So far in Rust, I've encountered rock-wielding bandits, malicious architects building one-room death arenas, and a cult of naked men. Poke around the community for a bit, and you'll find more good times in a game with such a sheer degree of freedom. Those flashes of spontaneity are just a small part of why Rust is really cool. Its success is, by now, not a big surprise after a pretty strong early access alpha and taking the top spot for survival RPG player activity, but today marks another notch in Rust's handcrafted leather belt: it's sold over 1 million copies, as tweeted today by Facepunch founder Garry Newman.

As a comparison, it took Garry's Mod a little over five years to hit the same sales milestone since launching on Steam in 2006. More impressive is the fact that Rust is still in alpha, with Facepunch continually tweaking and updating the game as it nears a full release. Rust first arrived on Steam Early Access on December 11.

Last week, Facepunch pushed out a sizable patch that removed zombies from the game entirely and improved animal behavior beyond derp levels. A million sales in almost exactly two months--not bad for a WIP title with a warning line of contains violence and caveman-themed nudity."

We've got our own thoughts on Rust's alpha right here. If you're jumping in for the first time, check out our guide to surviving your first day.

In some ways, Rust is like a big, pastoral representation of life. Your ramshackle hut, built through sweat and tears, stands for the your accomplishments. The weighty rock you use to crush an interloper's head like a grape? That's just being a friendly neighbor. And the zombies...well, I still don't know what the zombies mean, but they're pretty annoying. So much so, in fact, that Facepunch's latest update yanks them out of its sandbox survival-thon entirely replacing them with less-stupid animals.

"The longer we keep zombies in, the more complaints we d get about removing them," Facepunch writes in the patch notes. "We are forcing ourselves to deal with it. We are no longer a zombie survival game!"

Instead of walking corpses, we'll now meet red bears and wolves with a similar appetite for eating your face off a temporary swap, Facepunch assures, until the reveal of something fresher in the future. The patch also fixes wildlife calmly standing around in the vicinity of gunshots and predators along with numerous bug squashes and performance tweaks. Oh, and we get more rocks.

Here's the rest of the changes:

Fixed bugs with the level (such as rocks intersecting buildings)
The "oil tank" area has been modified with cover
Workbenches make you craft faster when standing next to them
Added new player animations
Improved melee attack animations
Added locked backpacks and lockpick test (off by default)
When you die, your backpack is locked for everyone else but you for a time
Someone else can use a lockpick tool to bypass this time
Lockpick tools are a default blueprint
You can't use lockpicks on doors
The amount of time the backpack is locked for is per-server and can be set with the command player.backpackLockTime seconds (can be turned off by setting player.backpackLockTime to 0)
Footstep sounds will never play the same sound as the one previously played
Grass textures have been improved

Rust is pretty cool and it's already generating its fair share of memorable moments though it still shows some rough spots in its alpha state. Rust's Steam page houses the update's full notes, if you want to take a look.

Written by Andy Chalk

Welcome to a new day in Rust! Life is hard in the multiplayer survival game (read our alpha review to find out why it's worth playing), but with the right knowledge, you can at least make it through a day.

Which brings us to our first tip: Check the time. If sundown is approaching, consider quitting for 20 minutes and coming back at dawn. It's cheesy, but spending a night in the open without food or shelter puts you at a real disadvantage.

Your first steps

The rock: Your best friend in the early going.

Once you're ready to begin, equip the rock in your inventory, then find a pile of logs and hit it to "harvest" wood. Trees will do as well, but they provide far less wood for the same amount of work. Keep your eyes open for free-standing boulders and do the same to them to gather stones, metal ore, and sulfur ore. Work quickly, and when you have ten wood and five stones, press "Tab" to enter the inventory, pull down the crafting menu and make a stone hatchet. Bye bye, rock!

Log piles are far better sources of wood than trees.

