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Rust strategy

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Rust strategy

Unread postby icycalm » 19 Jun 2017 03:03

One thing we are not doing is checking out the mines, military bases, ports and other sites of interest on the map. The one mine I did check out had lots of cool and rare parts, so I think that exploration of these sites can be crucial. Of course there are higher priorities when you only have 2-3 people in the team, but if you have 5+ I think you can afford to send off one of them on trips to the closest sites. That's what the radiation pills seem to be for, by the way, since many of these sites are radioactive. It seems to be used as a kind of timer to make exploration/looting more exciting.

Some other thoughts from Discord:

recoil wrote:Our base got sieged by some Chinese motherfucker. RIP. Establishing a new base.


I wrote:How did he destroy it?


I wrote:If you don't have any stuff left over from the last base, it might be best to stop playing and declare next weekend Rust weekend so that we can start over with more people instead of with 1 or 2 people at a time, as now (edited)
We can set a start time and pick a large server in a region where it is early in the morning so everyone is sleeping and where there was a recent wipe
Then we build, build, build for several hours until people start waking up, and then we have the rest of the week to log in and kill everything
We need to make a base large enough to fit half a dozen sleeping bags, a large furnace, half a dozen containers, a fridge, research and repair benches, etc.
We wasted all those materials building stairs to nowhere
We should have just built a huge square first floor
For a while, you don't even need a roof


recoil wrote:The guy just blew up a stone wall with advanced explosives to the furnace room, murdered us and built his own shit over everything we made.


I wrote:Need several layers of walls so that he'd need several expensive-to-make explosives
Also, multiple bases
Architectural plans of these bases to maximize space and minimize materials needed
And better location in the middle of nowhere so people with advanced explosives won't bother with us
Best location would be in snowy arid areas. We just need to figure out what level of clothes we'd need to not get cold there.
Last edited by icycalm on 07 Aug 2020 20:52, edited 1 time in total.
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Unread postby icycalm » 19 Jun 2017 03:41

Another way to play the game just occurred to me, that we could try sometime.

So far, we have been trying to craft our way to the top. The most hostile action we have undertaken is to scavenge for leftover loot outside of other people's bases. The idea is that, until we've crafted advanced weapons, there's nothing to be gained by going to war with people.

But, whenever we've been hunted, it's only been by one or two people with advanced gear -- mostly even by just one. So, if there's 6 or 7 of us, and we go out hunting for one of these lone hunters, I reckon we'd have a good chance of overpowering him and getting all his gear. In this scenario, we wouldn't bother crafting anything beyond the basic necessities to create an initial spawn location. Beyond that, we'd just go out as a hunting party preying on lone hunters with advanced gear. I reckon we could get to the endgame purely by looting other people's stuff, if we put some effort into it and got decent at it, though granted we should only attempt it with teams of at least five players or so. With 10+ I reckon it'd actually be pretty easy if we co-ordinate our hunting well.

The crafting and base-building are extremely fun, however, so I propose we keep doing that until we "win" the game, and then start over trying to "win" again with the hunting strategy. It should extend the game's playtime for us by a couple dozen hours at least.
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Unread postby icycalm » 30 Jun 2017 19:42

It looks like we might get seven or even eight people on tomorrow, if all the people who've said they might show end up showing, which is a lot more than the five maximum we've had on so far, and I've been thinking of how to handle it. One thing's for sure is that about six, maybe seven, is the maximum you can have on a Discord channel without people talking over each other. The main problem is not so much the number of people, but whether they are all engaged in the same task. If everyone is on the same raid, then you can have ten or more in the same channel with no problems, but if half of them are gathering resources and the other half building stuff, and both groups want to discuss something at the same time, the only way to do it is for one group to jump to another channel, if only for a while, until they are done with their task.

So if we do end up getting seven or eight people, I say we split into two groups from the outset -- the builders and the gatherers -- until we have a fairly secure first base, at which point I say we flip roles and make a second base in the general vicinity, both for security purposes (if one base gets knocked out we're still in the game with the second one), and so that both groups of people get to enjoy the game's building aspect.

Afterwards we link the bases with corridors and airlocks, upgrade our weaponry, and start going on raids and scavenging missions as one big group, taking breaks now and then to upgrade the bases, and also build other stuff around them. It's going to be a hell of a weekend.

P.S. From now on, make sure to copy-paste every post you make in this thread (and also all other Rust threads in the forum) to the following Steam thread: http://steamcommunity.com/app/252490/di ... 267026799/
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Unread postby recoil » 17 Dec 2017 08:16

With Uberust up and running, we need new strategies to kill everyone. We really did have a good chance of killing IED. They are mainly PvP players and don't like to explore and build, they want straight fights and open fields. We should have built forward bases, towers, traps, and defensible positions around them, and forced them to engage on our territory.

