Rust is starting to look more and more like a game rather than a desolate wasteland where naked men kill each other with rocks. The latest update is one of its biggest yet, adding an entirely new XP system into the game that rewards almost everything relevant. As you level up you get access to more craftable items and abilities, replacing an old system of blueprints that was more random and could leave you grinding for ages to try to get the correct blueprint for the item you want.
We try our best to recommend some survival games before we die of hunger.
To explain the whole system, community member Phaedo82 made a video that comes developer-recommended as a primer on the situation.
Most interesting is how XP operates across groups of people. Designer Garry Newman says that “completing various actions will leave your mark on items, and when those items are used to generate XP somehow, you’ll get a share. An example is a Fish Trap. If you make the trap but someone else uses it, you’ll get XP. If you cook food and hand it to another player and they eat it, you’ll it earn as well. If you harvest resources and someone else uses them to craft something like a hatchet, you’ll earn XP. Also, because your resources were used in the creation of an item, the system knows that and when that hatchet is used, you’ll also get XP.”
In other words, you can build up quite the little industry for yourself by being a provider. The intention is that not only will this encourage a lot more teamwork in what is one of gaming’s more brutal and unfriendly genres, but gives you reason to help out noobies rather than, y’know, take their stuff and eat their corpse.
Devblog 100 has way more on the update, including a full changelog. It’s live now, if you want to play, though Rust itself is still in Early Access, two and a half years after it first went live. There’s still much testing to be done.