Toggle Background Color
Rust is really weird. Let's talk about Rust.
Bacter, for heaven's sake, what is Rust?
Rust was going to be Yet Another Zombie Survival Wilderness Survival Game. The idea was you're dropped into a hostile, ruined, rural environment buck naked. You get a rock and a torch, and a pat on the butt to go make the best of it. You have to contend with other players, animals, zombies, and bombed-out ruins in a quest for dominance. The wilderness has scant food, and only what weapons and clothes you can forage or craft, as well as predators. The cities have better gear and more filling food, but are all heavily irradiated and zombie-infested. HOW WILL YOU MAKE IT?
In actuality, it's changed quite a bit since that first idea. Zombies were eliminated entirely. The dev teams says it's because they realized they weren't central to the experience. Frankly, seeing as ever the bear, horse, wolf, and deer AIs are still pretty iffy at this point, my guess is something more complex like a zombie AI was just a no-go.
Radiation has been eliminated entirely (except in modded servers), and really the only dangers are bears, wolves, starvation/exposure, and other players. Three guesses which the most dangerous of those are.
Rust servers are also FREQUENTLY wiped. The longest ones are usually once a month - once a week is much more common. This avoids too much stagnation, and, in larger servers, means the time right after a wipe is usually VERY interesting. Join a big server too late in the cycle and you'll find impossible castles with bazookas and auto-turrets that cut you to pieces. Join early, and you too can watch 20 naked men beat each other to death with rocks for two cans of beans in a wet cardboard box in your local ruins.
Rust is... this super-weird conglomeration of a survival game, tech-tree race, and enormous, mad max style gang brawl. The physics are just weird enough to make it entertaining, the community is all over the place, from hilariously toxic to disturbingly polite, and it's got a startlingly active player base and frequent updates. It would be boring, but it's just too STRANGE.
Didn't you already do this?
So it's been quite some time since my last Rust update (which is fitting, whole "lo effort" ambience!). Why do a new one? Well, for starters, I actually started PLAYING it again. And for seconders, it's changed a bit!
Rust is a game that's still under heavy development, with near-weekly updates, so quite a lot has changed, and yet, Rust remains Rust. Like war in the Fallout universe, or the concept of exchanging money for governmental services and the abrupt end of life, Rust Remains.
The basic setup is still the same - I mostly play with my cousin, and he's usually the one interested in core gameplay, base building and the like, while I like to abuse the janky physics to break into other peoples' bases, put punkins on their heads, and destroy the evidence of how I got in. That said, you DO lose something not knowing what the "intended" game IS in Rust. So, I've set aside this update...
Update the second, in which the basic idea of what actually is supposed to happen in Rust is discuss'd
Now, a caveat. Rust is very much a "create your own experience" type of game. It's perfectly happy to cater to the punkin-parkour enthusiasts among us. But, much like in Minecraft or Terraria, there are clearly intended avenues of progression. Let's explore them!
I wasn't kidding when I said there were frequent updates. 126 major ones, and we're still in ALPHA.
I'm glad to see they FINALLY got around to buffing bone armor, and reducing miner's hat fuel consumption. It's the little tweaks like that that really make a game come to life.
Rust is one of those "only online" games. You can't really appreciate the majesty of the game ALONE, BY YOURSELF. It's a communal, social exper- hm? yes, of course I spend most of my time in servers with 0 people in them, you think I LIKE getting shot to death every four seconds?
Actually, my cousin is unaccountably good at finding servers where there are other people who are friendly without being a roleplay server. I've never EVER managed that.
There are three types of servers: Official, Community, and Modded.
Official servers are an absolute toxic sewer. This is where the dregs of Rust hang out. There is very little admin presence, so hacking is rampant. If you don't find hackers, you're likely to find an organized, well-armed army of children, racists, and sociopaths. There have been some motions made to automatically find and eliminate hackers, but not much can be done about the community, I'm afraid. The one big exception to this rule is Rustafied, which tends to be well-moderated and patrolled.
