In Rust, you start alone and bare-ass naked in a vast wilderness. Depending on the server, you might not get anything. You do whatever it takes to survive. Aside from killer bears and wolves wanting to eat you, cold, starvation, and radiation will all kill you. You need to gather materials, craft them into tools, and hopefully scavenge some weapons; then you can make fire to keep warm and cook the game that you kill.
Then you will probably get murdered, because everyone else in the game world is on the knife edge of survival too, and they all want your stuff.
Not to be confused with the programming language.
This game provides examples of:
- Adventure-Friendly World: Rust is a PvP pressure cooker where even getting some firewood can be life threatening. Key activities are designed to alert other players and give them time to show up. Everybody needs resources and guns, so you will probably fight other players while:
- Mining. Why work up a sweat with a pickaxe when you can kill the guy who did and take his ore? Watch your back while making all that noise hitting rocks!
- Scavenging. A core gameplay loop is to visit "monuments" - abandoned facilities - to scavenge materials. Other players may also be scavenging... or waiting to ambush you!
- Set the pager item to the right frequency and you'll get an alert when other players are running one of the Oil Rigs. Thus, attempting this monument tends to attract boats of bad guys!
- Fighting. Gunshots are audible from far away and tend to attract trouble. The last player standing gets to loot the fallen. But loot quickly, because more enemies might be on their way!
- Raiding. Not only will raiders fight a base's owners, the explosions and gunfire attract counter-raiders, who will fight the raiders, each other, and the defenders. Sometimes the counter-raiders are enough of a distraction for the defenders to win. Other times, the counter-raiders will wipe out the raiders, take their explosives, and finish the raid themselves.
- Boss fights. Bringing down either the helicopter or the Bradley makes a lot of noise, leaves a marker on the map, and makes you wait for the debris to stop burning before you can loot it. Hunker down and defend your kill!
- Airdrops. Planes and helicopters periodically drop off crates full of goodies. They are lucrative and thus very dangerous.
- The Alcatraz: It's quite possible to build what is supposed to be an impregnable fortress with enough time and resources, only for a particularly determined group with their own resources to utterly demolish the place. There is nothing you can do to make your building/base outright invincible to raiders and griefers, who can destroy everything with enough C4 and rockets, but you can try to construct your base in a way that all but the most determined simply give up out of frustration, or decide that raiding your place isn't worth the time and resources.
- Artificial Stupidity: Animals, before the big navmesh update, were... bugged, to say the least. If idle, they were generally simply walking around in circles, ignored each other (even when wolves and bears are near potential prey), and not only did they easily scale slopes and rocks effortlessly when players couldn't, they also went through player-created structures like they weren't even there. It wasn't uncommon for wolves or bears to wander into a player's home and kill them in their sleep if they were foolish enough to sleep on the ground floor. Wolves and bears also tended to get stuck on the outside or inside of built structures and objects (making them easy targets for ranged weapons, but they immediately became unstuck if a player moved into melee range), and pigs, deer and horses could easily be cornered at shorelines if pursued right, allowing players without a ranged weapon to kill them with a spear. Fortunately, this is now mostly in the past.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Armored structures are, at the moment, only 50% stronger than sheet metal, which means warding off an additional timed explosive, but actually upgrading to it per-structure is prohibitively expensive, especially for solo players. On top of that, it doesn't stop griefers/raiders from using doors as weak links to get into a building, since even armored doors are weaker than armored structures and yet simultaneously essential for obvious reasons.
- An extension of this to a lesser degree is sheet metal, which is much more affordable but isn't much stronger than stone (and doesn't hold up any better against C4), which you get from mining ore anyway, and stone also becomes increasingly less important for making items as you progress, making it an ideal building material. It's best to make sure your entire building is at least stone and have all your doorways have armored doors, which actually hold up slightly better than stone structures do and about as well as sheet metal, and thus become much less of a weak point in the overall building.
- To an extent, this has been Downplayed recently, as Sheet Metal buildings, while now more expensive, are more suitably durable (A cool 1000 HP) and Armored buildings are not only MUCH more resistant (2000 HP as opposed to 1000), they only require HQM and half as much as before. Of course, setting up a base like that will still require a fair amount of materials, but it is easier for newer players to get a more defensible base.
- The Military weapons (LR300, MP5, M249) are this. They certainly look and sound cool and they have the stats to back them up...but they are also very rare (the M249 in particular can only be obtained through helicopter and APC wrecks), cannot be crafted and researched, and are typically more frail than the craft able variants.
