Community Update 21

Today's art is actually very old fan-art, drawn and posted all the way back in January by Steam user Leyla. I only just spotted the impressive landscape, and then got lost rooting through Leyla's impressive collection of screenshots for other games. It's here, and totally deserving of a thumbs-up.

Spent almost four hours painting this. More detailed, more complicated perspective. Again, painted while watching a movie and although those rocks, textures and the lights/shadows really killed me, I think it was worth it :}

Leyla also made this.

Nothing scares me more than the night in Rust. Those wolves/bears coming at you out of nowhere (and especially those zombies when you loot radiated areas) get me every single time. Inspired by some of my in-game screenshots and my game experience, I painted this picture while watching a 1hr 40min movie.

It's interesting: it's based on Legacy, but atmospherically it reminds me a lot of the reboot. Very prescient! I hope the new Rust inspires similar art.

The inevitable happened: the users of the Playrust subreddit have started their own public server. All the details to join can be found here. I'm excited about this, as I feel like the best servers are the ones where there's an online space where players can talk about the game, and the world's history starts to become a lore. Or just a bunch daft ranting. I'm cool with both:

Someone in the base carefully looks outside the Northern window. As he looks down his sight, scanning the surroundings, he falls to the ground. One 5.56 to the fucking eyeball. The remaining five guys can be heard, panicking and trying to grab their guns and syringes. Too late. EliteHT blows the door up with an explosive charge crafted from gunpowder, powder of 50 wolf skulls, and the severed penis of every bandit who dared knock on his door. We went in, guns blazing, and mowed them down like vermin.

That's a good story, though I've obviously chosen a bit where creative license has taken over. I hope the subreddit is crammed with stories, videos and screenshots for the players to mull over. I've already popped into the server and discovered a noob town near spawn being built for people to shack up in for their first few nights, so it seems like a good place to learn the game.

The reddit server popped online just as we started to experiment with the spawn points, where currently new lifes begin on the beach. Are we suggesting you've just washed up there? Who knows? It's currently just an idea to make the inside of the world something of a goal, as well as giving people a chance to meet-up at the beginning of the game. Did it work? Anecdotally, it did. As BodyWeightEnergy pointed out:

However, after the new change, it restricted spawning to a horizontal stretch of shore to the North of the island. This meant that no matter how much you suicided, you would always end up in that area. It changed the mechanics of the game so much. All the noobs spawned in and started interacting with each other immediately. A few server veterans also decided to make camp there and create a social structure to protect that area, even though it was far from resources. The more skilled players fled away Southward and built big and defensible structures.

My own experience was interesting: after a short while on the server, the constrained spawn points actually came in handy. The fear that I'd be spawn-killed never really came into being, but knowing roughly where I spawned allowed me to get used to the world. It also stops people from using suicide as a teleporter, meaning you have to start learning the map, which is something the subreddit has already started. It's basic, but everything good starts with an open MS Paint document.

You don't need a big concept to tell a story about Rust. I like this little 20 second video by WardCannon because it's so slight: all it's doing is saying what it thinks those moments before you take control are like. I guess it works because the rest of the time you're naked with a rock being chased by someone with three exclamation marks in their name, and making a short video of that wouldn't be quite as relaxing or elegant.

The goal of building in Rust is usually functional: any sign that you might be rich (in Rust terms, anyway) is enough to get you raided. Some people don't care, though. Facepunch forum user Adam-2012 is one of those trailblazers, building a tower that takes three-and-a-half minutes to climb, and about three seconds to fall from. He did so by glitching a little, but who cares when the structure is large enough to cast a shadow across the land? And in case you were wondering what server would enable such building madness, it was here. All that way down without a scratch? We really need to enable falling damage.

There's a dedicated forum post, or you can post in inky depths of Reddit. I also shuffle around the the Steam Community, so feel free to show me to things from there. You can follow and respond to Rust on Twitter, and I'm on there as well. We also have a dedicated site for suggestions and bug reporting. I can't respond to everything, but I read every comment and take it all in. Just be nice.