Community Servers, by contrast, are rented and set up by people who care about their version of Rust. That can absolutely be a vicious PvP death camp, but at least they keep the hackers out. Rules are up to the admins, but usually include no threats, racism, and hacking, putting them LEAGUES ahead of the Official Servers. I and my cousin live in these. The worst you'll usually find is a server set up by somebody who wants to play God - mods can beam infinite resources into their pockets and just explode your base anytime they feel like it. They can also boot you if you're so good at sneaking into their base and putting a punkin on their head that they think you must be hacking, but that's a story for another day!
Modded servers run the gamut from highly specialized rulesets with custom graphics and graphical tweaks, to ones with teleport and 5x faster resource collection to make racing up the tech tree faster and eliminate all the "annoyances" that are supposed to be entertaining vulnerabilities in the main game, to old-school reboots with radiation and zombies still in 'em!
Of course, the zombies look like this.... anyway!
Just for the fun of it, let's see what one of these Rustafied servers is like. You generally get a little "ABOUT THIS SERVER" message when logging in, so you know what you're in for. The really swank ones have graphics to let you know they care.
Ah.
This is of course the downfall of being the only good Official Server. I don't think we're waiting 73 players just to show off a server for 10 minutes, thanks!
There are also themed Official Servers, like this one. It's my experience that literally everybody in one of these servers has a better computer and more skills than I do, so let's jump in mid-game and just spectate for a bit, shall we?
Every server has a long load time - there are a lot of assets to load, plus putting the whole environment in place.
Those splines won't reticulate themselves, you know. I think.
And here's our boy! Motion-blur the unreadable name!
Hilariously, a persistent bug is that Rust's decency filter doesn't recognize clothes, so you can see it's still trying to blur out the butt of Mr. Bone Armor here.
He's got on scrap metal armor, bone pants, and a bucket hat, and he is ready to ROCK.
Hello, Kr1ket. We're all rooting for you! Notice that he's got a nice gun. He is better outfitted than I ever have been in a game of Rust.
His low level means he found all of this stuff. The hazy white area is, I'm pretty sure, the edge of the playable area. To the bottom-right are health, food, and water meters. He's pretty well-fed and watered, but in stark defiance of his "do not enter" chestplate, somebody is PERFORATING him.
Yes, sadly, we don't really have much time to get to know the hopes and dreams of KR1KET before he's gunned down. Don't worry, though, because not five seconds later...
His killer gets his!
So, cards on the table, Rust really isn't made for this kind of gameplay. This is an interesting scenario for a run-n-gun, and Rust's controls just aren't remotely tight enough for this to be truly interesting. Or maybe I just have a bad connection or something, but I'm lucky if I shoot where I'm aiming half the time. The few times I've tried a mission like this, I'm just gunned down 2 seconds before the starting countdown finishes. Ah well!
Notice the airdrop coming in on the top left there - airdrops from planes have the best gear of all, and they happen a lot in maps like these.
Alright, stuff that. Let's find ourselves a relatively unoccupied, normal, non-Rustafied Official Server.
And we're in! This is the way all Rust games start. You're naked, sleeping, and you've got to wake up.
I see a lot of player-built palaces nearby. That is VERY BAD on an official server.
Notice the bottom of these is stone, but the top is wood. This means that either this isn't the main base of these guys, or that we're not far into a wipe. Building materials goes wood -> stone -> scrap metal -> fortified metal. Stone will keep out jerks with starting gear (like me!) but not any determined attacker with explosives.
This is me. Ugly as sin, bald, naked, and with just a rock and a torch to my name.
Turning to my immediate right, I also found out I spawned one foot away from a huge wooden fort. This server is obviously HEAVILY populated.
By contrast, in community servers, you typically have to go scouting to find other player-built structures. There's no in-game way to know where people built things, but you get a general sense for where buildings typically are as you play.
This poor guy didn't even make it home. When you log out, you fall asleep right where you last were. Hopefully that's somewhere safe, but this guy doesn't seem to have anything on him, so I doubt he cares. You can built a sleeping bag, which lets you set a respawn point, but you can't teleport to there (in unmodded servers) except by dying.
The whole area is just FILTHY with these massive forts. This could be all one clan, or maybe everybody just builds together here?
