Rust Is the Best Survival Game

There are many great survival games out there. Titles like Pathologic, Don’t Starve, and Frostpunk has impressed the gaming community with their ingenuity and artistic style. Years after their release, people still listen to their music and remember the good old days when they tried to complete them despite the challenges. Know why Rust Is the best survival game.

Rust occupies a special place among survival games because it’s so hardcore. Most survival games are single-player experiences. Or they provide a co-op experience that allows you to collaborate with a friend in a desperate attempt to stay alive. But Rust does the exact opposite.

This game puts you in the unpleasant situation of having to survive against other players. You join a server, and the round lasts for an entire week. Everyone starts from scratch at the end of the round or the wipe. However, you do get to keep your recipes. But those get erased as well after a one-month cycle.

Key Characteristics of Rust

Rust Is the Best Survival Game
Rust Is the Best Survival Game

The main selling point of Rust is that the action never stops. If you disconnect while someone else continues to play, they will get ahead of you in resources, equipment, and everything else. Because of that, Rust is not a game for casual gamers. It’s a game for hardcore gamers willing to turn it into their full-time hobby.

Other survival games give you the chance to take a break and do other things. Their rounds are usually short, or their system was created for a single-player experience. Pause whenever you want and come back later, knowing that the world will stand still while you’re away.

But in Rust, the show must go on, even if you’re not around to witness it. This is a very challenging survival game that will severely punish you if you stay away from it for too long. The survival genre, it’s probably the most brutal, and this was made clear by the development team from early access.

Just like all the best survival games, Rust will require you to find resources like stone, wood, and metal ore, build a base, keep yourself alive, fend-off looters, and so on. This is survival mode at its finest, but with one twist: other, real-world players are constantly trying to kill you. 

The same survival elements are used, but the progression takes a long time. This means that you will need to play dozens of hours to unlock the greatest weapons in the game and gather enough materials to build a strong base for yourself.

In most games, rounds are quick and last just 20 – 60 minutes. But Rust isn’t interested in players with short attention spans or unable to invest the hours.

What Makes Rust Fun

What makes Rust fun is exactly what makes it annoying if you’re not good enough or don’t have the time to play it the way it was intended (i.e. 24/7). It gives you a very realistic experience of survival in a world. In which you must gather resources and survive the long dark night against other players whose intentions are not known to you.

The game offers a simulation of what life must have been like for the early tribes of humanity. All of its survival aspects are geared toward that, and because of this, Rust is a very original game.

Rust’s Release Date and History 

Rust was officially released in February 2018 by Facepunch Studios. You can buy it on your Steam account for $39.99 and experiment with its wide variety of community servers. Just like Team Fortress 2, this game can be played in a lot of ways. And it’s up to the server admins to determine the rules of their game.

How to Get Good at Rust

Rust is not friendly at all to beginners. But you can make your experience easier by choosing a server with rules that protect you from other players. At least in the beginning. Until you master its elements, you want to avoid fights as much as possible.

If you think about it, you’d do the same in a real-life situation. Getting into fights is extremely risky when you are not properly equipped to win. And because of the nature of the game, you can lose hours of progress as a result of just one pointless death.

After you’ve mastered the basics and discovered how you can thrive in Rust, you’ll most likely search for a server that allows you to utilize your superior knowledge of the game to loot as much as possible and as soon as possible. You won’t care about the threat posed by the risk of dying because you’ll know how to be the hunter, not the prey.

Learning Rust in 2022 is much easier than it was in 2018. There are plenty of good guides online and you can follow the best players on Twitch and YouTube. There are many secrets to this game but if you’re perseverent, you can learn everything you need to know in 3-6 months.

At the moment, Rust is played by a few million people. It’s certainly not dying, but it’s not growing at a rapid pace. This game is not for everyone, but it will always have its following. Gamers who prefer a hardcore survival experience over the more straightforward single-player campaigns offered by other titles in this genre will tell you that Rust is the best survival game out there.

If you’re interested in Rust skins, you can find a lot of great offers on Tradeit.

Posted by
William Westerlund

William is an author, editor, and an avid gamer with over 10.000 hours in CS:GO (Counter-Strike 2). He also enjoys playing Rust, Dota 2, and TF2 but never became a top 1% player in any of those games.