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Rust
Welcome to Portforward's Rust tutorial. As the game has no single-player, I'll be going through the basic gameplay, crafting and multiplayer aspects of the game.
Start your game out by familiarizing yourself with the minimal HUD. To the bottom right you have your health-points, hunger bar and current radiation level. More on that later. Start out by locating these kinds of stacked together logs of wood and harvest them by bashing it with your rock.
The logs will diminish as you essentially pick them up into your inventory which can be opened with (TAB).
Then locate some of these distinctively shaped boulders. They are the source of Stone, Metal and Sulfur ore.
Harvest them in the same manner as the wood.
Once you have a bit of both, go ahead and open your inventory with (TAB). Then click "Crafting" at the top of your screen to open the crafting window. Here you have a very wide variety of different items that you can create, both with raw and processed reagents. Make a Stone Hatchet.
When It's done crafting, throw away your stone and replace it with your new Hatchet. Although beware to have some spare wood & stone incase you need another one since Feburary 25, 2014, Items now have Durability.
Harvest more wood, about 450 should do.
When done, locate some wild animals, preferrably Pigs while avoiding the aggressive ones such as Wolves and Bears.
Kill animals by whacking them with your stone hatchet. They'll eventually fall over.
Once dead, harvest their carcasses for various materials including: Food, cloth, leather and fat for fuel. Keep doing this until you have about 40-50 cloth.
Find a nice place to start a base and create a Wooden Shelter.
Drag it to your toolbar once It's done and place it down.
You should be close to starving at this point so hurry up and create a Campfire.
Place it just like the shelter and go ahead and create a Working Bench as well in the same manner.
Then go close to it and hold (E). This will allow you to interact with the campfire.
Drag the raw food you have into the "Cook" slot and then ignite the fire by pressing (E) once.
When that's done, create a Sleeping bag..
And place it inside of your shred. When you die, you'll spawn onto it, and as Rust as a random respawn mechanic, It can sometimes be an invaluable asset in assuring less loss of progress.
Now while you're still waiting for the food, create a Wooden door.
Drag to your toolbar and hold your mouse over the Shelter with it.
This will attach the door to your now slightly secure wooden shelter which only you can open..
Unless you change the locks to allow other players to open it with the right combination or simply unlock the door as a whole by holding (E) on it. When done, go ahead and create a Hunting Bow and some arrows as well.
Some of the food should be done at this point. Take it out of the campfire and put it in your toolbar then use it to consume. Do NOT eat raw food as It has literally no positive benefits. Go and get 20 more animal fat If you don't have It at this point.
Once you have the animal fat, create 10 low-grade fuel and then make a Furnace & place it down.
Open it yet again by holding (E) then place down some wood and all the ores you found in it to "Smelt" them.
Once you have 10 metal fragments, go ahead and create a "Hatchet" under the weapons menu. This will be your bread-and-butter for all gathering needs. Always having a few around is probably a good idea.
Gather some more supplies while waiting for the ore to melt and then create a Repair Bench.
When the repair bench is ready, feel free to put it down next to your crafting bench.
To use it, simply put a damaged tool/weapon/piece of armor into the slot and click "Repair" with the necessary materials in your inventory.
Do pay some heed when doing it though, as every repair to something decreases It's max durability.
Next up is moving off from you scrubbish wooden shred. First, gather atleast about 400 wood. Then create 38 wooden planks and with those, create: 1 Wooden foundation, 3 Wooden walls, 1 Wooden doorway, 1 Wooden Ceiling and 4 Wooden Pillars.
When done, put the foundation on your toolbar, use it and place it down somewhere desireable away from radiation and creature spawns.
Once the foundation is down, take the 4 wooden pillars and CAREFULLY place them precisely in the corners. Messing this up will render the wooden foundation useless & without a chance of full wall coverage as pillars are currently indestructible..
Once they are down like this, start placing down the walls.
Finish with the ceiling..
