Where was my mistake and how did I finally realize it?
My problem was that you can use the pipes in the Industrial update to move around all kinds of items including absurd stuff like fireplaces and entire freakin' guard posts, and I felt that was ridiculous and utterly destroyed the game's immersion.
But then I saw the screenshots coming out of it.
And then I played the game again after a half-decade hiatus. And I remembered something.
Rust is a game in which you're running around an island carrying fireplaces and freakin' guard posts IN YOUR POCKETS. And that has never bothered me.
Literally not once in my 500+ hours with the game have I thought "It's pretty fucking dumb to be able to carry 20 freakin' guard posts in my pocket". In fact, it is retarded.
This had never occurred to me, and it had never messed with my immersion.
And the reason for this is both aesthetic and mechanical.
Aesthetically, there is a subtle but unmistakable COMIC tone to the game. Rust doesn't play it 100% straight. Rust is part-comedy. It is incredible how this element lives side by side with the hyper-violent trailers and brilliant edgy music, without any of these aspects feeling out of place or clashing at any given time. Rust's aesthetic is utterly unique and perfectly executed. You can't argue with it from any conceivable angle. It's perfect.
Mechanically, running around a thousand-player free-for-all full-loot PVP map with insane amounts of loot on you turns even the simplest trip into a high-stakes adventure. The chance that any other player you encounter might be carrying a veritable treasure trove on them that can save you hours of work turbocharges the exploration and discovery aspect, and downright forces you to be a homicidal maniac, which feeds the lust of PVP beyond what any other game can manage. No other game has such sky-high stakes when dozens of hours of work can be riding on the outcome of every single shootout. And that can only happen when the inventory works like a bag of holding out of D&D for no apparent reason.
The fact is that the game's industrial feature functions perfectly in-line with the inventory and storage systems (you can put the fireplace and the freakin' guard post inside a box or even backpack). So unless I advocate for these systems to be replaced with a hyper-realistic one from Life is Feudal where every log you cut down must be individually transported via a wheelbarrow and then stacked on top of each other in a fully physicalized log pile and where every pound of dirt you dig up must be placed somewhere thereby forcing you to create a pile of dirt next to every ditch you dig, I have no leg to stand on when criticizing the industrial system.
Do I want Rust's inventory to be fully physicalized?
I've never thought about it until now. I'll say this much: They'd have to redesign half the game to make it work. You'd have to have vehicles from the early-game in order to carry the materials across the map to build anything more than a log cabin. It'd be a vastly different game.
And yes, that is the game I myself would have made.
It would also have territory capture as in LiF, and it'd therefore be a FP4X instead of a survival-builder.
But then... why am I playing Rust today instead of LiF?
Because though ultimately LiF is a better game, it also requires a far greater level of commitment: we're talking ANNUAL wipes instead of weekly or monthly, in order to get anything done. And though LiF's resource physicalization is vastly superior to Rust's, its base-building is vastly inferior: you're placing down ENTIRE KEEPS at a time in LiF. You aren't building them wall by wall. They're all pre-built. So the actual building aspect of Rust more than compensates in terms of complexity for the missing resource physicalization.
Of course a game that physicalized both aspects would be superior. But it doesn't exist, so I can't play it.
I am making it though, and that's exactly how the building in Alex Kierkegaard's Battlegrounds works: fully physicalized everything down to individual rocks and even tree leaves. Moreover it's turn-based and pausable, so you can play for years without needing wipes or to destroy your life. It's gaming heaven.
But it's still cooking, and I feel like playing something right now.
So for now I'll play Rust.
P.S. Once I'd accepted Rust's industrial system, its genius at last hit me: that it finally makes electrification REQUIRED instead of optional, that it pushes electrification back to the midgame instead of the endgame because now it's automation that's the endgame, and that, once you reach that stage, you can focus on war because everything back at base works automatically, and you can spend the endgame blowing up half the island and winning. It's a complete game-changer, and it's so hard that hardly anyone uses it, adding a brand-new layer of difficulty to an already hypertough game for you to master, and blowing the fuck out of lame autism simulators like Satisfactory. But I will discuss all this at length in future essay installments. Now I must play Rust.