While you continue collecting wood and stones with the hatchet, keep your eyes open for animals. There are two you can kill at this stage: boars, which you can outrun, or wolves, which you won't have to. Wolves will mess you up badly, but you can usually take one down without dying by walking backwards and hitting it with the hatchet while it attacks; even so, do yourself a favor and try to find a boar.

Be careful while you're stalking your prey, because unlike the real world, the animals in Rust get along fabulously and where there's boars and deer, wolves and bears often aren't very far away. If you don't get at least five cloth from your first kill, find another animal and do it again.

Killing pigs with a rock isn't the worst thing you'll do in Rust.

It's probably best to avoid other people during this delicate time. Some of your fellow players may be very helpful but there are a lot of griefers out there too, and while it's easy enough to get away from a guy with a rock, dodging a spray of bullets is another matter entirely. Pay attention to the conversation to get a feel for how things are going; if you see a lot of players complaining about being killed (and they will most definitely complain) you should probably keep a low profile.

You can also simplify your life by turning off the grass with the F1 console command "grass.on false," entered without quotes. The denuded landscape isn't as pretty, but it's a lot easier to see things on the ground.

On the next page, craft shelter, armor, and weapons...



Let's go crafting!

It may not look like much, but it'll get you on your feet.

Collect as many resources as possible until hunger or darkness sets in, then craft a wooden shelter and place it in an out-of-the-way corner by putting it in a quick-access slot and then selecting it. Craft and attach a door the same way, then go inside, lock up, and make a campfire. Place and start it, then press and hold the "Interact" key and click "Open" when the menu pops up. Put the raw meat you collected from your kills it will all be chicken breasts, by the way into the "Cook" square and give it a few minutes to roast up into a tasty meal. Meat won't go bad, so cook as much as you can.

Your hovel holds all the necessities: fireplace, furnace, workbench, and sleeping bag.

With the food on the grill, go back into the crafting menu and whip up a bow and a bunch of arrows 20 or 30 at least. You'll need 35 wood and five cloth to make the bow, which is why you may need to kill multiple animals with your hatchet. The bow isn't terribly accurate but it hits hard and makes hunting a relative breeze, and at this stage that's what you need.

A simple bow eliminates most animal dangers (but watch out for bears).

If you have sufficient cloth remaining, make armor; if not, whip up what you can, then eat up (at least some of the chicken should be cooked by now) and go hunting. Depending on how much was left over after building the bow you're going to need 40 to 50 pieces of cloth to make the next big jump in progress, so don't be shy about killing everything you see. Once you have enough, get back home and craft whatever armor remains unmade plus a sleeping bag.

Place the sleeping bag on the floor of your cabin to create a respawn point, then build a wooden storage box, place it and put excess food, wood, stones, and whatever else you can spare inside. Having a stocked-up respawn point makes bouncing back from death a lot easier assuming nobody comes along and blows it up.

Gearing up and getting serious
 
By now you should have a good supply of basic crafting materials, so at this point the game becomes less about staying alive and more about transitioning from prey to predator. Use animal fat and excess cloth to make low-grade fuel, then use that and some rocks to make a furnace. Wood, metal, and sulfur ore goes into the furnace; charcoal, sulfur, and metal fragments come out.

Use wood and stones to make a workbench it'll be crowded in your little hut but everything will fit as long as you're not too sloppy with the layout and with all the necessary furnishings in place you can craft a proper firearm, plus gunpowder and ammunition.

Stay away from places like this until you're packing heat.

It's a lot to do in a single day but with a good jump on the morning and a little bit of luck, it won't be much trouble at all. And now, properly armed and armored, you're ready to strike out into the world. But keep the bow bullets are scarce. Good luck!

As of writing, Rust is winning this round of the eternal battle of the exploration and survival games. Which is to say, it's currently beating DayZ in the Steam charts. It's a battle that will likely flip back and forth over the next days and months, proving that people really like to be bludgeoned to death with rocks, wrenches and the occasional axe. In fact, the game has done so well for Facepunch Studios that, according to founder Garry Newman, it's already made nearly 40% of what his previous game, GMod, made in 9 years.

