It's been five years since Rust arrived, treating players to dangling dongs, rampaging bears, and a ruthless multiplayer survival experience. To celebrate this anniversary, a big, world-altering update is now live. Electricity has been added to the mix of tree-chopping, rock-breaking, gun-crafting, base-building, and (recently) hot-air ballooning. Also, you can now wear underpants.

The Electric Anniversary, as it's called, is now live and contains a number of electrical components: batteries, switches, pressure pads, splitters, timers, and other various odds-and-ends that will allow players to use electricity to power lights, automation, clocks, CPUs, defenses, traps, and god knows what else. Power generation is currently (ha ha, current) supplied by solar panels and windmills. Here's a nice video from Rustafied to introduce you to the basics.

Along with the exciting new electrical components, the update adds an M39 rifle, provides an overhaul to how bows work, brings some improvements to the cargo ships, and as I said earlier, adds underwear. This last item (called a censorship option in the devlog) should be helpful for streamers who are penalized for showing bare butts, wangs, boobs, and muffs while playing the game for others.

Finally, in a post on Facepunch, Garry Newman delivered some stats about Rust's development. In five years, Rust has sold 7,457,075 copies, grossing $110,313,646, which includes bundles, DLC, and in-game sales. Its highest concurrent player count was 71,801, just this past month following the balloon update. It's also sold over 4 million skins, and the creators of those skins have earned nearly $2 million combined from those sales. That's some shockingly (electricity, get it?) good news.

Rust players really like hot air balloons, apparently: since they were added this week, along with surface-to-air missiles that can shoot them down, the player count for the survival game has inflated to an all-time high. 

Today, more than 71,000 people were playing at a time, according to Steam's official stats page, and as I write this it's Steam's fifth-highest game by concurrent player count, beaten only by Dota 2, CS:GO, PUBG and Rainbow Six Siege.

Looking at data from Steam Charts, you can see a definite spike around the time of the release of the latest update. You can also see that this is the first time it's pulled in more than 70,000 players at a time: its previous peak was around 68,000 in February, when it left Early Access (here's Luke's review).

I've never played Rust, but jumping in a hot air balloon with some friends to glide calmly over an enemy's base at the start of a raid sounds like fun. The SAM missiles sound like they'd be a pain, though—they just automatically fire on any balloon that comes near. Surely everyone can just stick one on their base, completely negating the balloons? I know they cost resources, but I assume anyone with a base worth robbing will be able to afford them.

Is that the case? If you've had a go with them, let me know in the comments below.

Rust, the survival game where you start by banging a rock against a tree and then progress to crafting automatic weapons, has opened up a new mode of travel that lets you take to the skies: hot air balloons. You'll find them scattered around the map, and once they're fueled you can fly wherever the wind carries you. Balloons should hold about four or five passengers, making them the ideal way to soar above the defenses of a fort you'd like to raid.

But every Sherlock has his Moriarty, and you may find your balloon shot down thanks to the inclusion of surface-to-air missiles, which also arrived in the Rust update. You can purchase a deployable SAM site from scientist outposts for 500 scrap and once stocked with ammo it'll automatically target any nearby balloons.

Note: this includes your own balloon. SAMs aren't psychic. They just love killing balloons, so they'll shoot yours down too. So remember to either unload the SAM site before you launch, or just don't fly anywhere near your own fort.

The Cargo Ship Update has brought a big, noisy boat to the shores of Rust, and it's filled with useful loot and heavily-armed scientists who'd really rather you kept your hands off of it.   

The ship, the CCSC Lazarus, will appear as a "periodic server event" that occurs every 2-to-4 in-game days. It will approach the island to a distance of about 200 meters, at which point you can ride out to it on a boat of your own and climb aboard via one of the ladders hanging down its side. At that point, you'll have to clear the defenders, hack two locked crates, and defend the ship while you're waiting for them to pop.   

One further complication: Everyone else on the server can hear the boat "from kilometers away" and see it on the map, and that could possibly open the door to opportunistic behavior on the part of unscrupulous competitors. Not that we'd expect something like that to happen in Rust, right? Best to be cautious, though—better safe than sorry. 

Oh, and there's a spot of radioactive waste on board as well. Once your radiation alarm goes off, it's time to go. 

