Rust is definitely an interesting game and has a lot of potential to be a huge addition to the market, but at this point, it still leaves a bitter taste in a lot of peoples mouths, yet they come back day after day. It’s the kind of game you will love to hate, and from the start Rust will have you begging for more.

Rust is a Steam Greenlight game which is still in the early alpha stages. This point alone should tell you it is massively unfinished and will be improving tremendously with almost every update.

This Rust review is more of an anecdote of my first few hours on Rust Island than anything else.

When you first start your Rust adventure, be it on a modded community server, or an official Rust server, you’re going to start in the middle of nowhere, naked, with nothing but a rock and a torch, surrounded by nothing but hostility and other naked men with rocks.

From there, you’re going to want to make a mad dash for the nearest cover and plan your next moves accordingly.

Rust is based on simulation principals, so you’re going to have to take care of essential needs like; warmth, hunger, safety.

First things first, you need food.

In Rust, it doesn’t matter what you take down to turn into your next meal, you’re going to be harvesting chicken breasts. Kill a deer, harvest chicken. Kill a bear, harvest more chicken. Even rabbits, wolves and boars give chicken, and of course, chickens give chicken.

All of these animals are quite common on Rust island, so a food source is usually nearby.

Now you’re going to have to cook that chicken, for that, you will need some wood.

Wood is everywhere, it can be harvested from tree’s, or from wood piles for a significantly increased yield. Eventually, you will find yourself ignoring tree’s and hunting wood piles, as you can get roughly 80 wood from a pile in the same time you would get 10 from a tree.

Now that we have wood and chicken, it’s time to find a safe place to build a campfire!

Because you don’t yet have your own form of shelter, you’re going to want to find somewhere relatively “out of the way” to create your campfire and cook your chicken!

One thing to keep in mind, your campfire will create a plume of smoke, which will be visible from quite a ways away, which can easily lead someone to your location. The best way to combat this is by finding a nice rock outcropping to build your fire under, shielding both the light given off and eliminating the smoke plume.

I suppose now is a good time to mention that the chance of you completing these tasks without being killed by another player once or twice is slim at best.

Now we’re rolling! or maybe we’re closer to rocking?

We have cooked chicken to keep our hunger level down! The next thing on the list is gathering more wood and harvesting any “rocks” you may come across, as they yield the components for numerous tools and weaponry. -You’re going to need a lot of these materials soon, so its best to harvest every rock you find, at first.

Now that you’ve been killed 4 more times and had to find more food and wood to cook with, and you’ve finally gathered enough wood to start building your house AGAIN, we’re going to want to find somewhere to set up shop, not only is this crucial to storing your looted gear, but it gives you a safe place to log out.

Typically, you should bypass building the basic 50 wood shelter, and go straight for a 1×1 foundation shelter. Not only is it stronger, but you can then add on to it, rather than wasting wood on a basic shelter.

For your basic shelter you will need:

• 1 wood foundation
• 4 wood pillars
• 3 wood walls
• 1 wood doorway
• 1 wood ceiling
• 1 metal door

Again, like the basic 50 wood shelter don’t build a wooden door unless you absolutely have to, they can be broken down with basic tools and enough motivation, which would waste a bunch of your time.

Now that your shelter is up you have somewhere to store some of your less needed items and log out safely, once you have a metal door, that is.

To build a metal door, you need 200 metal fragments, which can be created by putting metal ore into a furnace with some wood. You will need at least 100 ore to make the 200 metal fragments, usually less but its better to have and not need, than need and not have.

Now that our metal door is in place, we’re relatively safe!….. for now….

From here you basically are tasked with surviving. You should be gathering more materials to improve your base’s defenses and to build tools/weapons, while making the occasional trip to the irradiated towns which serve as a home for numerous irradiated and very angry bears and wolves. The reason of these trips is simply for more loot and blueprints for advanced weapons and gear.

Some modded servers will be using a plugin called Rust Oxide or Rust Magma, either of these mods will allow you to type /position to be told your coordinates on the map, which you can then input into some rust map websites that are online, like rustnuts.com or rustmap.net.

These maps will make it much easier to initially find your way around the island, as Rust does not currently have its own in-game mini-map or craftable map/compass.

Rust is a game of constantly starting over, pretty much any server that has a decent population will undergo complete server wipes from time to time. This is something that can be very dissuading to lots of people for the sole reason that it sucks to have your hard work destroyed. That being said, Rust is still in its early developmental phases, and is considered an alpha release, so it will tentatively evolve a lot over time and will eventually be more supportive of long term building.

The main issue with rust right now is balance.

Unless you’re joining a server which has been freshly wiped, chances are you’re entering into a world consisting of well geared predators looking to waste their ammo on a freshly spawned “noob” such as yourself.

Another issue which has just come up in a recent update is durability. Before the update, your items we’re pretty much indestructible, now they have gone completely in the opposite direction by making everything feel like its glass. The only item which is still unbreakable is your starting rock, which is definitely not the wise choice for harvesting and is usually considered a “throw away” item.

You will definitely find yourself throwing your rock away now, if only to make room for an extra hatchet or pickaxe.

Everything considered, Rust has immense potential to be an amazing game, and if the developing team play their cards right, they could end up with something huge. Already Rust has 2 000 000 downloads with over 19 000 000 hours of logged gameplay!

Please feel free to share your own Rust stories in the comment sections below! What has been your most memorable moment so far? What are your biggest issues with the game? Would you recommend it to others?