Rustafied

Lunar New Year 2026

Work continues on Lunar New Year 2026, and this time it’s all about the Year of the Horse. A brand-new horse armour set is well underway, complete with updated materials, optimized textures, proper world models, and multiple polish passes to get cloth physics, tassels, LODs, and ragdoll support behaving nicely without tanking performance.

There’s also an ornate (and slightly silly) themed horse mask in the mix, featuring custom materials, transparency fixes, physics tweaks, and even a tailored neck model to support the design. Store integration and icon work are progressing as well, so this cosmetic bundle is looking close to ready as the LNY26 branch heads toward release.

Other Stuff

Other stuff you can add (not covered in your article, and leaving out general fixes/hotfix noise):

• Boxes DLC is moving along with multiple themed storage boxes getting full item/prefab work (including gibs/corpses, icons, localization/manifest work, collision tweaks, and general setup passes). Looks like it’s more than just models now and is getting close to being “real” content.

• Apartment Complex monument continues to get layout and set-dressing work, including street/sidewalk refinements, front yard passes, sign greyboxes, subway entrance/town square bits, and early rentable kiosk blockouts.

• Local Tutorial work is ramping up: a playable tutorial island scene, local-server boot flow, server shutdown rules, asset/vehicle stripping for performance, bundle build process, and a lot of guardrails to keep it self-contained and stable while it’s being developed.

• UI/dev tooling: a “new console UI” / tools tab effort is underway with performance/refactors, plus WIP work for item UIs that need dual panels (example: showing protection properties and vessel UI together).

• PlayerRigUpdate2 keeps expanding with animation/rig pipeline tooling (batch update tooling, mask/hierarchy updates, anim set re-imports), plus some instrument pose/IK adjustments (drums/guitar) and outbreak scientist skinning work.

• World/render tech: terrain renderer “nested grid” changes (instance data scale, packing rotation, faster LOD coord logic), and a jungle-specific optimization pass simplifying kapok tree branch colliders to cut down collider counts.

• Weapons/content prep bits: early blockout rigs landed for an M16A2 and a mortar, and there’s a “Molotov refresh” branch that looks like a broader revisit rather than a simple tweak.

• Cosmetics/marketing pipeline: Twitch drop rendering updates (SKS + fixes), and the Artist Pack store page video was updated.

• Small QoL-ish gameplay/visual behavior change: the building planner viewmodel is now controllable per-entity via a new construction script flag (started with ladders/ladder hatches).