"We never, ever expected anything to dwarf GMod's success," Newman told GI.biz. "I did some rough maths this morning: in terms of profits, from sales and royalties, in a month Rust has made about 40 per cent of what GMod has made in about nine years. We can't really believe it."

It is a pretty phenomenal figure, given not only that Rust has only been available for just over a month, but also that it's an Early Access title. Meanwhile, Garry's Mod was a regularly updated phenomenon, responsible not only for some of the most endearing pre-Source Filmmaker machinimas, but also for one of the best gaming webcomics ever created. It also had multiplayer servers dedicated to melon racing.

For a rough idea of what that figure equates to, back in March last year, Newman revealed that GMod had made $22 million over seven years.

More revelations can be found in the full GI.biz interview. As for the future of the game itself, check out our own chat with creator Garry Newman. Alternatively, pop on over to our alpha review to see if Rust is deserving on a place at the top of the Steam charts.

Update: Blimey, that escalated. According to Newman's recent tweet, Rust has now made 55% of GMod's total profits.

Original As of writing, Rust is winning this round in the eternal battle of the exploration and survival games. Which is to say, it's currently beating DayZ in the Steam charts. It's a battle that will likely flip back and forth over the next days and months, proving that people really like to be bludgeoned to death with rocks, wrenches and the occasional axe. In fact, the game has done so well for Facepunch Studios that, according to founder Garry Newman, it's already made nearly 40% 55% of what his previous game, GMod, made in 9 years.

"We never, ever expected anything to dwarf GMod's success," Newman told GI.biz. "I did some rough maths this morning: in terms of profits, from sales and royalties, in a month Rust has made about 40 per cent of what GMod has made in about nine years. We can't really believe it."

It is a pretty phenomenal figure, given not only that Rust has only been available for just over a month, but also that it's an Early Access title. Meanwhile, Garry's Mod was a regularly updated phenomenon, responsible not only for some of the most endearing pre-Source Filmmaker machinimas, but also for one of the best gaming webcomics ever created. It also had multiplayer servers dedicated to melon racing.

For a rough idea of what that figure equates to, back in March last year, Newman revealed that GMod had made $22 million over seven years.

More revelations can be found in the full GI.biz interview. As for the future of the game itself, check out our own chat with creator Garry Newman. Alternatively, pop on over to our alpha review to see if Rust is deserving on a place at the top of the Steam charts.

Welcome to the early access report, a new regular round-up looking at the most interesting early access games of the moment. Here we try new alphas and revisit old ones to separate the promising gems from the bug-ravaged time wasters. This week Craig goes full Bear Grylls, and throws himself into three different sandbox survival games, DayZ, Rust and 7 Days to Die.

DayZ's arrival on Steam Early Access was the most prominent and most talked about of the people-vs-people-vs-environment releases, but it wasn't the first. Just a week before it came out, Facepunch (of Garry's Mod fame and fortune) released Rust, a DayZish game focusing on crafting yourself up from a sort of pre-industrial spawnee to a land-camping hermit. And just a few days before that, 7 Days To Die landed, bringing with it all the technical panache of an animated gif of a PS1 game. I've spent lots of time scrounging for survival in all three, but are any worth supporting on Early Access?

The nature of these games means there's a lot that can go wrong. At least Bohemia was clear about what they released, with this warning displayed prominently on the store section usually reserved for game info fluff: "WARNING: THIS GAME IS EARLY ACCESS ALPHA. PLEASE DO NOT PURCHASE IT UNLESS YOU WANT TO ACTIVELY SUPPORT DEVELOPMENT OF THE GAME AND ARE PREPARED TO HANDLE WITH SERIOUS ISSUES AND POSSIBLE INTERRUPTIONS OF GAME FUNCTIONING."

