In Rust, an indie game by the maker of Garry’s Mod, that’s the seemingly simple objective. You are plopped down stark naked in all your 3d modeled glory with nothing but a rock and a couple bandages and told to achieve this simple objective. Also plopped down in this world are other players, some just as naked as you. However, other players arrived long before you and now have clothes. And pickaxes. And fortresses. And body armor. And military grade rifles. And in a world where resources are limited and you are told to survive at all costs, those players with rifles are rarely friendly.
I logged in for the first time to a generic, unmodded server with over 100 other players. I wandered around trying to find a rock node or wood pile to hit with my rock for crafting materials so I could start carving my little place out of the hell that was the world. My first romp through the forest returned little for my efforts and as soon as I found a rock to harvest, I was greeted by another player stone axe blade first. My first death in Rust. I stopped counting at this point, which was good, because my current death toll is higher than I can count. I can honestly say my adrenaline was pumping fast as I wandered through the dark forests, constantly listening carefully for player footsteps, running and hiding scared when I heard them. When you die in Rust, you lose everything. The other player can loot you and that’s that. This makes creating a defendable fortress essential in which to store spare gear that you can retrieve after your many, many deaths. This game has provided me with some of my most terrifying moments in a video game, all thanks to the other psychopaths on the servers with me.
A quick overview of the progression. You harvest stone nodes and trees or wood piles for wood, stone, sulfur, and metal ore. You build a stone axe to increase your harvest rate, and then a hut in which to hide come night time…when the world gets near pitch black. You have a torch, but by lighting it you essentially just paint a target on your back. You need to build a door in addition to just the hut, and then you have a semblance of safety. You gradually increase your raw material stockpile, make a furnace, a larger hut, metal harvesting tools, a bow and arrow, and then you need to go from hunted to hunter. When I started, there were zombies in main hubs. Now they have transitioned to temporary mutated animals with an as of yet unannounced replacement for those in the future. These special monsters drop blueprints you need to progress further, making things such as handguns, ammo, Kevlar armor, military grade weaponry and plastic explosives.
I never made it this far on a standard server. Hell, I never made it past the making a little hut phase. The servers were too overpopulated, the harvest nodes had yet to be optimized to account for this and the map was too small to handle this many people in any way but absolute chaos. Once I gave up on the main servers and found my way over to the modded servers, my enjoyment factor climbed quickly. The servers went from having 100+ people on at all times to hovering around 50 at most, for the servers I chose. I feel with the current map, 50 is about all it can support without requiring all out war 24/7.
Once on a new server a friend and I had carved out our little nook in the world, created an ever growing fortress and started stockpiling blueprints, gunpowder, ammo, food, and weapons in a way that would make the best doom day preppers proud. Now violence is always enhanced in video games, but something I have learned from Rust is that given a situation where a few pieces of wood can mean the difference between surviving and not surviving, I am totally willing to beat another player’s head in with a rock to make sure I walk away with that piece of wood. I’m also willing to hold players at gunpoint if they approach too quickly or try to move in a way I don’t like. I am also willing to take shots from on top of a tower with a rudimentary sniper rifle at a near naked player who came too close to the field in which my heavily fortified house was built. My sociopath switch may or may not be triggered by this game.
The game is early in alpha and has met an extremely high success rate for being in such an early build. The game keeps getting better with every update, although we are currently experience a drought of updates because of a MASSIVE rebuild in the works, rewriting most of the code from the ground up. I can’t wait to see the re-release in the next few months, the game has good bones to build on and I expect great things for its future.
There have been teases of upcoming additions, ranging from attack helicopters to electricity to alarm systems…it’s extremely ambitious to put it lightly. Personally, my friends and I have simpler wish lists. We feel the game plays its best at the primitive level, and should at least start with that. I’d like to see different bows available, improvised clubs, swords and shields. The ability to dig would make moats a valid option for home defense, and the ability to take out metal doors and walls without the use of high explosives would make it less of a yes/no as to whether someone can get into your house. This would also mean we need more building materials to supplement the current wood or metal, different strengths to make it so the battering ram may get through the wall, but is an hour of playtime clicking the button worth it?
Being in early alpha, the game definitely has its bugs. They fix them, but some online players, being the fine human beings that they are, decide to break them and create workarounds and hacks as fast as the bugs can be fixed. On a lot of servers, hackers that can phase through walls, insta-lock for headshots, steal possessions out of your pack and a plethora of other cheap moves run rampant. They are fighting them and constantly looking for new, better systems with which to fight them. Generally when I run across hackers I either try to enjoy the game elsewhere, or I find a new server. It’s a short term fix until they can build in their long term fixes.
I hope the game continues to get better and better, and I will keep dropping by as the updates come. If you are looking for a great game that brings out the inner mass murderer and recluse, Rust is definitely for you. It’s definitely worth the $20 asking price, and I anticipate with their newest patch in the next few months, it will go from feeling like an early alpha to a well polished beta.
Rust can currently be found HERE on Steam.
Thanks for following!
-Mac
--Sociopathic Score--
In a world where you are naked, scared, and without anything
to your name…your inner sociopath shines brightly.
--Sophomoric Score--
You do start stark naked, 3d modeled junk and all
--Strategic Score--
It’s survival of the fittest and most creative. Coming up
with new ways to build given the limited options that prevent others from
breaking in and stealing your stuff…it’s kept me up at nights.
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| It's all fun and games until a friend takes an arrow in the stomach. |
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