The update also brings a new bolt-action rifle, the L96, with "extreme projectile velocity and range with very little damage drop off or bullet drop," making it particularly effective when paired with a scope. Speaking of which, there's also a new 8X rifle scope, a few different types of new gloves (including Tactical Gloves that eliminate aim sway), an additional clothing slot, and a handful of tweaks and optimizations.   

Rust's "Cargo Ship Update" is live now. Full details can be had at facepunch.com.

Rust is interesting, and also infuriating, largely because it is completely without rules. Players can work cooperatively, and they can also murder each other without penalty. Trading is a big part of surviving, and getting shot in the face while you're trying to do a deal is a big part of not surviving. What's a poor soul, dropped naked and alone into the midst of a cold, rocky wilderness, to do?

The new Compound update promises to help alleviate the stresses of such no-holds-barred business by adding a place where players can safely interact under the protective watchful eye of heavily-armed scientists. It will provide useful services and facilities including a refinery, workbenches, a recycler, a water-catcher, and vending machines that sell basic survival resources, and also a place where you can just kick back and be social if that's your thing.   

The rules are simple: No weapons, no looting, no killing, and no sleeping inside, or directly outside, the compound. Follow the rules and you can hang out to your heart's content. Break them, and the scientists (and their turrets) will kill you dead. You'll be marked as hostile for five minutes and the status will persist across death, meaning you can't rush back into the compound immediately after you die: The only option once you've been marked is to wait it out. 

Facepunch acknowledged that the compound is "probably going to be gamed pretty hard," but said that it will continue iterating on it in order to stay abreast of players trying to dick around with the system. It also pointed an amusing finger at the player base for forcing developers to take this step in the first place: "We originally intended for people to set up these kind of zones with peacekeeper turrets, but after a year and no-one bothering we took matters into our own hands." 

The update also adds a four-piece set of scuba gear to the game that facilitates underwater operations, and underwater rock formations, because what's the point of scuba diving if there's nothing down there to see? Full details on all the new content and gameplay changes including first-person clothing models, new AI for compound scientists, and updated chainsaw sounds, are up at facepunch.com.

Rust, the multiplayer survival game from Facepunch Studios, left Early Access back in February but is still receiving updates and additions (which makes sense since creator Garry Newman still considers Rust to be in alpha). Chugging into Rust in an update this week is its first player-controlled vehicle, a motorized rowboat. Boats are not craftable, so you'll have to go out and find one: they will spawn along the coastlines of the island map. The boat has room for a driver and up to three passengers.

Boats require low grade fuel to power their motors, and if left out in the elements a boat will decay in about three hours. If you find one and want to keep it you'll need to build a boathouse, this post on Rust's devblog advises. Servers may spawn as many as 64 boats at a time, so it doesn't sound like they'll be in terribly short supply, however.

To give you a little something to do on your boat, servers will also spawn floating piles of junk on the open water, so you can do some looting while you're cruising around. There's a compartment built into the bow of the boat to store your haul. Boats can sink, naturally, if they take too much damage, but they can also be repaired with a hammer, wood, and metal fragments.

You can find lots more info about Rusts's boats in this post on Rustafied. 

Rust makes better use of voice chat than any game I've ever played. You are naked and alone on the world's silliest island. There is no narrator or announcer, so instead you submerge in the quietude of the unkempt grass crunching beneath your feet, as you uselessly smash your rock against the nearest pine tree. Perhaps you've also harvested some mushrooms and a few bundles of flax; enough to stave off the hunger pangs and fashion yourself a burlap shawl to cover your shame. If you're particularly industrious, you'll have furnished a nice wooden shack a stone's throw away from some fresh water and reliable resources—the entry-level homestead necessary for any successful Rust campaign.

But then you hear it. Faintly at first. Carried on the tip of the breeze. It's another idiot in Rust. 

I don't know what it is with this game. Maybe it's the fact that you spawn unclothed and uncensored, maybe it's the brutal vastness of the design, or maybe it's the simple uncouth joy of doing bad things to other human beings, but Rust has a distinctly regressive effect on the human species. The voice chat merges with the draw distance, so when you're spotted by an idiot, you'll start hearing the shit-talk quietly tickling your ear. They get closer, they get louder and more confident, and suddenly you're hopping over shotgun shells while absorbing an entire dictionary of insults.