And you should now have a respectable, safe housing quarters, minus a door.
Smelt enough Metal Ore in a furnace to get 200 metal fragments. Then go to a work-bench, select the metal door recipe and craft it.
Put it down in your new base like with the shred by looking at the doorway and voilá. Also take heed and move your bed into this housing as soon as possible by picking up your previously placed sleeping bag (Spawn point) with the (E) button.
Your next priority should be to start finding some Research kit off Red wolves & bears. They are essential to unlocking new recipes by allowing you to learn how to create existing items in your inventory.
Drag and drop one onto an item..
And you can permanently learn on how to create it from resources in the future. Player's own recipe lists are the only things that separates the long-time players from the newbies when houses or individual items aren't present.
The only other way to unlock new recipes is to find blueprints from world-spawning crates and red wolves & bears so be careful spending these research kits as they are consumed from single uses.
Now, your biggest and probably most important priority is to create guns. They are your only real, reliable defense against other players whom will be your biggest threat ever. To this end, we'll begin by creating a Pipe Shotgun.
They are relatively easy cheap to make, ammo is very easily created in bulk and can even kill enemy players in full kevlar at blank range in two shots that can be delivered very quickly If you have two separate guns.
Once made, create a couple of handmade shells out of stones and gunpowder. Gunpowder is made from combining Sulfur and Charcoal.
Feel free to try it out on a couple of nearby red wolves & bears. They one-hit wolves and can quickly become the most useful tool for beginners.
Only real downside is the limited clip-size and reload speed. If you come across players, creating a second one Is usually wise.
Now as stated above, the absolutely, undeniable biggest threat you'll ever have to face is the other players in Rust. "Bandits", thugs and random deathmatchers & gankers makes up for most of the population while the game also has an ongoing "Powerful gets more powerful while the poor gets poorer" mindset, leaving high-end powerstruggles frequently destroying any and all newbies that get caught in it.
There are several ways to tell what are players. The above one, is a large wooden-made construct by players. This picture here illustrates the "Sleeping" mechanic in the game.
it serves as a feature to always have one's character in fear of dying, even as you log out. This poor fellow logged out in the wilderness and will be killed within hours or even minutes depending on the server population.
Another giveaway can be simple things such as resources missing, dead animals, campfires or the in-game global chat. Keeping your wits about you at all times on PvP servers is essential for any and all success.
Due to the rampart consumption of resources on populated servers, paying attention to even the tiniest of critters for some cloth and food can be the difference between life and death.
Being the witness to simple acts of murder from one who has a gun when the other one has nothing is also a common sight. Trying out your luck to maybe loot some leftover scraps or simply staying away from the gunfire can mean the difference between life and death.
In this case, there was loads of items over left up for grabs.
It was however, not mine to take as I was shortly assaulted by more greedy players.
Players with nothing but rocks will still often have intents on killing you for potential loot, even If it takes them over 5-10+ minutes to do so. These are usually referred to as "Kamikaze" playstyles, risking everything to increase chances of gain.
Signs of areas to stay away from are usually dictated by massive buildings and frequent gunfire. Although, sometimes you won't have a choice.
In this case, I could actually sneak into the giant fortress..
And find tons of untouched supplies, all just from climbing around the mountains a bit.
Death is however, often imminent everywhere and glass-house clear signs are backpacks littering the ground, being the sign of other struggling players.
Rust is all about joining a server, shooting your neighbours or greeting them with some cooked chicken and then creating your mark on the world. You can do this in any way you see fit and noone can blame you for it.
Don't be discouraged If you die once or twice. There are literally thousands of servers, all having unique properties and people playing so finding your place to prosper is half the challenge.
Thanks for reading our Rust guide and remember that the game is still in Alpha. This guide was written at Feburary 25, 2014 and literally everything is prone to change. Have fun!
More Rust Walkthroughs
This Rust walkthrough is divided into 1 total pages.