INDUSTRIAL CRAFTING - Rust Update 6th January 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5VZD-j89wQ
The February update is, in all probability, The End of Rust. Let's understand why.
They are adding an incredible industrial tier of items and processes, effectively turning the game into survival-builder
Satisfactory, which is an insanely attractive concept. But the implementation is so hamfisted, that it's unplayable. You basically stick little modules on top of all your containers (boxes, furnaces, fridges, whatever), and somehow these little boxes and the pipes that connect them are supposed to move around items that are... bigger than the boxes and pipes themselves. It's the dumbest, laziest shit I've ever seen in the genre, and totally uncharacteristic of these developers who are ALWAYS extremely careful with both the mechanics and aesthetics they introduce.
Rust is a game with a super-unique super-focused aesthetic, starting from the game's name itself. And they have kept it finely-honed for a full decade (the game just celebrated its 10th anniversary). But apparently, they just gave up, and from February the game will become unplayable for all those, like me, whose immersion will be utterly ruined by the image of chairs and hammers flowing in tubes like liquids. It boggles the mind how ugly and stupid it all looks. You know the coziness and homeliness of a good
Rust base that felt like an oasis in the middle of the violent, lonely chaos of the typical high-pop
Rust server? It is gone. Take a look at Shadowfrax's video. The new
Rust looks like something an autistic "indie" teenager who's never left his room designed.
It's such a terrible shame because a ton of other awesome stuff are coming into the game soon such as pets, more monuments like a nuclear missile silo, a ferry that goes around and on which new players arrive, et al. Of course, the industrial system would have been the star new feature, but now it's ruined, and it ruined the entire game with it.
I suppose there is a tiny chance a lot of people will complain and the devs will remove the system, and hopefully remake it properly and readd it. But keep in mind that, aesthetically, it would be very hard to remake the system properly because the very nature of AUTOMATION utterly CLASHES with
Rust's key theme, which is DIY jury-rigging. It would make no sense to start factory production lines in such a Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic setting. The only way this could be done is if order was restored on the island, and a command structure was formed, and people specialized and began clearing out junk and setting up brand-new buildings etc. There would have to be a whole new ERA of
Rust like in a Civilization/Age of Empires game to properly introduce industrialization here. You see how the theme constraints the mechanics, and has finally led these hapless devs to this impasse, and these Mickey Mouse aesthetic choices that basically render the game unplayable.
What more is there to say? I am finally quitting
Rust after 5.5 years and 471 hours, as my most played game of all time (unless you count the two PA versions as one, which I suppose you should):
https://steamcommunity.com/id/icycalm/games/?tab=all
I have hundreds of dollars' worth of skins, and for a moment I considered selling them, as I expect their values to decline as the game declines as a result of this update, but then I thought twice about it. Selling the skins now would mean I abandon hope on the game, and I don't want to do that. There's still plenty of time to turn this boat around, plenty of solutions that can be found. This is the FIFTH best game of all time, after all (it goes my
Ultimate Edition/
Battlegrounds, then
Star Citizen, then
Life is Feudal: MMO, then
Atlas, then
Rust). The version with the Mickey Mouse industrialization is a travesty, but it can be rolled back with a few clicks. Facepunch HAS rolled back features before. Nothing as big as industrialization, but they've rolled back for example stats and leveling, which was a pretty big thing. So there is hope, and I am not abandoning it.
All this said, I am not THAT heartbroken as I would be if I hadn't discovered
Star Citizen, and if
Life is Feudal II [
> ],
Dune: Awakening [
> ], and others like
ARK II [
> ] etc. weren't due in short order.
Atlas, which in many ways is even better than
Rust, has been destroyed even HARDER than
Rust over the last couple of years. That too is basically unplayable now, and the original
Life is Feudal is LITERALLY unplayable, since it went offline. Not to mention the fiasco that was
Starbase!
Such is the nature of this genre: these hyper-complex monsters can be destroyed very easily with just a single bad decision, so it is paramount to enjoy them as much as possible while we have them—and this I have done with every single one of them, and will continue to do it. Do you know that Amazon's
New World was a full first-person 4X game before they neutered it to a generic MMORPG? That one was destroyed even before release! (the alphas/betas were reportedly amazing, and to this day I regret not trying them).
Really there's nothing to mourn here, it's just the natural cycle of birth and death of a project, and the cutting edge has long moved beyond
Rust anyway. Gaming's moving forward, survival-builders and FP4Xes are moving forward,
Star Citizen will dominate everything in the end anyway, and I would like to take a moment on
Rust's 10th anniversary to appreciate the game and its developers for kicking off ten years ago this wild artistic adventure that has really only just begun.
P.S. We'll probably always be able to just run
Uberust on our own server and just remove the stupid shit. So there's that.