Since we are bound to get players that like doing different things we have to play to their strengths and assign them roles, i.e. soldiers, builders, diplomats, scouts, trappers, guitar players, etc. So, if we get new players, ask them what they like to do in Rust and have them do it. The New Challengers are expendable pawns, muhahaha.

These are just a few thoughts. I think we are going to have a great time with this format. It really is like a first-person Age of Empires.
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icycalm's Uberust Quick Start Guide

Unread postby icycalm » 08 Aug 2020 00:31

As we're about to begin Uberust Season 1 this weekend [ > ], I would like to resurrect this strategy thread and keep it updated with my latest thoughts on the subject, and with those of whoever cares to contribute. Now isn't this "metagaming", you might wonder? Yes it is. And though I've trashed that idea for other games in my monumental essay Against the "Metagame", Rust is an exception. How so, you ask? Wait for my essay called "Rising Matrix", and I'll explain there. Until then, just take it as a given that it's okay, in general, to read up on Rust strategy. For more details and caveats and so on, wait for the essay.

So here's my ideal build order so far. Note that Rust is orders of magnitude more complex than even the most complex RTS, so its build orders are too. There is massive scope for different approaches to build orders depending on such things as player capacities and preferences, map layout and base location, etc. etc. The build order I propose is merely a generic one that I generally follow, and many different ones are viable, with countless smaller and larger variations to each one. This is a thread to discuss precisely all that. So without further ado:


1. BASIC SURVIVAL WHEN NAKED

In regular Rust, survival at the start of the game (and even in general) isn't really important, because you can just RESPAWN usually instantaneously, or at most with a couple of minutes of waiting. In my Uberust, on the other hand, respawns take 10 minutes to start with, and I might increase it to 15 or 20 after some testing. So your first order of business when logging into the server at the start of a game is to top up your three survival meters: HEALTH, THIRST, and HUNGER, because otherwise a couple of bites from an AGGRESSIVE ANIMAL and you'll lose 10 minutes of valuable playtime (or 15 or 20, if I end up increasing the cooldown, which can be disastrous for your team). Now there's not much you can do for thirst at the start because there are no naturally-occurring sources of FRESHWATER in Rust that I know of. But it takes a couple of days at least before that becomes an issue, so you don't have to worry about it at first. Hunger can also be ignored right at the start, but if you did find something to eat, that would increase your health, and that's important because your health starts at about 50%. Encounters that would be fatal at 50% health can probably be survived at 100%, so filling up that meter asap is a major priority. So finding some MUSHROOMS on the ground (though they mainly spawn on reddish-earth ground, which might be far from your spawning point) or PUMPKIN or CORN plants can be helpful, as every bite will fill up your health a bit. However, all those can be tricky to find, and note that the whole time you're worried about a WOLF or a BOAR or a BEAR biting you and pretty much killing you on the spot. So even before you've thought of trying to fill up your health and thereby exposing yourself to animals, your very FIRST thought should be to scan your surroundings. If you see ANY aggressive animal around, you need to steer WELL clear of it, as they will chase you down to the ends of the earth if you trigger them. If a chase does begin, find a ROCK or something to jump on, as they can't follow there, and they generally have trouble climbing steep hills or mountains. So HIGH GROUND is what you're looking for in those situations. In general though, outrunning them is an option only if you are somewhat far from them, otherwise they'll probably get you. So 1) Always scan your environment and proceed very cautiously at the start of the game when you're naked, so you can become aware of aggressive animals long before you trigger them. 2) If a chase does ensue, run like the wind with the SHIFT key held down, and if it seems like they're catching up to you, jump on a largish rock as a last resort. At that point you might want to call a fried to come rescue you lol. 3) As long as your health is pretty high, you CAN kill a wolf or a boar with a WOODEN SPEAR (though probably not a bear), so your first order of business after you've ascertained that there are no dangerous animals nearby is to make a spear. Smack a TREE with your trusty ROCK (you start the game with one) and use the resulting gathered WOOD to CRAFT a spear in your crafting menu, accessible with TAB. If you craft two spears, you can throw one with RIGHT-CLICK and then LEFT-CLICK, while keeping the other for melee with left-click. This will give you an extra ranged attack, which will greatly increase your combat prowess. Crafting a third spear will give you a second ranged attack, etc. Place all spears in your QUICK BAR at the bottom of the screen for quick cycling between them with MOUSE WHEEL. A couple of seconds of fiddling with the inventory at the wrong moment can mean the difference between losing a bunch of playtime and a bunch of gear to boot, so make sure you have the right items in your quick bar at all times.

