Rust: cavemen play small-scale UO and make shotguns

[Nonentity]

Rust is currently the number 2 seller on Steam. It's early access. It's a first-person survival game ala DayZ but with pseudo-Minecraft building elements. I think it is awesome and it reminds me of the fun parts of UO, except the equivalent of building spoon staircases is a part of the game.



The core loop of the game is this - you spawn completed naked at a random location in the world with a rock, a torch, and two bandages. You hit trees and rocks with your rock to get wood and stone/metal, you craft those into tools, repeat ad infinitum. A single day in Rust is a 45 minute day followed by a 15 minute night. There are currently zombies in the game, though the plan is to phase those out in favor of something else (same with the modern military weapons). You get new recipes and research kits via zombies (or airdrops, that occur once every ingame day at a random location in the world).

You can also use those materials to craft housing pieces. Foundations, pillars, walls, doors, doorways, crates, etc. - your structures persist in the world after disconnecting from the server. You can place a sleeping bag to pick that as a new spawn point. The most rudimentary structures you can craft have wooden doors that can be hacked down by persistent players, but as your structures get more complex, they start requiring explosives, which are a big resource sink, so it turns into a game of risk vs reward on how much C4 it's going to cost to break into someone's building versus the potential reward. You can also hide a bunch of huts in the hills and live like a drifter.

If you die, you drop everything. There is no character progression outside of learning recipes, which persists through death.

Servers hold 100-300 people and your character is persistent to that server. There are various types of servers, but I believe under the default settings, it is full PvP, you fall asleep when you disconnect from the server (to prevent disconnecting in the middle of fights), and crafting items takes a certain amount of time to do.

Usually there is a big alliance on a server that bullies the smaller bullies, and so on. The defeats are bitter but the victories are so, so sweet.



There is a map of the world on rustmap.net - size-wise, I'd say it would probably take 20-30 minutes if you were to run from one side of the playable space to the other completely unmolested.

ANYWAYS I play on a central/east coast server I think, when you're in the game you can hit F1 to pop open the console and type net.connect "216.155.128.50:28085" to connect to my server. Or play on a PvE server or some other official server. Also, while you're there, type "censor.nudity false" to get the full dick glory. This game has caveman dicks.

Another good tip is using the console command "grass.on false" to cut down on the grass in the world so you can see things like chickens and fallen backpacks easier.

[Falconeer]

This is, with Nether, Infestation, and 7 Days to Die, at least the fourth game that tries to do what Day Z is doing but better and sooner. What's annoying is that so far seems like none of them gets to recreate the incredible atmosphere of Day Z and it's amazing engine. At the same time, they ALL have more features than Day Z, which is a big deal. I am really interested exactly because of the UO parallelism (which was true for all the afore mentioned games too), but I thought I was done with early-access games that are so far away from being stable or feature-full. Glad to hear this is already better than I thought.

I have a few specific questions for you Non: would you say exploration is interesting or the world is mostly copypaste and feels dead? And combat is at least decent and responsive, especially melee?

[Pennilenko]

I have a few specific questions for you Non: would you say exploration is interesting or the world is mostly copypaste and feels dead? And combat is at least decent and responsive, especially melee?

While a lot of fun, it is not what you are looking for. I've read your posts for a pretty long time now and I do not think this will measure up to your standards.

[Falconeer]

I am really curious to what my standards are supposed to be, but anyway you might be surprised. I like princess simulators, truck driving games, merciless pvp MMOs and a few other oddities.
Maybe you are referring to the exploration standards? If so you could be right as the world seems to be completely empty and dull at the moment.

[Sir T]

I havent played this myself, but I've seen someone in beta in a stream. Its basiclly running around like a madman gathering wood and stune to made guns before THE OTHERS find you. He was hiding in his house with the lights off at night as people can see a light inside your starter house and will attack. Big reason to build a fort is that you can have a light on in your house at night as the walls block it. When you see someone its an occasion for panic and hiding. You are scrambelling around looking for the parts to make a gun. Its running from dogs at the start as you have nothing to fight them with until you build an axe. I don't know what the later play is like, but I have a feeling that if you did not get in there at the start its you with an axe against a bunch of guys with machine guns and aircraft.

Interesting concept if you are into that kind of thing.

[Bzalthek]

I've played Rust some, watched it streamed more, so I'll provide a few insights.   The map is static and kinda small.  The area around the road is currently the only place where mobs and resources actually spawn so, in essence, the map is even smaller than you would think.  Night time is harsh as well.  You see nothing unless there is a light source nearby.  A full moon will reveal absolutely nothing.  There are no day-only servers (unless that has recently changed) so plan do to housekeeping or crafting for 15 min after 45 min of daytime.

