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Rust is a game about survival. But that takes time. Initially, it's just about death. It's about freezing to death, and starving to death, being shot to death and getting bitten to death; occasionally mixing things up a little by slipping on a warm radiation coat and fading faster than your faith in humanity after being stabbed in the back by a supposed friend's hatchet. Sometimes you get gored to death. Other times, bored to death. It's not easy, surviving post-apocalyptic civilisation with nothing but a rock - especially when your enemies have guns, and double-especially in a game that makes you work just to earn a pair of basic trousers.Even this early into development, Rust's mix of DayZ and Minecraft (the easiest comparison, though Wurm Online is more apt) has won it no shortage of fans - some of them not even psychopaths, hackers and trolls on the hunt for new victims to murder and mock over voice chat. It's the kind of game that's less a shooter than an engine designed to tell stories. Those stories are mostly, as ever, in the field of bastardom, but there's scope for some humanity amongst all the pranks and murder. It's also a world that focuses on demanding effort rather than promising to reward it: starting players out naked and hungry and alone, dangling the potential of going on to build forts, craft weapons, and finally savour the air at the top of the food chain.
Crafting is the most important part of this, though there are loot crates - both in radioactive remnants of civilisation and regularly dropped from passing planes - that provide free toys to play with and blueprints for advanced gear that, unlike your inventory, survives death. Early on, the priority is making basic tools like a stone hatchet, a bow, a hut and a sleeping bag by beating supplies out of trees and rocks and animals... usually cloth, for some reason. Later, blueprints, furnaces and workbenches offer more advanced gear like metal doors that other players can't so easily get through, and armour capable of protecting against bullets and lingering radiation fields, as well as keeping you warm and covering up your naughty bits.
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