepunch measured the change at roughly twice as fast.
For server owners, UsePlayerUpdateJobs 4 now saves entities in parallel by batching snapshots into thread pool tasks, controlled by ParallelNetworkQueueBatchSize. Saving was one of the main stalls in a server's frame processing. Jobs 2 mode has been removed and Jobs 3 is the new default.
Terrain shader optimisations, and improved texture sharpness with TSSAA or DLSS.
The F1 console no longer stalls on long text, and the main menu opens and closes faster.
The new object pool no longer leaks under contention, which was a problem community developers had reported.
A paid pack with two real mini-games. The pool table and dart board are self-contained, playable in real time, and keep a score other people can try to beat.
Pool TableDart BoardJukebox
The pool table is placed like any deployable. Players walk around it, jump on to line up the cue ball, pick a power level and flick the mouse up to shoot. Standard pool rules apply, for one or two players.
The rest of the pack is an interactive jukebox deployable, skins for the mini fridge and shotgun trap, bar stool seating, and themed wallpapers and sprays.
A full rewrite with a dolly camera, a keyframe timeline, a sandbox mode and PNG sequence export. It is off by default behind demo.newui while feedback comes in.
The old workflow needed a pile of binds and console commands for even simple cinematics. The new panel exposes camera, depth of field, time of day and post processing as sliders, and any slider can be keyframed on a timeline.
Sandbox mode clones players and places lights, the scene system saves variations like project files, and appearance controls change the clothing and seed of any player or hide them entirely.
The Small Backpack is this month's workshop skinnable
The first wearable opened to the workshop in a while. Download the model from the in-game workshop under the Small Backpack item and add your own materials.
