Instead, when you join one of the many servers, you're presented with a few faint hints in the top-left corner of the screen: "harvest wood!" "build a hatchet!" The crafting system itself is fairly intuitive, with well-written tooltips for each of the items in the catalog, and you can fast-track yourself into some serious munitions if you get lucky with a few resource spawns. The development team didn't spend any time cooking up a tutorial (which makes some sense, when you consider how long the game has been available). There's a high concentration of racism and misogyny in the global chat, so much so that I eventually left the channel entirely.Īnd unsurprisingly, the new player experience is quite prickly. Given the tone, it shouldn't be surprising that the community I found in Rust tended to be fairly juvenile and toxic. I'm utterly entranced with how little faith it has in our ability to get along. When I'm turned the other direction, he bashes his rock right through my skull and runs off with the rest of my stuff. That's Rust! A kid and I are raiding an abandoned gas station for food and weapons, and I give him the extra pair of pants I was carrying around. An extremely geared man takes pity on you, and drops a crossbow at your quivering feet. Instead, I engaged with the population of Rust on a purely incidental level. There are a number of YouTube documentarians showing off the multi-man raids that spawn from committed Discord channels all over the world. That's a coordination I appreciated from a distance. (Some clans even recruit players across all time zones, to make sure there's always someone on guard.) One of the fascinating kernels of Rust's brutality is how everything in the world remains persistent, even if you're logged off, which means that smart players arm their bases with land mines, punji sticks, and keypad locks while they're away. I spent the vast majority of my time in Rust playing solo, but I don't want to discount the notorious community of players that band together in clans, and wage wars of aggression along the shared hunting grounds.
Sure there are some areas on the map that are stricken with radiation, which leads to the implication that perhaps you and the rest of your misanthropes are occupying a far-flung, post-collapse society, but those moments feel more like window dressing than anything else. Yes, you will need to manage your hunger, thirst, and health-and as you ratchet up the tech tree you will discover increasingly effective ways to stay alive-but that's it. Most of the servers are on a strict weekly or monthly reset schedule, which scrubs the island of any lingering housing or fortifications left behind by the players, which gives the experience a strange sense of futility. There is no grander narrative, or mythos, or win condition. Wake up naked, run for your life, do horrible things to one another. Rust famously does not quarter off its servers to keep entry-level nakeds away from the roving troops suited up in advanced firearms, which means that occasionally, your journey will end with you matching another player's revolver with a rock that you've tied to a stick. Eventually, from those same basic ingredients and a few mechanical leaps of faith (like work benches and furnaces), you'll be able to craft pistols, flamethrowers, and rocket launchers.
This is similar to the scrounging mechanics in plenty of other survival games, but what makes Rust different is how deep that tech tree goes. You quickly figure out that, by banging your rock on a few environmental doodads, you can harvest a few basic resources (stone, wood, and cloth) which you can parlay into a few prehistoric instruments, like a spear or a hatchet. You wake up on a map armed with only a rock and a torch. If you're somehow unfamiliar with the premise, think of Rust as a dumber, more nihilistic Minecraft.
The game was first released in Early Access in late 2013 by developers Facepunch Studios, and it's been a mainstay of goofy YouTube send-ups ever since. If it feels like we've been living with Rust for a long time, that's because we kinda have.
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