Rust Community Update 15: How Many Pixels?

I've spent a huge part of the past week documenting what people have been building on the servers. I'm not quite ready to share my screenshots yet (though if you've had the feeling you were being watched, it was probably me), but I've been privileged to have a few people nudge me about their creations. Most impressive was the godly GrymThor's tree-house work. He documented two builds where his houses are entwined with nature's brown and sticky things. Build #1 twisted around a tree like a boa constrictor, creeping up the trunk by wrapping around it. It looks lovely, particularly at night. His second build was even better, as he documented the process and made a tree-house that bridged between two trees. Seeing ingenuity like this makes me so excited for when Rust is in a position that people will be able to settle in places for the long-term. Wipe-free servers excite me no end. Speaking of server wipes...

I always thought of server wipes as a necessary evil for Rust, and I've been looking forward to the day they're no longer necessary. But that's not an opinion everyone shares. A few threads popped up on Reddit defending the notion of server-wipes as part of the natural evolution of a Rust server. Stick_to_the_Shadows started a thread considering how a server wipe could be part of the game, where players would fight to armor disarm a bomb that wipes the server, and have it not just be an admin pushing a button:

This bomb could be dropped like an air drop, or introduced in some other means, either via command or after a 2 week period of time. If people are bored and want the server to wipe, people will start trying to detonate the bomb. Give it a 24-72 hour timer once activated, and allow people to create a tool to check in on how much time is left.

However, storrgie argues that wipes are only considered part of Rust because there's currently no clear endgame:

I was surprised to see that there was some comments stating that wipes are a part of gameplay. I feel like Gary was right in stating that wipes stink. I'm wondering, is the reason that people like wipes due to the fact that it pushes us all into scarcity once again? I think that many don't enjoy when they are just beginning and someone is farther ahead of them, the wipe is a way to ensure a level playing field for a couple of days. Certainly we saw that in legacy this became a significant pooint of interest (as it was in almost every server name).

I'm actually coming around to the idea of a wipe being part of the game, but I also think they should be severely limited and incredibly difficult to achieve. Maybe even giving the admin the power to limit the server to one or two player wipes across its lifetime? Meanwhile, this has nothing to do with anything, but I'm always fascinated by the very specific ideas people have about the game. Case in point is jokerz request from the official forums:

How about the idea to be able to craft a megaspeaker that needs to be attached to a pole structure? Once built on top of your base or tower you can broadcast whatever you want to say obnoxiously that anyone within a 200 meter radius will hear. The speaker should be really expensive or else everyone will just build one... the equivalent in value to making six c4 in rust legacy?

I would love to do something like this one day. Just pick a random thing from the community and make it happen. A rather wordy update this week. I promise next week's will be mostly screenshot led, as I'll be sharing lots and lots of shots from the servers. I've been watching you...

Got a song, a suggestion, or anything you want to say about Rust? Have you moved into a cave because you played Rust? 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.

Unless someone sneaks a Rust Island onto Google Maps, or makes one out of cloth, I can't see this map being topped any time soon. It's a 68 Gigapixel image of the full Legacy map, extracted from the game and then, like serial killer and his victims' skin, stitched together into a grand design. You get to see the entire Legacy map, zoomable to the point where you can see the ruts in the road. It was taken from a blank map, so there's sadly no player builds. That's the next step for this sort of thing, eh? Also, he used a renderfarm to make it. Garry doesn't even have a renderfarm.

"The renderfarm was basically about 8 medium-end to oldish computers netbooting an arch linux image, and my highish end desktop(also running arch). I used Blender to do the rendering. I used a bunch of bash scripts and some python to turn extracted data into 65536 1024x1024 px chunks.

It's lovely to be able to zoom and examine my two main build areas: the one in the rocks above Rad Town was my favourite, as it looked onto the populated space and the empty area on thge other side of the hill. I often had all those Hacker Valley resources for myself. I also used to build in Secret Valley, just behind Ecko Mountain and overlooking the water. That gave me a nice route to some resources without taking the roads. The top image is from Owen153, who discovered a combination of Rust's triangle building sections and the in-game lighting can create an effect that resembles the Rust Logo. It's like the Rust signal.