Rust (2018)
Rust is a 2018 shooter video game made by Facepunch Studios.
Survival stripped to its meanest form. You start naked and freezing on an island where the cold, the wildlife, and the environment all conspire against you, but the real danger is the other players. Everything you gather, from stone tools to a walled base, can be taken by someone stronger or better organized. Days go to harvesting and crafting; nights go to hoping your door holds. Alliances form and shatter without warning. Rust makes no promises and tells no story beyond the one its players inflict on each other.
Quick answers
What is Rust about?
Survival stripped to its meanest form. You start naked and freezing on an island where the cold, the wildlife, and the environment all conspire against you, but the real danger is the other players. Everything you gather, from stone tools to a walled base, can be taken by someone stronger or better organized. Days go to harvesting and crafting; nights go to hoping your door holds. Alliances form and shatter without warning. Rust makes no promises and tells no story beyond the one its players inflict on each other.
When was Rust released?
Rust was released on 8 February 2018.
Who made Rust?
Rust was made by Facepunch Studios.
Similar games
Explore Rust guides
Rust in our writing
- Companion guide: Survival Crafting Games: The Complete Guide to Gathering, Building and Staying Alive
- Companion guide: Wilderness Survival
A few thoughts on Rust
Lord of the Flies is the natural companion: strand people with no rules and watch how fast cooperation curdles into cruelty and warring tribes. Golding's schoolboys and Rust's raiders wrestle with the same question of what holds when nothing is enforced. The Road pushes that same every-stranger-is-a-threat paranoia even further.
Survival stories where the real threat is other people, not the wasteland
Rust never gives you a story, just cold, hunger and the certainty that whoever's over the next hill is more dangerous than the wildlife. Lord of the Flies and The Road strip society to nothing and let people fill the gap, The Last of Us finds the real threat in surviving humans rather than the infected, and Attack on Titan proves the walls were never the only danger.
Raiding, plundering and holding onto what's yours in a lawless world
Everything you build in Rust, from a stone axe to a walled base, exists to be taken by whoever's stronger. Vikings turns raiding into a way of life, The Walking Dead shows entire settlements fall to whoever wants them badly enough, Largo Winch fights the same battle over an empire instead of a compound, and Renegade Immortal grinds every gain back into a fight just to keep it.
Alliances that form fast and break even faster
Nobody in Rust can really trust the person they teamed up with an hour ago, and that instability is the whole engine of these too. Grand Theft Auto V and San Andreas both build entire plots around partnerships that curdle into betrayal, The Witcher 3 shifts its wartime allegiances with every faction's convenience, and Half-Life 2 holds its resistance together only as long as the fight demands it.