It's so hilariously antagonistic that I wish I could say I didn't love it. I wish I could say that it didn't feel incredible when one of those naked idiots charged me with their rock and I switched to the battle axe I fashioned out of scrap metal (which he almost certainly didn't know I was carrying), and put him down with a single well-placed strike. I wish I could tell you that, as I was standing over his fatally wounded body, that I didn't laugh my ass off when my headphones were filled with the voice of a prepubescent boy shouting, "Hey man, wait a second!" I wish I could say I didn't kill him anyway. No game has ever indulged our lack of humanity quite like Rust, and I wish I didn't mean that as an endorsement.

If it feels like we've been living with Rust for a long time, that's because we kinda have. The game was first released in Early Access in late 2013 by developers Facepunch Studios, and it's been a mainstay of goofy YouTube send-ups ever since. If you're somehow unfamiliar with the premise, think of Rust as a dumber, more nihilistic Minecraft. You wake up on a map armed with only a rock and a torch. You quickly figure out that, by banging your rock on a few environmental doodads, you can harvest a few basic resources (stone, wood, and cloth) which you can parlay into a few prehistoric instruments, like a spear or a hatchet. This is similar to the scrounging mechanics in plenty of other survival games, but what makes Rust different is how deep that tech tree goes. Eventually, from those same basic ingredients and a few mechanical leaps of faith (like work benches and furnaces), you'll be able to craft pistols, flamethrowers, and rocket launchers. Rust famously does not quarter off its servers to keep entry-level nakeds away from the roving troops suited up in advanced firearms, which means that occasionally, your journey will end with you matching another player's revolver with a rock that you've tied to a stick.

This is the heart of Rust. Wake up naked, run for your life, do horrible things to one another. There is no grander narrative, or mythos, or win condition. Most of the servers are on a strict weekly or monthly reset schedule, which scrubs the island of any lingering housing or fortifications left behind by the players, which gives the experience a strange sense of futility. Yes, you will need to manage your hunger, thirst, and health—and as you ratchet up the tech tree you will discover increasingly effective ways to stay alive—but that's it. Sure there are some areas on the map that are stricken with radiation, which leads to the implication that perhaps you and the rest of your misanthropes are occupying a far-flung, post-collapse society, but those moments feel more like window dressing than anything else.

I spent the vast majority of my time in Rust playing solo, but I don't want to discount the notorious community of players that band together in clans, and wage wars of aggression along the shared hunting grounds. One of the fascinating kernels of Rust's brutality is how everything in the world remains persistent, even if you're logged off, which means that smart players arm their bases with land mines, punji sticks, and keypad locks while they're away. (Some clans even recruit players across all time zones, to make sure there's always someone on guard.) 

That's a coordination I appreciated from a distance. There are a number of YouTube documentarians showing off the multi-man raids that spawn from committed Discord channels all over the world. Instead, I engaged with the population of Rust on a purely incidental level. An extremely geared man takes pity on you, and drops a crossbow at your quivering feet. That's Rust! A kid and I are raiding an abandoned gas station for food and weapons, and I give him the extra pair of pants I was carrying around. When I'm turned the other direction, he bashes his rock right through my skull and runs off with the rest of my stuff. That is also Rust.

Given the tone, it shouldn't be surprising that the community I found in Rust tended to be fairly juvenile and toxic. There's a high concentration of racism and misogyny in the global chat, so much so that I eventually left the channel entirely. 

And unsurprisingly, the new player experience is quite prickly. The development team didn't spend any time cooking up a tutorial (which makes some sense, when you consider how long the game has been available). Instead, when you join one of the many servers, you're presented with a few faint hints in the top-left corner of the screen: "harvest wood!" "build a hatchet!" The crafting system itself is fairly intuitive, with well-written tooltips for each of the items in the catalog, and you can fast-track yourself into some serious munitions if you get lucky with a few resource spawns. The PvP combat won't win any awards, but it's tactile and packed with wonderfully sadist bone-crunching sound effects—connecting your hatchet with an idiot's head feels great, and really, that's all I needed. There is also a strange post-release monetization model, in which you can buy ugly paint-jobs for your weapons and clothing. Rust is fascinating for a hundred different reasons, but Counter-Strike-style weed-leaf AWPs isn't one of them. 

