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.
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.
No game has ever indulged our lack of humanity quite like Rust, and I wish I didn't mean that as an endorsement.
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.
I'm utterly entranced with how little faith it has in our ability to get along.
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.
Most patch notes are boring. Fixed a bug that stopped a menu from opening properly. D.Va's Defense Matrix doesn't last as long. Wukong's attack speed is 10 percent slower. That's the usual stuff, chronicling important but dull balance changes across years of a game's life. And then there are patch notes like this: "Added cat butchery." "Made all undead respectful of one another." "Tigerman does not have ears."
That's the good stuff.
Those are the kinds of wonderfully crazy patch notes Dwarf Fortress has given us over the years. Determined to top the absurdity of Dwarf Fortress's bizarre changelogs, I put on my deerstalker, grabbed my magnifying glass, and set out to find the strangest patch notes in the history of PC gaming. These absurdities are the result.
Rimworld
Alpha 12
Colonists will visit graves of dead colonists for a joy activity.
Alpha 16
New alert: Unhappy nudity
Alpha 17
Raiders will no longer compulsively attack doors.
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Conan Exiles
Patch 15.2.2017
Rhinos should no longer try to walk through players
Patch 15.2.2017
Emus now give less XP
Patch 23.02.2017
Players can no longer use chairs to travel great distances
Update 24
Imps, ostriches and other non-humanoids no longer go bonkers if you hit them with a truncheon
Update 25
Seeing dead people can now lead to great rewards
Update 28
Fixed a small issue where a player in some instances could walk underwater.
---
Rust
Update 149
Bucket no longer hostile to peacekeepers
Update 152
Pumpkins only have 1 season (instead of 7)
August 28, 2014
Bald inmate digging grows hair bug fixed
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Terraria
1.2.0.2
The game will no longer look for the square root of zero.
1.2.1
Mice can no longer spawn in hell
1.2.3
Red Stucco no longer spreads corruption.
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The Sims 4
02/04/2016
Sims carving pumpkins or working at a woodworking table will no longer ignore Sims who die near them.
02/04/2016
Babies will no longer send text messages congratulating your Sims on their marriage, engagement, or pregnancy.
01/12/2017
Confident children will no longer get a whim to practice pick-up lines.
05/25/2017
Babies will no longer change skin tone when they are picked up.
---
Don't Starve
January 29th 2013
Darts and poop won't magically accumulate at the world origin.
October 1st 2013
You can no longer trade with sleeping pigs.
November 19th 2013
You can properly deploy or murder captured butterflies
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Ark: Survival Evolved
254.9
Beers can no longer be eaten by Dinos
---
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
1.2
Taking items from dead owned creatures is no longer a crime
---
World of Warcraft
1.3.0
The quest NPC Khan Jehn no longer becomes confused and unresponsive
1.4.0
Roast Raptor now has an more appropriate inventory sound
2.1.0
Fixed an error where some characters appeared to be drinking while standing up
2.4.0
Zapetta will no longer become confused about whether the zeppelin in Orgrimmar is arriving or leaving
3.1.0
Yaaarrrr! now has a detailed tooltip
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Uplink
1.314
Fixed : Dead or jailed people don't answer their phones
1.35
Fixed : LAN Spoof progress graphic overflow
Fixed : Time freezing and unclickable buttons on computers running for several weeks
---
Everquest
July 10, 2001
Reevaluated the values of the various fish fillets
---
August 15, 2001
The Giant Tree Flayer is now Large instead of Tiny
December 6, 2001
Fixed a bug that was preventing characters from being bald
---
Two Worlds 2
1.4
Horse behaviour - improved
---
Battlefield 1942
1.2
Bots do not jump in and out of vehicles anymore
---
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
1.02
Dead party members will no longer show up later in the game. What with thembeing dead and all
---
Black and White
1.1
The word "Death" no longer said when villagers die of old age
Creature doesn't become constipated if you punish him for pooing
---
No One Lives Forever 2
1.3
Fixed problems with camera rotation after slipping on a banana
---
Hitman: Codename 47
Patch 1
Dancer in "Gunrunner's Paradise" is no longer confused by dead bodies
Garry Newman of Facepunch Studios, developer of Rust, reported on Twitter today that the 329,970 copies of the Early Access survival game have been refunded on Steam. According to Newman (in another tweet), that comes to around 6% of all copies sold. (Extrapolating from that, it appears Steamspy's estimation of 5,509,983 Rust owners is pretty close to the mark.) In terms of dollars, those refunds total an eyebrow raising $4.3 million USD.
It's probably not quite sensible to look at the $4.3 million as a straight-up loss of revenue. Since Steam began allowing refunds of games played for fewer than two hours, customers have presumably become much more cavalier about purchasing and trying games, knowing there's a safety net if they decide they don't want to keep them.
I asked Newman via Twitter what the most common reason given for requesting a refund was, and he replied "Not fun followed by bad performance - which is pretty fair I think."