2. TOPPING UP HEALTH

Chancing upon edible plants on the ground can be a great way to fill up all your meters, as plants fill up a bit of your thirst too on top of the health and hunger meters, but such plants are rare, and finding them when you need them at the start of the game is mostly luck. What's much less reliant on luck is making BANDAGES, and using them right away to inch closer to 100% health. Bandages ALSO need plants to make, they require specifically HEMP, a small green plant found on the ground that looks a bit like a marijuana tree. Those can be found in green grassland, and you ALWAYS spawn near green grassland at the start of the game, so luck doesn't play a huge part in finding those. Note however that not all green grassland is created equal, and parts of it have tons of hemp, while other parts have little to none, so once you've got your bearings and ascertained that no aggressive animals are near, and once you've crafted at least a couple of spears and equipped them to be ready for battle, your very NEXT order of business should be to find hemp, as much of it as possible. The moment you've found some, craft bandages immediately (note that gathered hemp turns to CLOTH in your inventory and it's this cloth that's required to make bandages), and start using them by placing them in your quick bar, selecting them with the mouse wheel, and holding down left-click while the bandaging animation occurs. Keep doing this with more and more bandages until your health is at 100%. If you get there, and with your spears on you, you are pretty much guaranteed to survive an animal attack, and you have MUCH higher chances of dominating any hostile player you come across at that point in the game. Moreover, if you combine your newfound hemp/cloth with some wood from a tree, you can make a HUNTING BOW, and that has the combat efficacy of a dozen spears or more, depending on how many arrows you make. There are various kinds of arrows that can be made, but you'll need EITHER wood and STONE, OR BONE FRAGMENTS for them, depending on the type of arrow. Wood is super-easy to find, but stone requires stone NODES which are both difficult for the beginner to discern, and hard to find in the game in general unless you chance in an area that's rich with them. Bones, on the other hand, can be got from dead animals, so if you've killed one with your spears, you can make a bunch of BONE ARROWS from it and thus level-up your fighting efficiency. Look for peaceful animals like CHICKEN or HORSES, or mildly aggressive ones like DEER if your health is low. If your health is high, you can go for wolves and boars too, while staying away from bears because only properly geared players or groups of players can take those on. The upshot of killing an animal is that it gives you not only bones for arrows, but meat for food too, which can be cooked in a CAMP FIRE and eaten for extra health. The camp fire itself can be quickly crafted with some wood, and then a little more wood too to get it burning, but note that especially at night it will give your position away, so use it as little as possible, only when you absolutely need it, then put it out asap.

3. SECURING A SPAWN POINT AND MEETING UP FRIENDS

So far you should have avoided death from animal attacks, armed yourself with some spears and perhaps also a bow and some arrows, and got your health as close to 100% as possible. And it is only NOW that you should start thinking about anything else. In normal Rust, you can skip stages 1 and 2 and jump straight to stage 3, because deaths mean nothing in that game—especially early-game deaths, when you have little to no gear or loot to lose—but in Uberust you will be penalized harshly for doing this. Uberust is a real survival game, and you should think of nothing else until you have ACHIEVED this survival. Once you have achieved it, the very next step is meeting up with your friends so that 1) You'll be stronger and safer together, and 2) Start building a base to begin properly teching up the tech tree. Now, you don't actually have to wander around the map until you meet each other, because the SLEEPING BAG mechanics allow you to circumvent this. If you craft a sleeping bag with some cloth/hemp (these two things are the same: the hemp plant gives you cloth in your inventory), you can then place it on the ground (preferably in a hidden spot under a bush or near trees, because enemies can find them and destroy them) and then GIVE the sleeping bag to a friend by holding the E key over the sleeping bag and choosing the "Give to a friend" command. Then the next time your friend dies, he can spawn in the sleeping bag, and voila, you are together now even though you didn't have to walk anywhere to meet up. Now, I don't like this mechanic (I mean the GIFTING of the sleeping bag, not the sleeping bag itself), and if I find a way I will mod it out of Uberust for future sessions; but for the opening session of Season 1 of the event, this mechanic will stay as it is, so you need to use it, otherwise you can waste hours trying to meet up with your friends, all the while your opponents are furiously teching up. So the number 1 thing you need at this stage is hemp, and lots of it because after you've made your friend's sleeping bag you should make one for yourself. So there's nothing more to do here than find large green grass areas and search them exhaustively for hemp. There's no way to move past this stage of the game without doing this, and sometimes it can take quite a while to achieve it, all the while the danger of being killed by animals or other players is very real and can set you back a long way, as with every death you lose all your gear, 10 minutes of playtime, and spawn quite a ways away from your death point too, thus losing also your bearings, which can be hard to find (holding G brings up the map btw). Complicating things is that, before you even try to spawn your friend near you, one of you must have found a good location for a base. It's little use spawning your friend in a crap location and then both of you needing to get out of there and walk halfway across the map to a better location. Two people searching separately for a good location can find one faster than two people searching together, as in the former case they can cover more ground. Having said that, Uberust changes things enough that perhaps the latter choice becomes viable now, because two players together have a MUCH higher chance of surviving animal attacks and even preying upon and killing enemy players, taking their stuff and setting them back 10 minutes. So... think about it, and devise your strategies. You could even short-circuit my entire guide so far by ignoring everything I said and just looking for hemp from the start, spawning your friend next to you, and taking all the challenges on together. It's risky, but if you pull it off you can dominate stray lone players and quickly gather loot and gear as a group to leapfrog all rival teams in terms of loot, gear and tactical prowess. You could even spend the first couple of hours of the game killing everyone on the island if you and/or your friend are good enough at PVP, and ignoring base-building and advanced crafting for the early-game. This should become an especially efficient strategy if I add in the XP system that I plan to add, but it should be viable already if you can pull it off.