Still though, I think everyone should at least have a taste of Rust. It's hard to think of many other games that are this uncompromising in its worldview, and I'm utterly entranced with how little faith it has in our ability to get along. We could build a utopia on this island! We could cast aside our weapons, and construct a peaceful commune where everyone is fed, warm, and loved. I love how Facepunch dangles that potential in front of our face, with no real incentive pushing us in any direction. If we are to dehumanize ourselves, and turn this Eden into a battlefield, we will do it on our own terms. In Rust there is a real sense of complicitness when you eventually succumb to violence, more potent than in any other survival game on the market. Despite the lack of rankings to chase, or K/D to nurture, or exclusive vendors to unlock—despite the unassailable fact that none of this will matter as soon as the server is wiped—we are at war, and we always will be.

Multiplayer survival game Rust has finally left Early Access, increasing its price from $20 to $35 and tweaking its update schedule from weekly to monthly to ensure changes are properly thought through. There's now a testing branch, too, for those that want to trial new features before they make it into the game. And you can still expect a lot of new additions: creator Garry Newman said last month that the transition from Early Access to full release "was more like leaving Prototyping and entering Alpha".

The biggest change to accompany that transition is a graphics refresh. Environment artist Vincent Mayeur wrote in a blog post that he has rethought the visuals "from the ground up, combing over almost every aspect of the game, striving for consistency". 

He said that visual consistency had been eroded throughout development because of the need for constant changes, many of which didn't match up, so he's "undoing what it has become and starting afresh". In practice, what that means is improved lighting, a refresh of the colour palette and post processing, prettier rocks and foliage, and lots of new types of trees dotted around the landscape. 

Away from graphics, the team have reworked weapon recoil. Previously, your aim would sway randomly every few second while aiming. Now, it will only sway if you haven't fired for several seconds, so you'll be able to track a target and tap fire knowing that your gun isn't going to start jumping all over the place. This will perhaps make it easier to kill enemies if you get your hands on a rifle, although the AK47 now has slightly more recoil overall.

There's a whole list of other, more minor changes (including giving out squishy frog boots to anybody that bought the game in Early Access), which you can read about in that blog post. Scroll down to the bottom if you just want the long list of changes. 

The multiplayer survival game Rust debuted on Steam in December 2013. Now here we are in 2018,  and wow, it's still there. Not for much longer, however, because believe it or not creator Garry Newman announced today that it will go into full release on February 8. 

Predictably, Newman said that development will continue after the 1.0 release, but the update schedule will change from weekly to monthly, to help reduce the likelihood of "rushing in features and fixes that end up breaking something else." For those who prefer to live dangerously, a "Staging Branch" of the game with daily updates will exist alongside the stable main branch. It's basically a PTR—Public Test Rust, if you like—that never goes away. 

"You can have both versions installed at the same time, so our hope is that we'll get one or two servers on the staging version that are populated all the time and help test the updates that are coming to Main at the end of the month," Newman explained. 

Despite the big step, he also very clearly wants to keep expectations under control. "Please try not to compare the game to some other finished game or some idealized version you have in your head. Compare the game now to how it was when we entered Early Access. That's the delta that we feel qualifies us to leave Early Access," he wrote. "Think of it more like we're leaving Prototyping and entering Alpha."

The full release of Rust will be a quiet affair, with no launch parties, surprise reveals, or other such shenanigans—"Business as usual" is how Newman described it—but there will be a price increase, from $20 to $35. "It sucks, it's going to cost more, but this was always the deal. And it's not like we're increasing the price to $60 without any warning," he wrote. "This is one of the main reasons we've decided to post this blog rather than quietly slipping out of Early Access, we felt like this is something you'll all want to be warned about." 

"Thanks to everyone that took the risk by buying our Early Access game. It hasn't always been the most stable, optimized, balanced experience—but we hope you don't feel like we've let you down." 

PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds may have popularised the genre inspired by the Japanese movie, but it’s not the only battle royale game pitting players against each other in desperate fights to the death. Below are 11 games, modes and mods that you should check out if you can’t get enough of hunting your fellow man.

GAMES

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

Let’s get the current top dog out of the way first, shall we? PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or PUBG, is still in Early Access, but it’s already swallowed up the lives of millions of players. In each match, 100 survivors are air dropped into a bucolic Russian island, seemingly abandoned during or just after the Soviet era. It’s a huge place, but the play area is always shrinking, forcing players to race towards safety on foot or using cars, bikes and boats, all while trying to murder each other with a wide range of guns and melee weapons. It’s a game filled with long moments of quiet tension, punctuated by chaotic, nerve-racking battles.