The latest update to the multiplayer survival goat rodeo Rust makes what sounds like a number of fairly significant changes to gameplay, particularly regarding guns, which for better or worse are an important part of the game. Facepunch's Maurino Berry explained in Devblog 162 that the changes to firearms—three of them, really—are meant to address complaints that the recoil in Rust is "screwy and unfun," and collectively make the action "feel a little bit more in line with traditional first-person shooters."
"First, you're going to notice less horizontal recoil so it'll be easier to maintain your target. Secondly, you're going to notice that, for rifles, the first shot is pretty much dead accurate and the longer you hold down the trigger the more inaccurate it gets by way of an increasing aimcone. This means you'll be able to tap at targets for high accuracy or you can risk spraying more rounds down range which are less likely to hit their targets," Berry wrote. "Lastly, I've implemented recoil compensation. This means if you're holding down the trigger and the weapon is riding up, as soon as you let go of the trigger it will correct back to the original aim position."
The cost of weapons have been adjusted slightly as well: The Thompson now costs ten HQM (high quality metal) less to craft than prior to the update, while the pump shotgun and laser sight cost five HQM less. Shotgun accuracy is also going up a bit thanks to the discovery that accuracy "cones" were actually being calculated as accuracy "pyramids." And if, for some reason, you don't like the new recoil compensation feature, it can be disabled by entering "player.recoilcomp false" at the console.
Other changes in the update include the addition of drop boxes, the return of dynamic moon phases, and the start of a "much-need overhaul" of Hapis Island. A quick rundown of everything new and changed can be pumped directly into your eyeballs via the update video below.
Facepunch Studios boss Garry Newman has some advice for Rust players who have grown bored with the game: Stop playing it. He acknowledged that the sentiment may come across as dismissive, but said in a message on Reddit that it's necessary to break the "ping-pong loop" that's holding the game back from full release.
"I'm noticing a pattern, and we need to address it. It's something we need to get past as a community, not only because it's getting boring but because it has wider implications," he wrote. "We're stuck in ping pong loop. We release an update, you love it for a month, you get bored, blame the system, bitch for a few months, then we release another update—and the same thing happens."
His concern is that the pattern will persist indefinitely, because the real problem isn't that the new systems are better than the old ones, but simply that they're "fresher." But Facepunch obviously can't keep overhauling the game forever, and thus Newman suggests a clean break for those unhappy with Rust. But he also asked that people who do end up quitting, or who think his attitude is unfair, give thought to "whether we have given you enough entertainment over the last three years to justify pocketing your $20" before getting angry.
"If you're interested in the game, if you play regularly and still get enjoyment when you play—we're definitely interested to hear what you think. We especially love hearing your stories, watching your videos, seeing your screenshots and paintings—all things that this subreddit has been very low on," Newman wrote. "If we want to leave Early Access then breaking this loop has to be part of that plan. We have a pretty good idea on how to push forward with Rust, but none of it is going to make the game more appealing to people that have spent their last 1,000 hours hating it."
As silly as it sounds, it's actually very easy to find players with more than 1000 hours in Rust giving it negative reviews on Steam. Two of them are on the front page, along with a few 100-plus-hour negative reviews; one of them, with more than 1200 hours on record, came about at least in part in response to Newman's statement. It's an unfortunate reaction, but probably inevitable, too: Sooner or later, every game developer has to settle on what exactly they're trying to make, and no matter how good that final concept may be, somebody, somewhere, is going to be mad about it.
This past week's Rust update brought some big changes to the way the first-person survival game works, including the removal of the XP and levelling system.
Developer Facepunch Studios detailed why players won't level up in Rust anymore, noting that it "completely changed the feel of Rust as a sandbox." Facepunch's Maurino Berry explained how the game "was no longer about new encounters and enjoying your time in the game world, but instead about how to level up as quickly as you can." This resulted in the game becoming boring once you had levelled to the max, making for an unsustainable gameplay model.
"New items we haven't even thought of yet would need to be hacked into certain levels, which would cause a never ending balance nightmare and item bloat (it was already ridiculous when you'd reach a level and have 12 things unlocked)," Berry continued.
"Eventually we'd like to never have to wipe and just have decay and resource management take care of the server, [but] XP was not compatible with this goal without all kinds of workarounds and hacks forced in like some sort of prestige system."
Berry concluded with the fact that XP negated the "'making lemonade out of lemons' feel" that Rust excels at, where your loadout would be consisted of whatever you could find and use.
Replacing XP is the component system, which makes everything craftable from the moment you start. This means no more locked items or blueprints. However, items beyond basics require the use of a component to craft, and these can only be discovered in the world components can't be crafted. Additionally, players will see the return of radiation, which has been remixed a bit. You can read more about the latest update on the Rust devblog here.
One note that Berry makes is an issue where the game chugs and pauses periodically. He says that if players experience this, they should press F7 and send an error report to the developer, mentioning "you're experiencing the same issue highlighted in the devblog."