4. CREATING A TEAM, AND EPILOGUE

And here ends my Quick Start Guide to Rust, and more specifically to Uberust. By this point you should be armed and healthy and have met up with your friend(s), and ready to start a base. Don't forget to create a formal TEAM by going in your inventory with TAB and hitting the CREATE TEAM option at the bottom-left of the screen. Then exit inventory and face your friend and hit and hold E while he goes in his inventory and accepts the invitation. Now you can identify team players from non-team players with a visual indicator system, and you can see them marked on your map at all times. Before this system was added we used what were called JUMP CHECKS to identify each other from afar, and you might still have to use this in the early-game before you meet your friend for the first time and create the team. You just tell each other via Discord to jump, and if you see the character in the distance jumping it means he's your friend and not some other player. This is a time-wasting system to use though, so remember to create the team asap when you meet up.


All the above can be accomplished within a few minutes if you're well-versed in the game and lucky, or it can take hours and hours if you've no idea what you're doing (i.e. if you don't have this guide) or if you're playing in a super-competitive server with merciless teams on a massive map. The skill disparities that Rust generates can be massive—larger than in any other game, because this is the most complex—and it only gets worse from there as the teams furiously race up the tech tree all the way to rocket launchers, helicopters and SAM sites, CCTV cameras and tesla coil defenses, not to speak of massive dungeon-like fortresses riddled with electricity and fluid delivery systems. For inspiration on what's possible, check out this video showcasing two giant bases, one of them mostly underwater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi-Hhr9Ghbk

Moreover, the game receives new items and mechanics every month, and these take ages to be added to the wikis (the game has at least three wikis that I know of), so you should keep an eye on Facepunch's (the developer) and Shadowfrax's YouTube channels to learn about these mechanics, because you can bet your opponents will be using them against you.

Facepunch: https://www.youtube.com/user/fcpnch
Shadowfrax: https://www.youtube.com/user/daakhelmit

I may or may not write more advanced guides in the future, but the internet is certainly full of them, and you can spend days reading guides and watching videos on an astonishing range of subjects about the game. There are even people advertising themselves in the Steam forum as for example "electricity experts". So there is insane depth for specialization here. Search for example on YouTube for "rust bow god". We're talking about people who've put in hundreds of hours to become experts in the bow, in a game that features rocket launchers. Here it is to get you started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5Iax6wmr7Y

So the reason it's hard to continue this guide is that at the end of this basic starting phase that I covered above, the game really opens up with an awesome and ever-growing range of options, so it would be a hell of a lot of work to try to map out all those possibilities and offer solid advice on the most efficient paths, even if I knew all this stuff, which I don't. You have already seen that, at the very end of my guide, I explained how you could pretty much skip all my advice if you wanted and follow a whole other route to success, and such "shortcuts" or alternate paths merely multiply the further in the game you get. There is for example an insane and ever-growing number of ways in which to acquire the advanced components like springs and gears that you'll need to craft the more advanced stuff in the game. You can raid various sites from abandoned gas stations and supermarkets all the way up to the massive and well-protected rocket launch site, you can trawl around hotspots like roads and power pylons where loot crates generally appear, or take boats and search for flotsam in the sea, or dive down to sunken wrecks for it, or simply hunt players and raid their bases for both supplies and already crafted gear. Or you can contest air drops, shoot down scientist-piloted helicopters, or raid scientist-guarded offshore oil rigs or oil tankers. After 250 hours in the game, I still haven't done most of these, so I've only a vague idea of the relative levels of risk/reward that they variously present. It's up to you to explore all options and find the most suitable for you and your group, depending also on circumstances. I will say that the sea seems to be the easiest option so far—though not the most lucrative—but that's precisely why the developers are planning to include teams of NPC scientists on powerboats patrolling the waters and harassing you. So when that happens, the game will become even more complex, and the only way to figure everything out is to pour hundreds of hours in it. Clans typically see anyone with fewer than 1,000 hours in the game as a "beginner", so be warned that this is the kind of game you're getting into, a game that makes Sid Meier's Civilization seem almost simple. So good luck out there, and see you on the ultimate battlefield that is Uberust.


