Tale From The Rust .

Rust is an online multiplayer survival game that, alongside gathering food to simply stay alive tasks you with building your own home or fort to keep yourself secure and then arm yourself up, through exploration, research and crafting, to survive against the most dangerous creature of all: The humans. Following on from my earlier review and my Survival Guide I’ve been asked to share my adventures in the land that is, in my experience, a place of pure concentrated evil.

This focus on survival against other humans has come even more to the fore now that Facepunch studios have gone completely against the rushing tide and removed zombies from the game. Zombies were the best source of new weapons, armor, blueprints for these items and even research kits that let you research how to craft something you’ve found.

Picking a Server

So my aim here was to see how long I could survive without dying or, to be more accurate, how long I could last without rage-quitting as a result of death. It was a surprise how long I lasted. What I remembered of Rust was a constant level of terror and annoyance, multiple quits per day as a result of irritation and a broken pen, because that’s what I was holding and writing with while playing the game for the review. I never did claim my 49 pence back for that pen.

Jumping in, with the full intentions of not dragging this out forever, I picked the insane stress test server. Why? Well that’s because the more people there are, the more chance there is of me being murdered in my sleep or just being griefed in general. So that was it, I connected to the server and girded my loins for the potential murder I would drop into as soon as the world opened up before my eyes. Let there be light, the lord said.

The only problem is that god was being a workshy git, it was dark. Night time in Rust is a pain at the best of times, when you’re in a safe place, but out in the wilderness? That’s a recipe for disaster. It’s so easy to get lost, your visibility is next to nil so even if you’re in the right area, or you pass something that could be extremely valuable, you would never know. Light a torch to make it easier to find your way around? You may as well sign your own death warrant.

Somebody Else.

This was the first time I died. Wandering around in the dark, trying to figure out where I was, attempting to head East, I heard a gunshot. If you’re smart hearing a shot in Rust gives a few choices, run or hide. Or, if you’re armed, run or hide and ambush. Or, if you’re not smart, run towards the gunshot. My aim was to run away from the sound of the bangs.

Sadly, getting turned around against is quite easy and I found myself running right into the path of two well armed people chasing somebody else. I saw the person fall and then their attention went right onto me.

“Wait! Don’t kill me. I don’t have anything, only just started” I stated, hoping that they wouldn’t want to waste ammo. Sadly, this wasn’t the case. After about twenty seconds of not being murdered where I stood, I decided to wander off. Five seconds after turning my back I heard a gunshot, the screen went grey and a large, red, ‘YOU ARE DEAD’ greeted me, mocking me for wandering off and not sprinting like I was being chased by a Bear trying to eat my scrotum.

Of course Rust is a world where trusting people to not murder you for the simple crime of daring to breathe the same air of them isn’t a guarantee. The uncertainty offered by including other, unpredictable, humans, as well as placing them in an environment where there is no guaranteed backlash for being evil, nor a guaranteed reward for being nice, is always something to be constantly aware of.

This is what makes Rust as exciting and interesting as it is and quite possibly the combined wet-dream of every survival nut and anthropologist in the world. You sit on a hill and see people below, do you head down and attempt to converse with them or do you hide, watching their every movement, following them to wherever they have set up camp. Just so you know where other people are, of course, not because there’s an illicit thrill in stalking somebody.

It turned out that my murder was fortuituous. Respawning and hiding for a few minutes until the sun came out let me use my knowledge of the map, through having looked at it countless times before to figure out that I was in the south-east, near one of the ruined and radioactive towns. Thankfully this is close to my preferred location, Hacker Valley, so I first doused myself in a dose of radiation while searching the town, finding some radiation pants, a flare, silencer and some ammo.

This was very nearly the second time I died. Towns are very popular and even this, possibly the smallest one, is no exception to that rule. Why? They are the best place to find the rarer items, including guns, which spawn in bags and boxes within certain locations of each of the ruins. Heading out of the town I heard a whooshing sound by my head, followed by a dull thud. ‘Arrow’, i thought to myself. I turned around and there he was, another person, chasing me and firing arrows at me.