It's not as typographically terrifying as they made out. I've lost a few characters: at least two have vanished in the dark hours when I wasn't playing the game, one died after a small fall from a short ladder, and I had to leave one to starve to death in a sort of limbo when I fell through a floor and couldn't get out. There are other issues: zombies will pursue you through walls, fences, and doors, which wrecks an otherwise carefully cultured sense of immersion. But thanks to the all-caps, I was prepared for this. Overly prepared, actually: those were just moments in almost 20 hours of zombie dodging. It hasn't crashed at all, it mostly runs smoothly (on an 580GTX, i7, 8BG RAM system), and my latest character has been alive for over a week. The internet is rife with tales the dirty sandbox, though my own tales are of a man watching the horror from behind a bush and backing away. It's capable of remarkable things, and in this stage I've already had more than 20's worth of fun from it.



I can similarly recommend Rust. Rust was a DayZ combo-breaker for me: until I tried it on a whim, I'd spend my evenings yomping across Chernarus Plus. Now I flow between the two. It's a surprising survival game from the Garry's Mod developer, set in a world where you start off with a rock, a torch, and a medkit. Through endeavour and/or murder, you gain better tech. It's thematically similar to DayZ: a multiplayer sandbox where you're up against people and the environment (zombies, radiation, animals, falling down a ladder), but the details matter here. You can make a proper impact in Rust's world through the crafting system, which allows you to build tools, clothes and, most importantly, buildings.

Your first night will be spent scavenging the land, hitting trees with a rock to carve out wood, and hitting stones to grab the makings of a hatchet. With that, you have the ability to gather things more speedily, which should allow you to build a shelter and a door. The world is strewn with little huts, built to house new spawns spat into the cruel world. With a hatchet to hand, and a generous pile of crafting recipes, it's possible to have a little single-room hut all of your own in a short span of time. They're dotted about the land, monuments to the people that came before, often abandoned. I've wandered the strange map (it's huge, but only has one road), climbed a mountain range, strolled across lonely plains, and everywhere I go has at least one abandoned shack clinging to a rock face like a lost goat. They're the base-level of the game's base-building: there are mazes, towers, even entire villages to discover, outposts of the people who play.

Rust is a bit more cartoony than DayZ, but the players are no less barbarous. It is a survival game after all, which means you could go to the trouble of gathering the material to craft a bow and its arrows and hunt the wildlife for meat and cloth, or you could just find someone who's done it and beat them to death. I've been killed on sight many times, and I have stories of people luring friends into buildings and locking them in, tossing scraps of food in and taunting them. It might be awful, but it allows for people to be creatively vile. It's also remarkably well put together for a game supposedly released early, though like DayZ it suffers from the attention of hackers. In fact, that's the biggest technical trouble it currently faces, with wall-hackers able to wander into your locked buildings and loot your wooden palace. It does feel like an early access game, with obvious placeholders, missing text, and moments of immersive fumbling (chicken breasts being looted from dead pigs and bears, for example). Still, I find it hard to be angry when the sunsets are so lovely, and the dead of night comes alive with torchlit human endeavour.



That's more than I can say for 7 Days To Die. It's way more expensive than both DayZ and Rust, and though it's craft-supported open world zombie survival sim, it's just not very impressive. If the idea of Early Access is to show off something that people might want to be part of and support, it just made me want to flee.

It's an ugly game, and not in the artistic way the apocalypse can be. It has bad textures stretched over bustable world blocks (a la Minecraft), terrible animation, and incredibly awkward action that feels like it's running twice as fast as it needs to. But I think the sound is the most off-putting part of the experience: a soundtrack that attempts to evoke the dread of being surrounded by the undead, but with all the restraint of a hungry zombie. Everything makes a weary zombie sound, and it can feel like things are near you even if you're alone. Worse still are the reactions from a zombie when you assault them: one punch elicits a groan; further strikes - and it takes many to put one down - will create the effect of hitting the button on a soundboard over and over, piling zombie squelches up. It has almost no immersion or sense of dread, and the world is full of oddly placed objects to loot. Why am I looting birds nest and air conditioning units?

