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Rust [Steam] is a game I've tried a few times and it never really seemed to click with me, but now after coming back to it after so long I'm finding it to be incredibly fun.

Note: My copy was personally purchased, quite some time ago.

The problem I always have with survival games is that they feel like an endless and boring grind, but Rust has somehow managed to throw that feeling out the window.

I've now experienced the fear of walking out of my house at night, to find a shadowy figure standing on my roof with some sort of assault rifle. I shortly met my end, but it was frantic and exciting to experience the absolutely panic and dread at seeing them there. There's many little stories like that you can get from Rust, like the ninja boar that sneaked up on me while I was mining and ran away right after it hit me. All I saw was a boar butt running off into the long grass―sneaky little devil! It practically made me crap myself, it was so totally unexpected.

For me, it's the fact that it's a sandbox that doesn't require endless level grinding to access items. They tried that once, it didn't work and they responded to feedback and removed it. Sure there's a bit of resource grinding, as practically any open-world game requires grinding of some kind, plenty from other genres do too! In Rust you only need the resources to make the items. There's no levelling, no classes―just a proper sandbox. Want to build a tower? Go ahead! Want to throw on a hazmat suit and explore some radioactive ruins? That's cool too.

When playing Rust, there's one rule you should generally follow: trust no one. You shouldn't buy Rust if you're not prepared to lose hour's worth of loot at a moment's notice, as it will happen. You might log in one day to find something like this:
image
They left us cold, naked and afraid. They also took all of our stuff―bastards! I've still got no idea who did it! That happened more than once, people sure do love to leave a sign to laugh in your naked face. The thing with Rust, is that when you log out, your body is still in the game. If you kill someone, the game will tell them exactly who did it. However, this makes it rather interesting. You could literally build a jail around them, or just pilfer all their crap, leave them naked and put a code lock on their door to be a nuisance.

In stark contrast to other survival games (hello ARK), the game actually runs incredibly well. I'm often above 90FPS on quite high settings. It does have a strange bug where running it in fullscreen results in no mouse and keyboard input, but running it in Windowed Mode until that's fixed does solve it. I'm pretty sure that's a Unity bug and not their problem, since other Unity games have the same issue.

In Rust there's a plane that flies over the map at random intervals to drop a big loot box, but don't think even for one second getting it is going to be easy. I honestly can't count the amount of times I've gone to grab it, to be taken out by a wolf. The absolutely terrifying sound of hearing footsteps suddenly speed towards you, as you see the jaws of a wolf jump out of the grass. Everything in this game is trying to kill you, unless you're that stupid horse I can never catch that runs at the slightest fucking breeze. On top of that, players will camp the drop out, waiting for you. Think you're safe? Think you got there first? Think again buddy.

The visuals in Rust can be absolutely amazing at times too, take this particular shot I took at random early on into our new server:
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I looked out of the window in our first house, saw this and I was in absolute awe at just how utterly gorgeous this game really is. That shot isn't even close to being maxed out either, which is amazing.

It does get a bit of stutter and frame-drop when it's loading new areas in, but it's not too often. This can likely be reduced by having the game on an SSD rather than a standard HDD. It's acceptable to me, considering the game isn't finished and they are clearly working on optimizations all the time.

Rust is just constant eye candy! I honestly think it's one of the best looking games we have available on Linux. Quite shocking really compared to how it was only a year ago. Take this shot from youtuber and GOL community member xpander69 that was taken on our server:
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I'm looking at this image, struggling to put into words how I feel about it. It's almost film-like quality with the colours—it's just so striking.

If you want to play with us, we have a server! See the server information in this linked article.

I'm also appreciating how open the developers are about what they're doing with the game. The frequent blog posts detailing various sections of the game being worked on, along with a bit of comedy at times about the nudity.

Honestly, I'm a little shocked to be recommending it. You can find Rust on Steam. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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31 comments
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nox Jul 17, 2017
Quoting: Mountain ManSounds like the perfect game for trolls and griefers. No thanks.
It's a survival sandbox game after all, which gives me a lot more motivation to protect my shit and work for my own protection. I guess it depends on what you like - but calling it "Trolls and griefers" is a bit wrong when that's half the game :P
Liam Dawe Jul 17, 2017
Quoting: eloThank you for this server, Liam! My partner and I have had so many great moments so far, even met the only guy we kinda sorta trust.

I very much recommend this game, but be prepared to run it on low settings unless you have very up-to-date hardware as the game starts chugging badly on higher settings after a while (seems like vram is very important for it)
Really glad you're enjoying it! We've had lots of amusing and not so amusing experiences so far :P

Quoting: elo
Quoting: Mountain ManSounds like the perfect game for trolls and griefers. No thanks.
It's a survival sandbox game after all, which gives me a lot more motivation to protect my shit and work for my own protection. I guess it depends on what you like - but calling it "Trolls and griefers" is a bit wrong when that's half the game :P
For me, it's great. So many games have such a false sense of urgency when it comes to survival, whereas everything you do in Rust needs to be thought about and protected. I think it's a fab idea, sure not to everyone's tastes, but it is what it is.