There's kind of a village here. Note the combination lock on the leftmost door. If you know the combo you can get in, but you get shocked and hurt if you guess it wrong. There used to be no shock, so people would brute force the combos. There are a lot of insane people playing this game.
There are a LOT of sleeping naked people in this city.
I hear a warning shot, and see this naked man approach me. His mic is really bad, and I can't make out most of what he's saying, but I do hear "fag" a lot.
I don't like the way this... lady? Is looking at me. I back away.
I'm instantly machine-gunned to death. That lady begins to prepare my body for eating. "WELCOME TO RUST" I hear somebody shout.
Alright, F8TL Reaper.
You know, it only needs to be F8L. Oh well. That's enough Offical Server for a lifetime.
Let's go find a nice relaxing, zero-population Modded or Community Server.
This seems like a nice place. I can't think of a single reason I wouldn't want to live here, so I will.
As before.
I'm just helpless when it comes to exploration games. Give me a cool ambience and a nice big moon, and I'm all in. No, the graphics aren't Skyrim, but man I still want to explore!
Notice that I'm too cold, but only a little. It's more a warning at this point, but it does mean I burn calories (food meter goes down) faster. I'm quite hungry and thirsty too, but that can wait a minute. First thing's first!
First thing is to a find a tree, and hit it ten times with a rock. This increase my experience and level counters, on the left. That's a new thing to Rust - it used to be there weren't really levels, you were only differentiated from opponents by collecting recipes (which were random drops or could be crafted from fragments of blueprints found in ruins), and by actually HAVING better gear.
With 200 wood I can make 2 paper, and still have 100 left over for projects. And you always want to make two paper immediately!
Because paper lets you craft two OTHER things you'd need instantly. One is a paper map, the other is a building plan. Each only requires 1 paper to craft, so it's just a two-step process.
I run across a pig. Pig's don't attack you (just bear and wolves do), and would make a fine meal if I had any ranged weapons. Animals will generally outrun the crap out of you, so hunting before you get a bow or find a gun is useless.
Godspeed, porkly.
The map lets you see where you've been. You can draw on it, note good places for resources, where ruins are, where your home is, etc. The dark blue is obviously water. Where there's brown mixed in it's shallow enough to cross. Swimming is calorie-expensive and slow, so I don't want to do it now.
Once you have a map and building plan, you'll want to instantly head for one of two places: ruins or a river. Corn and punkins grow along the side of rivers, and you can scavenge food from ruins.
I dutifully make my way towards the river, and...
Voila! Punkin breakfast! You don't cook corn or pumpkins, and they refill a generous amount of food and water.
In my preferred way to play, of course, I go after these punkins for a totally different reason, but we'll discuss that further another time.
So I mentioned that Rust works differently now. You gain experience points by building, gathering, scavenging, and hunting. Those advance your level. Advancing levels unlocks different recipes, which need to be further purchased with experience points. At level two you get basic burlap pants, which require fabric to produce. Fabric comes from hemp plants.
At this point, I'm on the lookout for stone, hemp, or ruins. That blue paper is the building plan, and we'll talk about it soon.
Hemp is pretty abundant. It grows naturally in forests, near rivers, and in plains. Basically just not in the desert or snow (though it is occasionally there, too).
Hemp has a bunch of uses and it stinks that it's illegal, man. If you have an hour I'd be happy to go over all its many joys with you, while wearing a rastafarian-themed fake dreadlocks hat.
You need something like five hemp plants per clothing item. Clothing of course keeps out the cold, so it's a middle priority. It would be first priority if I was further "north", or living in snow.
One kind of annoying thing is finding stone vs. Wood. I could go chop on any of these trees with my stone to get wood - they're everywhere. But none of these rocks will yield rock. It doesn't hurt your stone to bash on them, but you could bash all day and get no result. By contrast, hitting trees VERY slightly wears on your rock, and hitting manmade objects like walls or doors degrades it unbelievably quickly. You almost never can get into a house by hitting it with a rock - they're usually far too sturdy.
No, you need SPECIAL rocks to yield rock, and even then you get a mixture of rock, metal ore, high quality metal ore, and sulfur ore. Stone is a big roadblock early game, and you'll spend a lot of time looking for and mining it.