If there's one thing it has going for it, it's that it leans heavily on crafting. The loot is everywhere, and your inventory enables you to combine objects to craft helpful items. It mostly makes sense, so if you place a pile of sticks in a line they become a club, or a fill out the sleeping bag template with cloth gives you something to place as a spawn point. In addition, every building can be barricaded by breaking down internal walls and filling doors and windows with those blocks. A multiplayer game I played at least had a little bit of ebb-and-flow to it as we tried to survive a zombie assaults by plugging the windows with broken down bits of the house. But after the tedious, flappy fighting against the witless AI, all I wanted to do was wall myself in.

So two out of three aren't bad, and in fact both show a huge amount of promise. It's impressive that DayZ and Rust are capable of offering different things within the same space: DayZ is more of a survivalist game, whereas Rust's messy timeline invokes hunter-gathering. DayZ is about the fall of civilisation; Rust, if it has a goal other than to survive, is about the creation of one. Both are strong foundations for the developers to build on, and both are good games right now. That's more than can be said for our third contender. Like one of its infected antagonists, 7 Days To Die shambles, groaning, at the back of the pack.

Is it worth playing right now?
DayZ: Yes
Rust: Yes, check out our Rust alpha review for more.
7 Days to Die: Nope, not yet.

Have you played this week's alphas? What do you think? Are there any alphas you'd like Craig to try out? Let us know in the comments!

Written by Andy Chalk

My first day on the island did not go well. Waking after some unknown calamity, it was only a few minutes before I stumbled upon a man-made structure and encountered its owner, working diligently to expand and improve his home. He was somewhat less pleased to see me, however, than I was to meet him. "Leave or I kill," he said, four short words I failed to take sufficiently seriously, and a few seconds later he hit me in the face with a hatchet, and then again, and I was dead. That s life and death in Rust, an open-world survival game that falls somewhere between DayZ and Minecraft and has a way of bringing out both the best and the worst in its players.

A babe in the woods

Rust's only goal is to survive, and it s always challenging. You begin with nothing but a rock, a torch, and a couple of bandages, and if you try to spend more than two nights out in the open in that condition, you will die. It's an intimidating, sink-or-swim introduction to the game, but Rust isn't a forgiving experience. Most of the game world will do its best to kill you and while epic multiplayer battles are rare, ambush murders are not. Nor are you particularly durable, unlike conventional videogame characters, and if somebody puts a few bullets in you, you will die. Yet that fragility, coupled with the near-absolute freedom offered by an open-world, no-rules arena, is exactly what makes it work. "Go forth and do whatever the hell you want" is exhilarating.

The player-built Fortress of Corrugated Metal

There's a primal thrill to running through the jungle like some latter-day Tarzan, but if you're serious about staying alive then sooner or later you'll want to build some form of shelter. Construction options are quite limited so you won't be erecting any great architectural masterpieces, but having a relatively safe place to crash and store your stuff can extend your lifespan dramatically. Crafting is an even more important component of the game and while it's likewise neither particularly interesting nor flexible at this early stage of development, better equipment is the key to survival. The transition from prey to predator can be tedious, but once you're packing heat (and pants), the real fun begins.

The conventional fauna is bad enough, but there are also deadly zombies and radioactive hotspots that give the game a faint whiff of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Worst of all are your fellow players, who ensure that no matter how powerful you are, you're never entirely free of danger. At one point, well-armed and equipped after several hours, I was hunting zombies near some radioactive fuel tanks. Quick double-taps from my MP5 dispatched them and I was starting to feel like a real badass, which is probably why I wasn't paying as much attention to my surroundings as I should have been while my attention was occupied by the inventory of my latest undead victim, a pair of bandits snuck up from behind and creamed me with a shotgun.