While building complex forts are interesting, the walls are shitty and people can see storage boxes through the cracks, so instead of blasting through your multiple door complex, they build a quick ramp up and blow through your wall.  Unless you have huge forts with interior rooms or metal walls, which means you are probably already in some alliance which protects your shit while you are offline.  If you don't, it would probably be better to treat each play session as a unique experience.  Don't expect to log in the next morning with anything except a long trek naked back to your violated fort.

Overall it's very fun while you are on a streak or playing with friends, but there's a lot of frustration too.

[Pennilenko]

Maybe you are referring to the exploration standards? If so you could be right as the world seems to be completely empty and dull at the moment.

Right now you hit trees and rocks and hope you can make something before a horde of killers destroys you. Also, the horde of killers never appear to log off. There is no self mapping system. The UI is so minimal its painful. The crafting is weird, in that you build a stone furnace and with no tools other than a wood table you can craft military grade weapons.

The PVP is cool if you can find an empty server and get a head start before people show up.  Other than that I enjoy the fort building on PVE servers, but there just isn't enough there  yet to make a game out of. It is a fun little alpha to run around, but it is not really a "game" yet in my opinion. It is way to shallow at this time.

[Samwise]

I almost bought this because it sounded kind of interesting, but based on the discussion here I'm thinking I'd rather buy it for Surly so he can play it for me and write about his experiences.

[Nonentity]

The game is definitely very alpha right now. This game is screaming for all kinds of systems to smooth out the rough edges and have more things to do than be a bandit simulator. But currently, if you can get a foothold, it is very very fun.

[Kageru]

With all of these games I assume the main point of PvP is to stop people realising how boring, or non-existent, the gameplay is.

[Ginaz]

Are there any non-pvp type servers?  I know it sounds carebear as fuck, but I would probably just want to make my shit in peace any worry about what the environment throws at me rather than worry if xxXKillarDudeXxx is going to gank me and take my stuff.

Edit: NM, looks like I missed the part about pve servers.  Can people destroy your houses and stuff on the pve servers?

[Pennilenko]

Can people destroy your houses and stuff on the pve servers?

Yes. They can also take your stuff while you are offline or sleeping. However that takes a tremendous amount of resources, so what is more common is they just blow a door or wall up and then loot what you have stored and move on.

[Rendakor]

Is there a single player mode?

[Pennilenko]

No

[Malakili]

I hope that one of these sorts of games succeeds in actually making a game worth playing.  Minecraft mods seem to still outpace most, if not all, of them.

[Falconeer]

They should fucking combine them all together. None of them has enough money or time to do a whole game, but if only we could put together the crafting and mining of 7 Days to Die and Rust, the visuals and realism of Day Z, and the missions and progression of War Z, we would probably have a full PvP survival game worth playing for more than three weeks.

[Sir T]

The wall of Ego will never be breached, so such co-operation will never happen.

[Bzalthek]

New update came out, night is more realistic, or at least on some servers.

Changelogs can be found here:
http://playrust.com/

[Falconeer]

Hard not to crosspost this and hard to decide in which thread to put it, but this is a conversation that spawned on Twitter between Dean "Rocket Hall, creator of Day Z, and Garry Newman, creator of Garry's Mod and Rust. The cool part is that in the past few days Rocket stated more than once that Day Z is too unfinished to be worth buying and people should look into Rust instead, while Garry Newman declared in all his interviews that the reasons they started Rust is because they were totally in love with Day Z and wanted to make it "more reliable". It was only natural that these two were eventually going to talk, but the way it happened is kind of cute. Not to mention that it is awesome that they don't see each other as a threat even though their games clearly overlap in more than one way.

I secretely hope that their private conversations will make both games better. Soon.

[Falconeer]

Rust removes zombies, twisting more and more towards humans being the real monsters (in case you were wondering: no, Rust is not any less evil than Day Z and I would say there's more Killing On Sight in Rust than Day Z. Average character life in Rust is about 8 minutes).

6th Feb Update
1,324 Comments Posted on February 6, 2014 by Maurino Berry
Zombies Were Removed
nozombies

Yep. We did it. We decided we couldn’t hold off any longer. The longer we keep zombies in – the more complaints we’d get about removing them. We are forcing ourselves to deal with it. We are no longer a zombie survival game! They’ve been replaced with red bears and wolves. You hate them. We know. They’re just plugging a gap for now. All will be revvvealed.