This I could survive, I turned to the east and fled and I heard the person behind me with a thick Russian accent “Stop, stop. I demand you stop. Now”

“F[ahem] off, I aint stoppin’ fer you. You just gonna kill me” I replied, putting on a fake Scottish accent, as I always do over in-game voice chat. About two minutes later he stopped chasing me, presumably out of arrows, so I aimed east, to the valley, a resource rich place where anything is possible.

Of course, nowhere is empty on the extreme server so remnants of player housing and even fully developed ones with no damage were both present. This meant that I had to be smart so, making sure it was empty first, I gathered a lot of wood and stone as well as killed one of the mythical chicken-pigs for food. Once I’d collected enough I scarpered into the main mountain range, finding a nice place to build a shed to give myself a nice safe place for life.

A Place of Safety

Your first shed should always be the launchpad of greater things in the world of Rust. They aren’t one of the harder things to build, only needing fifty pieces of wood for the shed itself and another ten, maybe fifteen for the door. What makes it special is that it’s a place to call your own, however small it may be. This feeling of ownership and false sense of security only makes it more poignant when you eventually get back from a long scavenging mission to find somebody has broken in and taken everything you own.

Which is exactly what happened, only it was me doing it to others. While out and about collecting resources I decided that the houses down in the valley floor? Well, it was just the owners silly fault for leaving them wide open and unlocked. Well, there was a window open, three stories high, so I did the only natural thing to do: I built a wood foundation, placed stairs three stories high and jumped right into the window. Doing this to three houses, I collected a few weapons, lots of metal, stone and wood, as well as a number of others things. I mean really, I just practically walked into the houses? What do you expect me to do?

This is where the holding pattern sets in during the average life in Rust. Normally I would just keep doing that, ad infinitum, and build a nice house in a location people rarely visit, until I’m sat on enough loot and resources to make Croesus envious. Then, if I’m on a server with friends, we would try to group together and build a fort at one of the busier locations, just because we could. However, this is a story and I needed to put myself in harms way, and I’m alone, so I set off to wander the road, doing a whole loop of the map.

The world map, I lol’d at Ballzack mountain / valley.

It didn’t last long before I ran into people. I got over the mountain to Rad-Town and found a guy with a bow and arrow. Thinking it was the same person who chased me, I pulled out my pistol and shot him, chased him down, shooting, until he died. That’ll teach him to try put pointy things in my back.

Gunfire, however, is loud. It let’s people know where you are and that you have, indeed, got a gun. Having a gun potentially means you have better weapons and items as well, which means a gunshot nearly always leads to a gunfight, as more people trapse in. I heard a shot, a bullet hit the ground near me, then another bullet hit me. I ran behind a rock and scarfed chicken meat down like I had a wasting illness. More gunshots.

Three people were around the edge of the town, shooting at each other, I popped over the rock and started taking shots at them, I saw one go down. This was going well and then it happened. This was the second time I died. A muffled shot, obviously taken from far away, hit me and I died in one hit.

Thinking nothing of it, adrenaline pumping, I was happy to carry on. This was exciting. I respawned, got my bearings and found I was quite far away, near the hanger. This was the third, and final, time I died. No shot, no sounds, just death. The same person who killed me during the firefight also killed me then, ‘impossible’, I thought. It sadly was impossible.

Death is inevitable.

The chat suddenly came alive with recriminations and expletives. Arrows, because I don’t actually know how to type the arrows that constituted his or her name, was cheating. Seven people, myself included, had just been killed in quick succession, all at different parts of the map.

It was a sad way to end what happened to be one of the more exciting bits of time I’d had in Rust for quite a while, but once I know that no matter what I do, I can’t get an advantage, I lose interest. Quite possibly, the inclusion of cheaters, who are breaking the only rule in Rust, would be of interest to the aforementioned anthropologists, but I lose all interest and bidding farewell to the people I was chatting to, I quit.

What I do know is that in the future I’m going to be a little more aggressive. Develop quickly, hide out somewhere closer to the main areas, and get into fights. I don’t want to be one of those that goes around pilfering everybody, that’s just not me, but it’s certainly exciting to be a part of what delves into a big, shooty, free-for-all.