P.S. Feel free to ask any question you have in the #rust channel on Discord at any time during the game. More knowledgeable players will be happy to help you because we all want a good challenge. Moreover, if your question is urgent (as pretty much all questions in Rust tend to be lol) jump into the voice channel of a more knowledgeable team and ask away for immediate answers. And if you think you've figured out some cool tactics and strategies, post in this thread so others can learn them and we can talk about them. This game's complexity is a bottomless pit, especially with the neverending updates, so there'll always be more mechanics to explore and understand and improve at.
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Unread postby Robomoo » 12 Nov 2020 15:34

Here's my idea for a more aggressive + PVP oriented strategy than what we usually do, which we could try out in Ciarog's game next week.

My strategy the past couple of times I played has been to build in wooded areas near a small monument, preferably a harbour. The closer you are to a monument the quicker it is to get scrap, which is the main limiting factor in teching up for most of the game. Playing on wipe day we might struggle to gain a foothold, but with 2 or 3 of us I think we could manage. All we need to get started is a 2x1, which I can usually manage to put down after a few tries playing on my own on Sunday afternoon.

These areas are usually quite densely populated with 2- or 3-man bases, plus the occasional small clan base. Every run out of your base is likely to turn into a fight, so you will lose stuff every now and then, but you can mitigate this by mainly making short trips and banking your stuff frequently. The advantages of playing in this kind of area are:
-It's quicker to tech up overall because more resources
-Lots of fights are good practice (and more fun if you prefer that kind of playstyle)
-You have the potential to leapfrog the tech tree if you actually win fights, which becomes more likely the more you practice fighting

So it's higher risk, higher reward, and you reduce the risk by investing only minimally in your base and gear, and using all your scrap on research as soon as you acquire it.

This is my usual build order:
Sleeping bag/s -> stash -> stone tools -> stone/wood 2x1 -> airlock -> furnace -> internal metal door (+code locks) -> workbench 1 -> wood armour + crossbows -> research table (75 scrap)

At this point, we continue farming scrap from the surrounding area, until we unlock the basic guns, either by heading to the bandit camp with 250 scrap or winning one in a fight and researching it. Then after this we farm up and build a new base to replace our crappy 2x1, maybe in a less populated area.

This strategy is probably best for a group of 2 or 3. Maybe 4 at most. More than that and we will attract too much attention and will have to actually start dominating the area around us, which I think we lack the skills for currently.

Here's a tip for putting a base down quickly: get 1200 wood + 600 stone / 400 wood, and place 2 foundations, a TC, and lock the TC. You can get that done in about 5 minutes with just a rock, and pretty much no one is going to bother knocking it down just to get at your two pieces of foundation. Then you only need about 1500 wood or 2000 stone to complete the rest of it with one door.

A tip for getting your first sleeping bag down: If you spawn near a small monument, it's worth it to run into it and hit some crates. If you find a jacket, a tarp, a rope or several other items and recycle them you'll instantly have enough cloth for one bag.
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Unread postby icycalm » 12 Nov 2020 15:49

Great tips, I especially liked that you noted that with more players, you start attracting attention and need a new strategy. That said, the initial 2x1 build order should be the same regardless of group size, and we ALWAYS get that wrong (because I am in charge lol and keep forgetting it). Let's try not to next time.
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Unread postby Robomoo » 21 Nov 2020 15:59

I came up with a design for a base we could try next time:

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The complete version above costs about 40-50K stone, but we can build it modularly and only add as many floors as we need.

The base starts off like this:
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The first floor + roof airlock costs 12K stone total.

A three-floor version of the base, with a living floor and a firing floor, costs 25K stone:
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Living floor:
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Firing floor:
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For comparison, this part of our beach base costs 29K stone:
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One problem with my new design is that you have to break a ceiling every time you want to add a new floor, which is annoying but ultimately saves space internally.

