You can sign up to get a daily email of our articles, see the Mailing List page.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

Survival Game 'Rust' Fixes Linux Issues, Some Thoughts

By - | Views: 14,003
tagline-image
Rust from Facepunch Studios (notable for Garry's Mod) should once again work on Linux thanks to some more Unity engine updates, I've tested it and it works for me.

It may not work for all of you, but it now works for me. They are using the bleeding-edge Unity 5 game engine, and with it comes constant breakage.

About the game (From Steam)
The only aim in Rust is to survive.

To do this you will need to overcome struggles such as hunger, thirst and cold. Build a fire. Build a shelter. Kill animals for meat. Protect yourself from other players, and kill them for meat. Create alliances with other players and form a town.

Whatever it takes to survive.

Some thoughts
I haven't really played much of Rust, at all, until today. The last time I properly tried it was before their "next generation" branch became the default, and the difference is insane.

Personally, I'm not sure what the massive deal with Rust is, and why it's doing so well, but there must be something I'm missing. It has the usual problems with survival games thrusting you into the game and not telling you anything about what to do, so you must figure everything out yourself.

My first game ended up finding another naked man, he proceeded to batter me with a stone, and that was it, dead in 5 minutes flat. Enjoying this, not.

My second game I decided to smash a few trees and grab some wood, and the game decided to allow me to gather 3 lots before completely crashing on me.

Luckily, the third game seemed crash-bug free and I was able to collect some stone, make a hammer and a hatched, and I stumbled across naked guy sleeping, so I did the obvious thing of smashing him in with my rock.

I could only find one animal to help me make clothes with (which didn't give me enough cloth), so I will have to continue being butt-naked for the foreseeable future. I know it's all about survival, but the extreme scarcity of animals was frustrating.

I do quite like the crafting system in rust, as you simply double click what you want and it takes a certain amount of time to craft, but while crafting you can still continue doing whatever you want. I think I'm finally getting the hang of what this is all about.

Sadly, while researching how to make paper someone popped out of nowhere and killed me. So, I decided to call it a day on that server and try another one. The game decided to crash again when picking a new server, annoying as hell.

The game is really quite beautiful now, so where it's pretty confusing at the start, it sure makes up for it in just how fantastic it looks.

Looks like it still has some ways to go before I understand it, and for the Linux version to be polished up. It also seems to leave a process running when you quit, so Steam thinks you're still playing it forcing you to manually kill it, rough.

It seems the key to enjoying Rust is to read up on it a lot first, and find a server that only has friendly people that won't kill you on sight.

Performance wise the game is quite a hog, but you can tweak quite a lot of different things for it, so I was able to keep it around 40FPS while still looking awesome. I think that's pretty great for a Unity game.

Check out Rust on Steam if you really into sandbox games with naked people running around. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
0 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
13 comments
Page: 1/2»
  Go to:

dubigrasu Feb 4, 2015
What about performance with the new engine version?
Liam Dawe Feb 4, 2015
Quoting: dubigrasuWhat about performance with the new engine version?
Performance wise the game is quite a hog, but you can tweak quite a lot of different things for it, so I was able to keep it around 40FPS while still looking awesome. I think that's pretty great for a Unity game.

> Added that to the article.
WorMzy Feb 4, 2015
Sounds like they fixed the problem where the game wouldn't launch unless you symlinked some bundled libraries into a different directory, and the bug where the game would freeze after about 5 seconds unless you constantly killed the child process that the main process repeatedly spawns.

I think Rust could be good, given enough development. But it's really just a stop gap until DayZ gets ported.
GoCorinthians Feb 4, 2015
+200 hours back there...great time...[linux only]
Xpander Feb 4, 2015
44 hours here..havent really played the reboot one.
legacy one was superb.. alone is hard though.. i played with friend and over the teamspeak.. took like 5-10 attempts before we managed to build a house before getting killed.. and from that point it was just trying to upgrade your things and raid other players houses..

that rust reboot sadly has too many missing features yet to enjoy, so im waiting few more months for that.
in the mean time 7 days to die has been quite some fun.. its the most feature complete first person survival game on linux atm, though it lacks one big thing..servers are quite small.. up to 32 people only.
shigutso Feb 4, 2015
All servers are wiped every week. Sometimes twice a week. So you have to build everything again and again. It's ok in the beginning, but after the fourth time, it gets boring. Their engine can't keep up with a lot of stuff built into the server, so that's one of the reasons everything is wiped for every weekly update.

To understand the game, I highly recommend that firstly you go to an empty server and try everything by yourself, like a personal "tutorial".

But, to quickly explain, to play Rust, you never trust anybody in the server. Only if you're playing with friends over Skype/TeamSpeak/Mumble/etc, but either way it's going to be very hard to find your friends as this game lacks a map/cartography system.

Rust has a lot of potential, but for now, I would just wait.
ImperialXT Feb 5, 2015
Doesn't work on fedora 21, which sucks.
Belarrius Feb 5, 2015
453 hours only in Linux here
DoubleT Feb 5, 2015
It's still freeze for me. But at least it's starting without symlinks. :D
kon14 Feb 5, 2015
While they finally fixed the linux build (after 4+ rust updates), upgrading your engine components and then releasing a build that doesn't work for all of your supported platforms intentionally is something that shouldn't be passed that easily. They knew unity got a bug breaking linux, why did they upgrade?

It's not just as if they didn't optimize their game for linux, which they didn't, but that's alright cause their windows version is also buggy as hell.

After deciding that their old game was bad they went on reimplementing it, which is something good at least.
Other than the testing bugs you'd expect a reimplementation to be better than an abandoned implementation but that's not the case at all.

The game is beautiful, but it's too unoptimized, buggy, empty and resource intensive to be considered worth its hype (for me).
I'd rather play 7DaysToDie no matter it's a bit uglier. at least there's something to do other than get killed as a naked guy

On top of that, the main developer goes ahead wholeheartedly accepting the requests and releasing a brief mindplan concerning what's in the works and then supports his negativeness concerning these roadmaps by claiming he's a HOBBYIST!!

How can anyone dare consider himself a hobbyist after collecting all this money from his customers? Sticking with an "Alpha" label forever won't help excuse the game's issues and the way the developers handle it.

I purchased the game back when it first came to linux in hopes that I would support the alpha and even suggested it to some friends. Would I purchase it again? Absolutely not! I don't like being an indie hater but this game has been the biggest let-down in my purchase history :/
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.