Lose all your scrap at Rust's new poker tables

April brings yet another interesting update to brutal (and brutally popular) survival game Rust. Now you can enjoy new ways to communicate without a mic in the brief seconds before someone shoots you in the face. And for gamblers, there's an exciting new way to lose scrap metal in the casino. In the brief seconds before someone shoots you. In the face.

New gestures including waving, pointing, thumbs-up, and an arguably sarcastic clap have been added to Rust, which can be accessed from a radial menu and look quite nice both in third and first-person perspectives. These gestures don't unequip your weapon and can be canceled mid-gesture, making them less risky to use in dicey situations, which in my experience with Rust is every situation ever.

"Fun fact: these gestures are all left-handed because they were initially meant to be used while holding the weapon at the same time (which is generally in the right hand), however we felt it limited our future options for gestures—clapping with one hand is tricky," reads the Rust devblog.

"As we felt that the quality of the legacy gestures weren't up to scratch compared to these new animations, we've made the decision to remove support for playing the old gestures. You can however still bind these new gestures using the same commands/keybinds if you don't want to use the gesture wheel."

Gestures are cool, especially for players who don't or can't use a mic, so that's a welcome addition, but I'm personally excited to see the addition of poker tables for the casino. Finally, a proper way to lose everything I have in Rust: Texas hold 'em.

You can take a seat at the poker table (which can be configured for two to six players) by depositing at least 100 scrap metal. Then kick back and see if you can bluff your way to victory. As a poker-enjoyer, this makes me want to play Rust more than anything else I've seen added to the game in years, and the interface looks nice and easy to use.

Slot machines, which were added recently, have undergone a few changes as well, with fewer possible rewards though "the chance of getting a proper payout (three matching symbols) should be much higher than before. The majority of scrap paid out last month was via the wildcard symbols which felt a bit unexciting," it says on the devblog.

Along with the gestures and new gambling options, some server optimizations have also trickled in with the patch:

• Floating junkpiles will no longer process buoyancy if no players are nearby
• Better balanced server load when lots of turrets are scanning for targets
• Upgraded SQLite and removed lots of GC allocations in the connector code
• Update Facepunch.Steamworks with buffer pooling for swnet (Steam Networking only)
• Rewrite NetWrite to have less CPU overhead
• Add caching to TechTreeData since it could cause short CPU spikes on the server
• Got rid of some small GC allocations that happened every frame

There's way more to the update, including the option to disable blood, a reduction of the safezone hostility timer (from 30 minutes all the way down to five minutes), and some hitbox and recoil tweaks. An Easter egg hunting event will also pop off about once a day for the next week, and the players who find the most eggs will get some special loot-filled eggs as a reward. There are also a few Easter-themed items in the Rust store. You can read the full patch notes here.