I have quite a few other ideas for how I could adjust this design. Let me know what you guys think.
Last edited by Robomoo on 24 Nov 2020 00:26, edited 2 times in total.
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Unread postby ChevRage » 21 Nov 2020 18:19

I'm curious to see how it looks in-game and with all the different materials the base will eventually be made of, like sheetmetal, etc.

One way we could save ourselves having to constantly break the roof like you say, is to simply build a single tile into the next floor, complete with door as exit onto the current roof, as preparation for each floor. And once we are ready with the necessary materials we expand properly onto that floor. I've seen this type of thing happen with other people's bases to some extent over the last two days.
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Unread postby Robomoo » 21 Nov 2020 20:03

What you said can be done but it takes up a bit more space. You'll need at least two tiles per floor to make an 'airlocked' staircase:
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Whereas a single staircase takes up just one tile per floor, which gives you much more room overall if you're building a small base:
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(A single staircase using triangular stairs, like in the base design I posted earlier, takes up two triangle tiles per floor. An airlocked triangular staircase would take up 4 per floor.)

An airlocked staircase is also more secure than a single staircase, since once a raider breaks into a single staircase that gives them access to every floor of the base through just one more door.

Another way to avoid breaking the ceiling would be to build your entire staircase before the rest of the building, but that looks pretty stupid:
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If we built a base with a single square staircase, we could also replace it later on with an elevator.
Last edited by Robomoo on 24 Nov 2020 00:33, edited 1 time in total.
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Unread postby ChevRage » 22 Nov 2020 02:04

Oh, right, I see what you are saying.

We could always leave the very roof of the staircase exposed. It's not ideal, but I don't think anybody would be willing to camp there for a very long time, even if they manage to get up there via thatch platforms, which would also be fairly noticeable. The staircase seems isolated from the rest of the base too, via doors at least. And that's if they can see that there's a hole in the top of our base, which they could only see if they fly over it or make the effort to get on top of it in the first place.

And on the other hand, we could instead make the tower taller for more vertical room. We'll definitely need space for even more stuff that we have never seen yet. I only used lockers for the first time yesterday, and if you haven't, you gotta log on and check them out. We have one in our base right now. They basically function as a loadout, and you can save up to 3 outfits and hotbar configurations with it, and swap them with whatever you have equipped at the click of a button.
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Unread postby icycalm » 24 Nov 2020 17:53

The foundations look weird in this program. It took me a while to understand that the bottom blocks are foundations.

One thing I don't get about your design Robo is that it doesn't seem to be any more secure than all the bases we've made in the past. Isn't the whole point of honeycombing security? Where is even your honeycombing? I don't see any honeycomb. You still have just a couple of walls between the outside and the TC, as we usually do. In the working space (what you call "living floor") there is even only one wall.

Anyway, this can probably be fixed simply by adding proper inside walls/honeycombing, and maybe that's what we'll do. But I have a much more ambitious design to discuss. I'll post it in a sec, it'll blow everyone's minds.
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Re: Rust strategy

Unread postby Robomoo » 29 Jun 2021 18:02

I forgot to post this back in November:

The main advantage of this design over our old ones is that, at least while the outside of the base is intact, we can move around freely inside it and access all our stuff when armed enemies are outside, and fight back from multiple exits and vantage points. Previously, we left most of our weapons, materials and workbenches in sight of windows, which meant that a single enemy could completely shut down our ability to do anything to them just by camping one window with a gun for 30 minutes. This should be our main concern when designing new bases.

In terms of online defence, this design is pretty basic, but the main principle, in addition to the above rule of keeping your re-supply areas out of sight, is that you want to create as many exits and angles as possible that you can shoot out from. This makes it much harder for an enemy to cover all your possible counter-attack directions from the outside. For example, the firing floor has two doors we can exit from (now that I think about it, it would be better with six doors). We could also improve it further by adding more doors + half-walls for cover around the outer ring.

Something very effective I've seen in videos is to create these gaps in the floor that allow you to look down to the outside of the base:

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But I'm not sure how to do that, and besides it looks pretty ugly.

In terms of offline defence, yeah the base could do with a lot more honeycomb, which we could add with another ring around the outside or just by placing more internal walls and airlocks.
Last edited by Robomoo on 29 Jun 2021 18:51, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rust strategy

Unread postby Robomoo » 29 Jun 2021 18:40

Here's my tech tree build order:

Once you've built the workbench and the research table, keep at least 150 scrap on hand in case you find a double-barrel or a revolver in a crate, or you get lucky and kill someone. Once you have your reserve scrap, these are the cheap upgrades I unlock to make the pre-gunpowder game a bit easier (in order):

Salvaged hammer (75 scrap)
Metal hatchet - (75 scrap, 150 total)
Metal pickaxe - (75 scrap, 225 total)
Bucket helmet - (95 scrap, 320 total)
(if you're not near a river)
Small water catcher - (20 scrap, 340 total)
(if you're by the sea)
Kayak + paddle - (40 scrap, 380 total)

The metal tools make gathering resources significantly faster and will end all fights with dumb nakeds. Bucket helmet provides good protection for its very cheap price. Water catcher is a necessity if you don't live by a river and want to eat to full health. Kayak is a decently cheap way of farming sea barrels.