Wildlife Was Improved
wildlifeplus

no longer exploitable by walking backwards
fears hostile wildlife
reacts to gunshots
hostile wildlife retreats if it cannot find a path to you
wildlife should not jump up and switch to random angles anymore
removed white wolf
Resource Objects Were Improved
oreicon

added new models for wood & stone resources
wood & stone resources change model to indicate their quantity
added another stone resource – contains mostly stone
Other Changes
fixed bugs with the level (such as rocks intersecting buildings)
the ‘oil tank’ area has been modified with cover
workbenches make you craft faster when standing next to them
added new player animations
improved melee attack animations
added locked backpacks and lockpicks test ( off by default )
when you die your backpack is locked for everyone else but you for a time
someone else can use a lockpick tool to bypass this time
lockpick tools are a default blueprint
you can’t use lockpicks on doors
the amount of time the backpack is locked for is per-server and can be set with the command player.backpackLockTime seconds
can be turned off by setting player.backpackLockTime to 0
footstep sounds will never play the same sound as the one previously played
grass textures have been improved
 

Known Issues

there are a small number of areas with what seems like invisible walls
there are one or two rocks without collision
there used to be  about 200 wolves in one area of the map, we fixed it, though.

[Surlyboi]

Yeah. Fuck that shit. I will tilt at a ton of fucking windmills but I probably can't fix these assholes.

[Threash]

So yeah,"penis brothers" is a thing.

[HaemishM]

I both love and loathe the Internet. 

[Hawkbit]

Game needs facial recognition software and access to the facebook/G+ api. 

[Der Helm]

Yeah. Fuck that shit. I will tilt at a ton of fucking windmills but I probably can't fix these assholes.

I feel I am missing a bit of context ? What assholes ? The devs ? The players ?

[Surlyboi]

The players. This explains why DayZ has been such a walk in the park lately, all the real shitheels are in Rust.

[Sky]

I'm always happy when there is a new strip of flypaper out for them. Makes things nicer elsewhere.

[Rasix]

There's plenty of flies to go around.

[Samwise]

So yeah,"penis brothers" is a thing.

I gotta say... that video was awesome.  I loved the one guy with an assault rifle taking out five of the naked shrieking cavemen before they dogpiled him and beat him to death with rocks.  Way better than zombies.

[Threash]

So yeah,"penis brothers" is a thing.

I gotta say... that video was awesome.  I loved the one guy with an assault rifle taking out five of the naked shrieking cavemen before they dogpiled him and beat him to death with rocks.  Way better than zombies.

How can you not love "have you heard about our lord and savior jizzes christ... the second cumming?".

[Falconeer]

CheatPunch

We made our own anti cheat called CheatPunch last week. We ran it over the weekend. 4,621 people have been detected and banned.

We don’t know how stable it’s going to be, so we’re testing it out on our official servers to make sure it all works before forcing it on everyone else. If you get kicked from the official servers with the message that you’ve been banned then you have been caught. You’re a naughty boy. You know what you have done. You won’t get unbanned. We know it was your 9 year old cousin. We know your computer got hijacked. We know that the CIA is getting you banned from all your games on Steam so you will join them in the hunt for aliens. We’re aiming to get a site set up for people that have been banned so they can go and see proof that they’ve been caught.

CheatPunch isn’t the answer to all of our prayers. It’s a stop gap solution. It’s going to get rid of a bunch of cheaters, but it’s not hard to get around (by design). We fully expect cheats to be touted as ‘CheatPunch proof’ quite soon. That’s cool. We’re never going to be finished fighting.

[Falconeer]

Devblog #9 is out

The bad news is that since they sold 1.6 million keys they decided the code wasn't solid enough so they pretty much started all over from scratch. Meaning it will take a long time before this is anywhere closed to a finished game. The good news is that they are making it look better, and... well... creating a lot more clothing options...

NSFW?

[Xuri]

Clothes made of... mud? 

[brellium]

Clothes made of... mud? 

and pieces of hand drawn tires.

[Falconeer]

There are no significant news about Rust, and there haven't been for a while now, but development keeps going, apparently, although as a hobby (see below). Rust got several million dollars thanks to Steam Early Access around this time last year, and since then eccentric lead Dev Garry Newman decided to scratch pretty much all the work done (and that people paid for) to restart under a new engine, from Source to Unity if I am not mistaken. Which is what we have now. Needless to say, the game is light years away from any kind of complete state and since 2013 lots and lots of similar games have caught up and have probably already surpassed Rust both in terms of content and potential.

What I find fascinating though is how Garry Newman defines his company when asked for a Roadmap (since, you know, people have been waiting for substantial progress for a while now):

People are constantly asking for a roadmap for Rust. I’m not a fan of the traditional roadmap. I don’t want us to feel tied down to features and timescale. We’re hobbyists at heart – we’re not a game factory – we don’t need that kind of pressure.

So for these reasons a mind-map seems to fit our style of development quite well. It allows us to see our grand plan on a single screen, to jot down our ideas in a logical way. It doesn’t have the same pressures as a traditional roadmap, there’s no dates, no times. If we change something we can follow the tree and see what else it affects.

Here's said "Mindmap".

At least he admits it's just a hobby.