Heeeeey ruins! The abandoned nuclear plant isn't the BEST, the airport and warehouse usually have more items, but any ruins are welcome.
The best thing about ruins is they spawn crates and boxes. Crates can have weapons, armor, ammo, health packs, any number of goodies inside! Cardboxes are more one-trick ponies, but are even more valuable early-game, because...
They have FOOD! Boxes can have chocolate bars, granola bars, apples, cans of tuna, cans of beans, or water bottles. Each restores a huge amount of food/water, which in turn restores a good amount of health. They also respawn fairly quickly around major ruins, and sometimes along roadways!
Now that I'm full, I'll dash everywhere. It uses calories more quickly, but not two times more quickly, and that's how much faster you move. It's almost necessary to not go crazy with long travel times.
Since there's no more radiation, we'll want to establish a base came fairly near this broken, glowing nuclear reactor. What could go wrong?
You can see the path I've taken here - the nuclear reactor is the big paved area - I went far enough away to find a nice flat plain for buildin'. My house is visible from the road, which could be a huge problem in a nasty server, but is just convenient here.
Here's where the building plan comes in! For 50 wood, you can place a foundation, upon which further construction can take place.
Protip: before you have armor and a good weapon, a wolf or bear will MURDER you. But they promised their dads they'd never set foot on a foundation. So if one is running from you, pull out your building plan, vomit out enough wood to make a foundation, step on it, and you're safe forever! Until you step off the foundation, that is.
I want a 3x3 house, and BOY do you run out of wood quickly. Lacking any better tools (haven't found stone yet, which is required to make a stone axe and pickaxe, the next level up), it's...
Back to poundin' trees and shootin' the breeze. A LOT of the early game is composed of finding hemp, hitting trees, and finding and hitting rocks, stopping to scavenge the cities for beans and apples. It's relatively slow going, but soothing if you're into that.
The building plan also lets you build a huge number of other building parts - each of which also take 50 wood. We'll do some stairs, because our foundation was built high off the ground. This is done to accommodate the changes in elevation - you just make sure your hut floor is level and the foundation is sized differently from there.
If you find a barrel, you can smash it open and hope to find something. I usually have back luck, but you can get weapons sometimes this way. Barrels occur naturally along roads and in ruins. Nature is amazing!
After the foundation and stairs are in place, it's wall time. I'm just going to do a one-story for now, it's easy to expand later.
Did I mention there's a LOT of foresting in this early part?
My window to the world!
There's actually two ways you can roof your hut - with a floor or with a roof. I pick floor, because it'll make it easier to expand the house to two stories later if I want to.
No, seriously. A LOT of forestry.
A floor will collapse if it's not in contact with at least one wall, so for the center of my 3x3 house I put down a pillar. 50 wood, same as the others. Wood is a confusing substance!
And there's the house!
In a punkin-parkour playthrough I'd have explored LOTS more than this by 20 minutes in, but I'm a homebody here.
While exploring a bit, I hit paydirt - a stone brand stone, specially formulated to beam stone into your pocket when struck by another stone! There are smaller hunks that you can pick up for 50 stone, but I find those to be fairly rare, and while any large stone gives you a mix of stone and ores, as mentioned above, if you find a sulfur or metal small stone, it always gives you +50 sulfur metal, and never stone. Stone is hard to find, is what I'm saying.
But VERY important, because with wood and stone you can make a stone hatchet and pickaxe. The hatchet is good for forestry, swings probably twice as fast as the regular stone, and gives you +20 wood per swing. You can just mow down trees with this baby.
With this firmly in hand, I rear back my original stone...
...and hurl it away in disgrace. You can TOTALLY see it in this screenshot! It's the small dark blotch on the stone.... ah forget it. I threw away my starter stone is what I'm saying. Thing was worn down anyway.
From here, it's a craft-a-thon.
Tool cupboard is for giving people building permission. In a wide radius, it forbids anybody to build anything unless they're got authorized at the cabinet. Anybody who touches it can be authorized, so you'll frequently hide one in your base. Getting around its baleful influence is how I make my trade as a Punkin Parkour man, and I'll discuss that futher later. For me, it means nobody can climb onto my roof or knock down my door, build a new door, and lock it, locking me in my house.