If you've unlocked all of the above and still haven't found any weapons, the choice is yours whether to run to the bandit camp (300 scrap to buy and research revolver + bullets), save up to unlock the revolver via the workbench (735 scrap), or save up for the first actually good guns: the pump-action at 1050 scrap and the semi-auto pistol at 1250.
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Re: Rust strategy

Unread postby icycalm » 29 Jun 2021 18:58

What’s the justification for the bandit camp being so much cheaper? I am guessing the risk of taking the trip and back. So really it all depends on how far you are from them. However, now there are delivery drones... So I don’t know how that factors in. One more thing to think about and try out.
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Re: Rust strategy

Unread postby icycalm » 29 Jun 2021 19:11

As regards the central building, it’s all yours Robo. It will be a tower of some kind, with enough space on the roof to park a small copter (the big ones will go elsewhere). You might want to try to make it circular, we’ve never done that before, with lots of honeycombs. There will be a TC inside but not much else. It will basically be labyrinths and firing floors and vantage floors. All I ask, since it’s your first try, is to do it in twigs first and call me out before you upgrade them. Make it either clean and symmetrical, or if you go for asymmetry, make it look cool. Asymmetry actually looks cooler if done well, but it’s tough to do well. You can post Fortify models here beforehand, or you can design it on the fly, whatever you prefer.

The rest of the buildings we’ll apportion between the rest of us. One idea would be to make a bunch of mini-towers, say three of them, around the main one, like a triangle. And spread the good stuff among them. And the bottom floors of these towers could serve as stables, garage and copter hangar respectively.

I need to find that pic of that giant old fortress that’s the best looking fortress I’ve seen. I actually prefer that design much more than my conventional compounds, but it’s hella expensive to make and worst of all requires huge amounts of flat space, which is fought fiercely over by the big clans. There are only a handful of those places on the map, and if we want to play on impossible mode, we should head for them.

We could certainly spend the FIRST day fighting over one of those, and if it doesn’t work out we switch to an easier spot the second day. It’s brutal but super exciting. Or if we have enough people we could take the bulk of them for the brutal fight while sending one or two people to start a conventional base so we can have all our bases covered so to speak. Imma look for that pic of my ideal compound and post it here so people can see what I mean.
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Re: Rust strategy

Unread postby icycalm » 29 Jun 2021 19:21

My ideal base is in this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi-Hhr9Ghbk

Not the titular water base shown later in the video, the land base shown right at the start. Which isn’t quite a land base either because it’s sitting in shallow water which is the only area in the entire game that’s truly flat. I think even if we grabbed some area like that, we wouldn’t hold it for long.

Another option is to look for a small flat area, again on the coast somewhere, and build a mini version of the compound. After all, that base must be for 20+ people, we wouldn’t be able to run it even if we made it. And our compound doesn’t have to look the same, just the same general idea of some towers in the center surrounded by layers of castle-like circular high walls and smaller utility buildings.
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Re: Rust strategy

Unread postby icycalm » 29 Jun 2021 19:25

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It looks even better further zoomed out, but I am on the phone and it’s hard to take a good shot.

So a mini version of something vaguely resembling this. That’s what I’d like to make unless someone can show me a better-looking design.
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Re: Rust strategy

Unread postby icycalm » 29 Jun 2021 19:27

If we start with something small but well-formed and actually succeed, we could then scale it up in future wipes as we get more experience and more players.
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Re: Rust strategy

Unread postby icycalm » 29 Jun 2021 20:49

A quick note on squad size. I will be writing an essay on this but it won’t be ready for Thursday so I’ll give you the tl;dr.

We suck at managing large teams. Our optimal squad size is about five, which interestingly is the sweet spot party size for tabletop D&D. Any more people than that in a voice channel, and we are performing worse than if we were in two groups. Military squads can go up to 12 or something iirc, but that’s because those people are trained, disciplined soldiers with a real chain of command, which we will never be and have, and that’s ok because this is a videogame. And our way to compensate for this deficiency of ours is to break the group into two squads when he hit six people in the channel. Just divide the tasks and hop to another channel while using the text channel to coordinate, or appoint someone to hop between voice channels and play coordinator.