- Heavy Plate armor is certainly this. The leg and body armor reduce damage taken to about 25% of the original amount and the helmet has a whopping 90% damage resist! The armor also reduces your movement speed by 30% (originally, you had to wear the whole set for that, now only one piece is needed for the full speed penalty) and aside from the leg armor, the armor also has other drawbacks (the body armor prevents you from aiming down sights and the helmet narrows your view).
- Bamboo Technology: Bashing animals, rocks and piles of wood using a hatchet for supplies can ultimately lead to players decked out in Kevlar body armor and carrying military-grade weapons with laser sights.
- Downplayed to an extent in the more recent iteration of the game, but it still is possible to make a couple of guns that are not makeshift looking.
- Boring, but Practical: There are certain tactics that aren't generally glamorous but will do wonders for base security and are commonly used by players:
- Creating "airlocks" with two locked doorways in a row and closing each one behind you before opening the next one as you leave and enter basically greatly reduces the chance of accidentally letting someone into your building (for reasons such as if you end up getting killed as you open the exterior "airlock" door by an opportunist trying to get in), and will force raiders/greifers into wasting explosives if they choose to blow up your doors in order to get inside.
- Not having a second floor used to be this until the devs decided to allow twig building and ladder placement even in building blocked areas, rendering the threat of "boosting" mostly moot anyway.
- Pistols could be considered this. They aren't flashy or too exciting to use, but they're easier to research and craft versus rifles.
- The Semi-Auto Rifle is this for, well, rifles. It doesn't have the damage and accuracy of the Bolt Action, nor the mag size and fire rate of the Assault Rifle, but it has a decent fire cap and magazine, it's easier to craft and it can hold its own as a marksman weapon when there's no other option.
- Back onto pistols, surprisingly, the M92 can be this for military weapons. It’s resistant to damage, has the best stats out of all handguns (Best mag size, second in damage only beaten by the Python) and easier to get (Scientists can drop it). Of course, the boring part is that, well, it’s a pistol.
- Boss Battle:
- An NPC-controlled attack helicopter periodically flies over the game world and will lay waste to any player it spots with machine gun fire, rockets, and napalm. It takes substantial rifle fire to bring down. To make things fair, the helicopter ignores players who are naked and not equipped with firearms, so it's only a threat to established players.
- The rocket factory has a Bradley APC patrolling the place, forcing players to either sneak around it or kill it with rockets or Timed Explosive Charges (and thus also risk losing a rocket launcher and rockets to other players as well).
- Breakable Weapons: All your tools will eventually break the more you use them. They deteriorate slower if you use them for their intended purpose.
- Like other games, you can repair said tools, even when they're completely broken, but it will make said tool easier to break, due to the max durability dropping dependent on the damage.
- Chainsaw Good: The chainsaw harvests wood quickly. It's up to you to use it as intended (cutting down trees) or not (cutting down people).
- Continuing is Painful: Watch out! When you die, all your stuff drops right where you are and you have to somehow navigate back to it if you wanna get it back. And that's if someone else hasn't already picked it up. So far the only thing you get to keep whenever you die is every blueprint you've studied. Even then, you don't keep those if you switch servers.
- Deployable Cover. The building system lets players instantly plop down full-health structures on any unused terrain, so it is very common to ambush a player, only for them to deploy cover and heal. There are structures clearly meant to be cover, like waist-high barricades, but the walls used to ring compounds are also popular, and scrappy players will use whatever they've scavenged, like repair benches and water barrels.
- Full-Frontal Assault: Fighting naked is viable and very common. Some reasons:
- You're too poor for clothes (but not a crossbow!)
- You don't want to risk your good gear on a scouting/risky/suicide mission
- You're hoping to kill somebody to take their armor and bigger gun
- You got back to your corpse with seconds to spare: only enough time to pick your gun back up and defend it!
- You don't have time to equip armor during a frantic base defense
- Griefer: Like most other games in the genre, the primary appeal for most players seems to be dicking with other players.
- There have been a lot of angry accusations made against Chinese players (possibly from the SEA servers) who are said to be "going around and having fun with killing anyone who is NOT Chinese".
- I'm a Humanitarian: You if you decide to kill humans and eat their meat. You can also use their bones to craft stuff. Be warned that Human Flesh will dehydrate you if eaten.