I've come a long way from swinging a rock.

That's not to say that everyone you meet is a paranoid, kill-or-be-killed social Darwinist, and in fact there's a considerable degree of cooperation to be found in some locales. But it comes cautiously, while vicious, violent death lurks everywhere. There are non-PvP servers for those who prefer less capriciously lethal entertainment, but while that cuts down on griefers, it also does away with one of the most undeniably exciting parts of the game: Random encounters with other human beings in which anything can happen. As frustrating as it is to be blown away without warning, that pervasive uncertainty is a central part of the survival experience, and Rust is vastly diminished without it.

It's not too soon

The Rust alpha test is available via Steam Early Access, and as you'd expect it's very much a work in progress. The graphics are no great shakes and you can expect wonky shadows, occasional clipping errors, and other glitches, and the sound effects don't even pretend to venture beyond minimal. Lag is sometimes a challenge, especially when you find yourself caught up in a spot of unpleasantness with your fellow island inhabitants, and simply finding someplace to play can be a hassle: Official servers tend to be crowded, while unofficial ones can be unreliable. Server wipes happen with major updates, so it's best not to get too attached to your stuff, and there are plenty of gameplay oddities: for instance, every animal you kill, from boars to bears, provides "chicken breasts" for food. (I haven't found any chickens in the game.)

Mmm, chicken.

Rust s alpha is rough, but it's surprisingly playable. The underlying systems are essentially complete and functional (or at least appear to be, from an outside-looking-in perspective) and recent updates have dramatically improved the performance of the server browser. Rust has a ton of potential, and it's an intense and impressive experience even now.

Price: $20
Release date: Out now via Steam Early Access
Developer: Facepunch Studios
Multiplayer: Server dependent, typically 128
Link: http://www.playrust.com/
Play it on: Dual-core CPU, 8GB RAM, DirectX 9.0c video card
Alternatively: DayZ

Verdict: Fun to play now
 
An intense, take-no-prisoners survival game, Rust is a great use of Steam Early Access. It's far from finished, but it's ready to play.

This review is based on the current alpha build of the game.
We will re-review this game once it is complete.

Rust has been causing a bit of a stir on Steam Early Access this week. The open world, player-driven survival game is made by Facepunch Studios, which includes the designer behind Garry's mod, Garry Newman. Players are free to hunt, gather and craft their own structures, choosing their own alliances and enemies in a bleak post apocalyptic environment. How is everyone getting along? What are the best player builds Facepunch have seen so far? We asked Garry, and you'll find his answers below.

PC Gamer: What's the grand concept behind Rust? Why did you want to make it?

Garry: We love DayZ and we wanted to make a game like it. So we did. We quickly realized that we couldn't create an explorable world as well done as DayZ so we came up with the idea of having the player create the world. This was the seed that spawned Rust. We really loved the idea of players starting with nothing, and having no goals but to exist in the world.

Every decision we make is pushing emergent gameplay. So the players themselves decide how the games are made. We give them the tools, they make the world. For example.. a problem we had was that users wanted to be able to open each others doors. The solution suggested was to have a list of users that you can add to a door - to let your friends use them. That's great but it doesn't happen in real life. It's too secure. It's not exploitable. So what if the door has a combination that you share with friends. Or a key, that you make copies of and give to friends. This solves the problem but it leaves a lot of room for emergent gameplay. You could build a house and hide the key somewhere in the world for another player at a later time. You could be forced to hand over your key at gunpoint, and be locked out of your own house etc.

PC Gamer: It's an incredibly ruthless game, and players often kill on sight. Do you have any plans to counter this, or do you see it as part of the experience?

Garry: So one thing that was suggested was making 'bandits'. Making people turn evil, get a negative score if they attack other players. We hate that. People should be nice to each other because they get a nice feeling from being nice. There shouldn't be a system hanging around forcing people to be good. It removes a lot of gameplay fun.