Now if you’re doing a raid or a difficult monument run, by all means take everyone and have fun. Grab a bunch of vehicles and go wild. Though note that in my experience even for raids smaller groups perform better and with less noise and fewer casualties, again just because we aren’t trained in tactics, and smaller tactics are easier to conceive and implement—especially in real-time—than larger ones.

I still remember having 16 freaking players on a beach in Atlas with 13 of them dancing and taking pictures while THREE people gathered all the materials and built all our ships for us. We could have had an armada if everyone was working, but even I just stood there and twiddled my thumbs because the logistics were overwhelming and I was lost on what to do. So since dan had figured out the ship building, I just basically tailed him and watched him work. Fun for me, but an utter waste of resources: if we had broken that giant 16-player voice channel into four teams of four and taken on separate objectives we would have gotten at least two islands instead of the ZERO we ended up getting.

Don’t get me wrong it was one of the best sessions in my life, but at some point you have to ask yourself what’s the point of exerting yourself to enlarge the clan if performance goes DOWNHILL once you are past 5-6 players. Our only solution is to relentlessly avoid having crowded voice channels outside of special occasions.

So the key is smallish groups and clear missions. If the channel starts getting crowded, fight the inertia to stay put and have fun joking with the bigger group and instead take the initiative to take a couple people with you and split the squad and aim for separate but complementary objectives.
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Re: Rust strategy

Unread postby icycalm » 30 Jun 2021 14:33

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The range of vehicle sizes that exist. You will never find the van/bus size in the wild though, you'll need the lift installed in your garage, and then you'll need to assemble the van/bus by using modules cobbled together from other vehicles. I don't think you can build the modules yourself.

So another goal for us is to build a bus. One of those full of people with good guns going around should be nigh-on invincible I imagine, unless the enemy has a rocket launcher. Or maybe it'd be a death trap, I don't know. But with so many guns sticking out of it, plus the option to drive away, it'd be a useful tool. Another approach, if there is fighting, is for everyone to exit the vehicle and use it as cover.

Don't forget that vehicles also come with storage compartments. So on top of the passenger inventories, you could carry a shitload of stuff around.

You'd need a huge garage to fit in the lift and a bus.
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Re: Rust strategy

Unread postby icycalm » 30 Jun 2021 15:42

We need a list of all the types of rooms/buildings that we should aim to make. I am not saying we'll be able to make all of them this wipe. In fact I am certain we won't. I am just saying we need a list so we'll know what is possible and what to prioritize. This is what I have so far. I am sure I forget something so let me know and I'll add it in. I also plan to go over it again and add more craftable items in the parentheses I am forgetting. The best item list I've been able to find is this: https://rustlabs.com/group=itemlist

It seems to have everything except the upcoming DLC items. It even has stuff I never knew existed like the graveyard stuff.


ROOM/BUILDING LIST for the CULT COMPOUND

-Starter base (2-3 small furnaces, 3+ sleeping bags, several small boxes)

-Workshop (research table, workbenches, repair bench, mixing table)

-Vault (lots of shelves with lots of large wooden boxes preferably skinned appropriately for their contents)

-Sleeping quarters (sleeping bags, beds, electric heaters, lockers, audio alarm)

-Kitchen (fireplace, barbecue, fridge, water barrel)

-Shooting floors (elevator to take you there)

-Stables (2x hitch & trough)

-Garage (garage lift)

-Boathouse (kayaks, small rowing boats, inflatables)

-Naval base (large boats, upcoming submarines, has to be outdoors, but can be within high walls and high gate)

-Computer room (computer station)

-Large furnace area (has to be outdoors, but can be grill-covered)

-Recreation room (table and chairs, card table, arcade machine, phone, boom box, rug, spinning wheel)

-Farm (tons of shit here, I don't know half of it, I'll list it all later; can be indoors or outdoors or semi in- and out-doors)

-Quarry (apparently there are several of them)

-Music room (all musical instruments, plus all audio equipment and a stage with disco floor and all club items)

-Large pool area (large swimming pool with all accessories)

-Beach area (all beach-related items)

-Graveyard (graveyard fence, gravestones, coffins, wooden crosses, cursed cauldron)
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Re: Rust strategy

Unread postby icycalm » 30 Jun 2021 15:56

Btw you can consider this wipe as a dry run of our new mission-based organizational structure for the upcoming Starbase launch. That game is gonna be 100x harder than anything Rust can throw at us, exactly like LiF, if not more so. If we can't properly coordinate 10+ people in Rust, we will never get far in the FP4X games, and those don't wipe every week, they wipe once a year if that, so if you fuck a wipe you'll be waiting a while for a retry.
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