H1Z1: King of the Kill

Another Early Access game, H1Z1: King of the Kill was spun out of Daybreak’s zombie survival game. The survival aspect became its own separate game, Just Survive, while the more competitive, PvP side of things became King of the Kill. Frenetic and fast-paced, it’s more of an arena shooter than a game like PUBG, so you won’t have to wait long to get into a gunfight. Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene was also a consultant on H1Z1 before making Battlegrounds.

Ark: Survival of the Fittest

Like H1Z1, Ark: Survival of the Fittest is another arena-style battle royale game, and is similarly a spin-off. Its hook, not surprisingly given its progenitor, is that there are dinosaurs and monsters to watch out for, as well as 71 human adversaries potentially hunting you down. Other elements from Survival Evolved have made it in, too, including riding and taming creatures, tribes and traps. Unfortunately, it’s struggled to retain its playerbase in the face of PUBG.

The Culling

If you prefer battle royales of the more intimate variety, there’s The Culling and its 8-player and 16-player blood-soaked arenas. Though it’s fast-paced, there’s still time to craft equipment and set traps. The central conceit is a big draw, too, set as the game is in a crazed game show for sadists. It’s been in Early Access since March 2016, and while it was popular initially, it looks like player numbers might be on the wane.

Last Man Standing

Budget PUBG is probably the clearest way to describe Last Man Standing. It’s set on an island with 100 players trying to kill each other, the play area is a big circle that shrinks over time, mods can be scavenged and attached to guns, it’s got loot crates—there’s a long list of similarities, but Last Man Standing is free. It’s not quite as polished as its premium counterpart, however.

GAME MODES

GTA Online, Motor Wars

GTA Online recently got a competitive mode called Motor Wars, which has some similarities to popular battle royale games: a shrinking kill box, arriving from the sky, then finding the best weapons possible on the ground. The key difference is that it's more focused around vehicle combat, and all the cars are marked on the map, as well as the players driving them. The shrinking kill space provides a similar amount of tension, though, and there's tons more potential in building on the idea, given the size of the map they've got to play with. Sam had fun with it, even though it has some flaws.

Fortnite

Epic has announced a new battle royale mode for their base-building romp, Fortnite. It’s due out this month and will see up to 100 players duking it out until there’s only one left. The mode was put together by Epic’s Unreal Tournament team, who were busy experimenting while Fortnite was in development. The scavenging and building from the game’s regular mode will also feature in this new one, so you’ll be able to create bases and fortifications to hole up in while you wait for everyone else to die. They’ll probably be doing the same, mind you.

Unturned

Unturned is a blocky, free-to-play zombie survival game, but it’s also got a battle royale arena mode. Players are spawned at random points on the map and must hunt each other down while a barrier closes in, damaging those outside it. It’s as straightforward as a battle royale can be, but there’s one odd wrinkle: you can’t damage people with your fists, so you’d better get a weapon as quickly as you can.

MODS

PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale in Arma 2, Arma 3

Before PUBG, Brendan “PlayerUnknown” Greene created DayZ: Battle Royale, an offshoot of the original DayZ mod for Arma 2, inspired by the Japanese film. When players started leaving DayZ for the standalone Early Access version, Greene switched to developing Battle Royale in Arma 3. Later, it was licensed to Daybreak for H1Z1 and became the foundation for King of the Kill. A lot of Battlegrounds’ features started in PlayerUnknown’s Battle Royale, and Arma 3’s realistic aesthetic isn’t far of PUBG’s.

Rust: Battle Royale

Rust: Battle Royale is an unofficial mode for Facepunch Studio’s survival game, made by Intoxicated Gaming. Inspired by the Arma 3 Battle Royale mod, it combines the brutality of Rust—you even begin naked—with the race to be the final person left alive. All the survival and crafting elements have been torn out, with the focus being entirely on gearing up and murdering your fellow players in a map that becomes smaller and smaller as bombs start to fall.

Garry's Mod Battle Royale

Created last year, this Garry’s Mod game mode, like so many in this list, owes its creation to the Arma 3 mod, being a lightweight recreation of it designed by IC4RO so they could play it with their friends. Since then, however, it’s become popular, no doubt helped by the fact that Garry’s Mod is considerably cheaper than Arma 3 or Battlegrounds.