One of the things we did that made a huge difference here unexpectedly was add voice chat. A lot of the time players attack each other out of fear. They don't want to be the person to die. Being able to talk to the other guy and feel them out that way makes a huge difference. There's a lot of this 'tweaking' we can do, kind of social engineering to make people more comfortable with each other.



PC Gamer: There are a lot of permadeath/survival games around at the moment. What do you think sets Rust apart from the competition?

Garry: To be totally honest we haven't played any of the others. With Rust we're making the game we want to play. We're being ruthless with the development, being careful to test each theory instead of just dismissing it as a bad idea.

We're handling the building, cooking, crafting stuff pretty well I think. To the point where I think it's convinced some of the bigger boys to add it to their games too. The fact that we can influence those that inspired us is proof enough that we're doing something right.

PC Gamer: Have players done anything in the game that has impressed you?

Garry: Hah - every time another player comes up to me in game and doesn't bash me to death with a rock I'm impressed.

There's a lot of building that's impressed us. There's a lot of rival gangs stuff... that actually causes a lot of problems for us, because they get too powerful and consume all the resources on the map. We need to look at ways to balancing that.



PC Gamer: There's lots of stories of players imprisoning other players and having fun with them.

Garry: During early development we accidentally left a small white static cube out miles away from anywhere. There was a French server we joined and they'd built a huge shrine around it in a big circle, like a crop circle.

Helk tells a story about one time he was talking to a new bunch of players and showing them the ropes, said good luck then he went to bed, expecting them to die within the next 10 minutes and then hate the game and never come back. When he went on next they'd played through the entire night, had got all sorts of weapons and built a huge fortress.

PC Gamer: What kind of player behaviour have you noticed emerging? Any kinds of play styles that have surprised you?

Garry: It's a weird thing. When any player can kill you easily - and they don't, it's like the biggest compliment ever. They become good friends. You go to bed, and lie there and think to yourself "that was a nice guy, I hope I run into him again." It's a very weird feeling to be having in a game. I mean, people help each other out in TF2 all the time. A medic tops you up, but you don't feel a closeness to them. I guess it's because the world is so harsh you kind of feel closer to people that are kind. It must be an in-born reaction or something.



PC Gamer: How much impact does the community have on the ongoing development of the game?

Garry: It has a huge impact. It's a double edged sword.

Some people get a lot of stuff wrong, in their suggestions and ideas.. and they get angry at us for doing things differently. They say we're going to ruin the game and stuff. Which I don't know.. Don't they think they know what we're doing? Why would we want to make our game worse? They don't really understand what the game is about and don't really trust us to take it in the right direction.

But then there's a huge group that instantly get what we're trying to do. They get that we want to do things different. They understand why the game has to be harsh, why we can't add reputation points. And they make awesome suggestions that we'd never even thought of.

Sometimes we'll have a problem and we'll have 5 solutions, but we know in our guts that none of them are perfect, they compromise what we're doing and they're going to cause more and more comprises down the line. Then we'll read the forums and someone will have posted something that is just so perfect. We love that. Having half a million brains looking at a problem can usually produce the perfect solution.

PC Gamer: Thanks for your time, Garry.

If you haven't realised just how big a deal the survival and exploration genre is right now, take a look at the top of the Steam charts. DayZ managed to fend off its competition throughout the Christmas sale: staying in the top spot throughout the event, all while avoiding the discount infection. It sold 875,000 copies in three weeks, and has now found a survival buddy in the shape of Rust. The alpha survival game from Garry Newman and Facepunch Studios is securely in second place on the Steam chart, and has itself sold 150,000 copies in the first two weeks.

So what's the appeal of the game? To find out, Rust player and YouTube videographer Argyle Alligator started interviewing other players inside of the game. Their responses weave a tale of rocks, headshots and hilarity.