A sleeping bad, for the aforementioned respawn point.
I don't like to brag, but I DO like to sleep.
Then a campfire: you put wood and meat into a campfire (or just wood). The wood burns, giving you heat and comfort (which supercharges healing and eliminates any cold penalty. Cooking meat makes it go from hurting you but filling you up to healing you and filling you up quite a lot more. Burning wood also yields charcoal, which has further uses. Further, you can eventually put a water purifier above the campfire, turning bad water into good. Overall, very useful!
Then a door and a lock. At this level, only the simple lock is available. Anybody with build permission can make a key which opens the door for 25 wood, but it's the key that opens the door. If I lose it (say by dying - your body evaporates after about 2 minutes) I can't get the door open, and if somebody steals the key, they can open the door just fine.
Last, a storage box for keeping minerals in, and a hammer for improving the house. Hammers both repair decayed structures using some of the appropriate material (wood, stone, metal, high-quality metal), they also allow you to change the material the wall is made of - wood to stone takes 300 stones. This is a huge amount to get the whole house converted, but going from 10 health to 300 is well worth it. Any chump with a rock can take down a 10-health wood wall, stone keeps people without either explosives or a bow and arrows and a lot of time (more on that later!) out.
Note that you have to hit the walls, roof, AND foundation. Destroying a foundation destroys everything on top of it, so a wooden foundation is never any good, even with high-quality walls.
Further note that there is a way to bury the tools cabinet beneath the foundation of your house, making it almost impossible to detect, even if an intruder breaches your house. With a good-quality foundation, you'd never worry about somebody else getting build permission!
A goofy sign finishes it off. You can paint one, then lock the painting so nobody else can change it.
The rest of my time was pretty standard. I foraged for mushrooms and cardboard boxes, traveled along the road and found some more ruins...
I found a bandage right when I took some fall damage. Convenient!
But all that was secondary to the real issue - finding every possible rock and using my stone pickaxe to hoover up all the precious stone contained within it to upgrade the house.
The high point, excitement-wise, is finding an airdrop. A plane flies overhead, making a distinct noise. First you make sure it isn't an attack helicopter. Those circle around every half hour or so, hover near ruins, and machine-gun anything they see TO DEATH (with the exception of naked, unarmed players). You CAN defeat them, but it requires VERY high level gear.
Planes drop packages, and you run your little heart out after them.
Because they have GOOD STUFF in them, like these weapons and armor I brought back to the storage crate.
Green square is house, yellow circles are ruins.
I end this session with some bafflingly low-res stone pictures (I swear my computer is better than this, I think it's that the campfire is hard to render, so the middling internet connection drops all the visuals way down).
Almost all the house is stone. I have a good start, I've leveled up a bit, and have an easy source of wood, stone, food, and water.
What's next? A few more levels and I'll have bows and arrows. With those I kill animals. With animal fat I get low-grade fuel, which I use to make a furnace, which I use to smelt ore into metal. From there, I make better armor, upgraded defenses.
Add a second story. Plant crops (picking a plant always gives you one usable plant and one seed), scavenge more guns, add home defense (spikes, barbed wire, eventually auto-turrets). Build a repair bench. Build a third story, and an out-building. Build outer walls, get more settlers. Form a guild or gang, however you want to call it. Assert your dominance over territory, or coexist peacefully with anybody else on the server. Build a machine that mines for you, use the sulfur to make explosives, rockets, c4. Craft vanity armor. Fish. Build as much and as high as you can before the wipe.
It's an honest living, and relaxing.
But... somewhere between the awful insanity of public servers, and the, it must be said, somewhat stolid and slow life of the builder and farmer, there's something more. If it was just the official server stuff, I'd never touch the game. If it was just this survivalist and builder stuff, I'd play it for relaxation with the cousin, but I wouldn't really be EXCITED for it.
There's something else. Another game in here.
Something... for ME. I can FEEL it.
Something...
Something ORANGE.
Oh yes, that's the game for me.