- Improvised Armour: Many armor pieces fall into this category. Such as a helmet made out of coffee cans, burlap clothing and bucket helmet, which is a bucket that has been turned into a helmet and even some of the higher tier items, like the Roadsign Vest, (Road signs that have been shaped into a chestplate) and the Heavy Plate armor set (Most notably, the helmet, which uses a pot for part of the construction).
- Improvised Weapon: Quite a few of the weapons players can craft fall into this. For example, satchel charges are actually four improvised bean can grenades strapped together in a package, among others.
- Infinite Flashlight: The craftable tactical light and standalone flashlight that you can place on a firearm/ wield needs no batteries. This, coupled with the fact that you're already holding a weapon while using the light and don't need to switch out if you're attacked, completely outclasses the torch.
- MacGyvering: With just wood, rocks, and animal carcasses, the player characters can make houses, clothes, and electrical circuits. Scavenge a few springs and pipes and they can make guns and explosives.
- Male Frontal Nudity: You start out the game butt-naked with nothing in your inventory. Pants can be collected to cover your junk, however.
- And of course, with the addition of female character models to the game, the ladies can streak about as well.
- Master of None: The Semi-Auto rifle is this in spades:
- It's cheap but not as cheap as a pistol and uses more expensive ammo.
- It's effective at short range but not as much as a shotgun.
- It's effective at mid range but not as much as a Thompson or custom SMG.
- It's effective at long range but not as much as a bolt action.
- Mouth Flaps: Whenever players speak through their microphones.
- No Plot? No Problem!: Rust stands out among the many DayZ-like games on Steam in that it feels no need to explain the game world or why it is the way it is, without even the usual perfunctory "Zombie apocalypse, go out there and kill stuff". You're simply dropped into the wilderness naked and are expected to progress at your own pace from caveman to hunter-gatherer to modern survivalist/U.S. Marine.
- Percussive Maintenance: Need to repair your walls? Just smack them with your hammer.
- Scavenged Punk: Lots of equipment players craft are based on items they need to scavenge, leading to situations where an assault rifle is an AK-47 knock-off that uses a slightly modified bolt-action cycler.
- Scavenger World: Quite a few items can not be crafted. These include rope, metal blades and certain weapon parts. Players need scavenge the world for these parts.
- Schizo Tech: Weapons attachments are quite high tech compared to weapons they are attached to. Much in the same way, there are automated turrets available for players.
- Averted with the Makeshift Sight, which is as every bit handmade as the firearms.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- Unless you are wearing clothes according to the weather, it will eventually affect your health - ranging from hypothermia to having a heat stroke.
- The chainsaw that was recently added attacks very fast and tears through trees like it’s almost nothing. It’s also loud, needs fuel and can take multiple attempts to start.
- Survival Sandbox
- Streamer-Friendly Mode: The game has a streaming mode that hides all server names and randomizes player names as a means of preventing griefing.
- Stupid Evil: Often players will outright kill other players on sight, using up all the time, effort and materials it took to make the ammo in the first place, even if the dead players had absolutely nothing of value worth killing them over.
- Throwing Your Sword Always Works: You can throw many tools and weapons that aren't otherwise ranged, with varied results. Both varieties of spear, of course, can be used for this purpose, especially for hunting, though prey animals that don't die immediately from the hit will just run away with the spear in their bodies, and it's generally a stupid idea against wolves and bears.
- Ten-Second Torch: The torch you start out with and can later craft lasts less than a night. Later on, you get better lighting options.
- Video Game Caring Potential: If there was ever a game where you could honestly help people out, this is definitely one. From simple things as killing a wolf/bear/scientist chasing you or handing a newbie some clothes or a couple of tools. Any measure of help can be provided.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can be an absolute asshole to people. From picking you off at a distance for no reason, holding you up for your items and then killing you anyway, or finding yourself waking up in the middle of nowhere instead of where you signed off safely because your shelter just got ruined, all your hard-earned stuff taken away and your respawn point destroyed. Also, you can raid bases of users who are offline, steal their stuff, kill them and destroy their sleeping bag (used as a spawn point), as well as destroy their TC/take over their TC, empty it and then lock it to allow the base to decay if you so choose to. Doing so turns this trope into a certainty than a potential.
- Video Game Perversity Potential: Thanks to the option of being butt naked and the alpha stage of the game, players have become quite creative with their bodies. An example is reenacting The Human Centipede.
- Would Not Shoot a Civilian: If you’re unarmed and/or unclothed when the attack helicopter comes knocking, then it will leave you alone and move on.
- Averted with the APC and Transport heli, who will attack anyone regardless.