Quoting: Mountain ManAnd while the graphics are nice, I think you overrate them quite a bit just judging by the screenshots.
Oh sure, there's better games, but to me the game is undeniably good looking :)

Each to their own of course and everyone is free to have an opinion :)
kf Jul 17, 2017
Semi-unrelated: Garry's Mod recently got an update that makes the game playable and run very well.
Spoiler, click me
For me at least.
tictacbum Jul 17, 2017
QuoteIt does have a strange bug where running it in fullscreen results in no mouse and keyboard input, but running it in Windowed Mode until that's fixed does solve it. I'm pretty sure that's a Unity bug and not their problem, since other Unity games have the same issue.
I can't try just now since I've refunded the game, but IIRC I've workaround this on the screen that appears before starting the game, on controls it had joystick selected, I've changed the "enter" or "select" one to mouse1 and it started working on fullscreen
Xpander Jul 17, 2017
Quoting: eloThank you for this server, Liam! My partner and I have had so many great moments so far, even met the only guy we kinda sorta trust.

I very much recommend this game, but be prepared to run it on low settings unless you have very up-to-date hardware as the game starts chugging badly on higher settings after a while (seems like vram is very important for it)


VRAM is important indeed. I have seen it go beyond 6GB VRAM @1440p and pretty much all maxed. also System Ram is important. People with 8GB might want to look away from this game as the game starts with 8GB and goes up to 10.2GB after several hours of playing. Haven't had performance issues myself, but i have pretty beefy PC @1440p im around 55-65 fps most of the time, goes up to 70 inside the buildings. @1080p its 80+ constantly
that is with all maxed except high quality bloom off, motion blur off, parallax at 1 out of 2


also. Created a "Cinematic" Gameplay video about the game also (highly recommended to watch at 1440p60 as youtube doesnt give bandwidth for 1080p)

View video on youtube.com


Last edited by Xpander on 17 July 2017 at 2:31 pm UTC
metro2033fanboy Jul 17, 2017
I loved Rust since dayONE. I just don't get why all hate!
g000h Jul 17, 2017
Just wanting to add a bit myself about Rust and my own current survival game "7 Days To Die". I do own Rust, but haven't begun looking at it yet. All the internet talk about Rust and the horrible time people were having playing PVP on it really put me off multi-player.

When I play a game, I don't expect it to keep on running when I'm not playing it. i.e. When I decide I'm going to bed (at 2am) In Real Life, having just finished playing. Then the next day I start playing again to find my character dead / my base destroyed / or some other stuff like that --> Well, that is not the sort of gaming experience I want. Even if I'm in some sort of Clan environment where your buddies are looking after your combined base, it still isn't my "cup of tea".

I've been perfectly happy playing hours and hours and hours of Single Player "7 Days To Die" where it is "me" (well my character) against the difficult environment. I like the planning, the time management, the zombies sneaking up behind me when I'm foraging, the crafting progression, the building progression, the skills progression, exploring the big maps. Really love the Core Game Play, and how much control you have of how you decide to run things. 7 Days To Die (Alpha 15 for 210 hours, and now Alpha 16 for 45 hours) has kept me entertained, even though I'm playing it single player. Alpha 16 is quite different to the previous version, so that also made it almost like playing 2 games for the price of 1.

So, I'm still happy to continue gaming in 7D2D but will eventually have a look at Rust. But, if I can't play Rust in my own single player sandbox, and if the multi-player is annoying and toxic, then I'm probably not going to play much of it.

The eye-candy and performance comments do perk up my interest though. I like a game to look good.
sigz Jul 17, 2017
Quoting: Xpander
Quoting: eloThank you for this server, Liam! My partner and I have had so many great moments so far, even met the only guy we kinda sorta trust.

I very much recommend this game, but be prepared to run it on low settings unless you have very up-to-date hardware as the game starts chugging badly on higher settings after a while (seems like vram is very important for it)


VRAM is important indeed. I have seen it go beyond 6GB VRAM @1440p and pretty much all maxed. also System Ram is important. People with 8GB might want to look away from this game as the game starts with 8GB and goes up to 10.2GB after several hours of playing. Haven't had performance issues myself, but i have pretty beefy PC @1440p im around 55-65 fps most of the time, goes up to 70 inside the buildings. @1080p its 80+ constantly
that is with all maxed except high quality bloom off, motion blur off, parallax at 1 out of 2

The game runs correctly in my old hardware (gf 770, i5 4690k, 16GB ram) at @60fps most of the time in medium details.. I say most of the time because sometimes without any reason framerate drops to 20fps where it usually runs at 60. So I reconnect and this fixes framerate.. Strange behavior.
harshbarj Jul 17, 2017
I'd play the game, but why play only to have hours to days of work wiped by an update. Would be nice if you could disable this on your own server and choose to run an older version. This is the main reason I quit playing. I spent weeks building a massive base and upgraded most of it to the armored tier. Then an update came and I found myself in a new world with nothing on my own private server. Wrong way to do things.
Xpander Jul 17, 2017
Quoting: sigzThe game runs correctly in my old hardware (gf 770, i5 4690k, 16GB ram) at @60fps most of the time in medium details.. I say most of the time because sometimes without any reason framerate drops to 20fps where it usually runs at 60. So I reconnect and this fixes framerate.. Strange behavior.

Never had such issues that the framerate goes down. have played several hours in row, max being 7 hours in a row
i bet its either RAM gets full and it starts swapping if you have swap or VMEM gets full and its starting to throw up :D
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