Rust

Rust drops you onto a hostile island with nothing but a rock and a torch. Everything here wants you dead: the wildlife, the weather, hunger and thirst, the armed factions holding the island's monuments, and above all the other survivors. Developed and published by Facepunch Studios, the team behind Garry's Mod, Rust is a multiplayer survival game built around one question - how far will you go to last another night?

Explore an Island That Fights Back

Every life starts the same way: naked on a beach, too cold or too hot, with a rock in one hand. From there it is a scramble for wood, stone, metal ore and cloth, a sleeping bag to respawn at, and a scrap of shelter before nightfall. The island is procedurally generated, so each world has its own layout of forests, snowfields, deserts and the new Jungle biome, along with rivers, caves, train tunnels and advanced underwater areas to discover.

Scattered across it are monuments: abandoned industrial sites, launch facilities and oil rigs guarded by scientists and other factions, stocked with loot worth the risk. Safe zones such as Outpost and Bandit Camp give you a place to trade, while horses, modular cars, bikes, boats, helicopters, hot air balloons and trains carry you across the map. The 2026 update pushes the frontier out even further with modular boats, the deep sea, tropical islands and floating cities.

Build, Research and Defend

Whatever you gather is only yours for as long as you can protect it. Building is where Rust turns from a scavenger hunt into a long game of planning, engineering and paranoia.

Base Building Lay foundations, walls, doors and roofs, then upgrade from twig and wood to stone, sheet metal and armored construction. A Tool Cupboard claims building privilege over your territory, and every layout decision, from airlocks to honeycombing, decides how expensive your base is to break into. Research and Blueprints Recover scrap and components from the world, then work through the tech tree at your workbench to learn blueprints for tools, armor, weapons and deployables. Progress compounds quickly, taking you from bows and spears to firearms and explosives, one hard-won unlock at a time. Electricity, Farming and Automation Power lights, doors, alarms and defenses with electrical circuits, cultivate crops to keep your group fed, and automate the flow of resources through your base. These systems reward players who like to tinker, and they turn a simple shelter into a working compound.

Allies, Rivals and Raids

There are no rules in Rust but the ones players make for themselves. Team up with friends to build a shared settlement, form alliances with your neighbors, trade with other survivors, or turn raider and take what someone else spent hours earning. Rust is multiplayer only, with no single-player or offline mode, so every figure on the horizon is another real player whose intentions you have to read.

That uncertainty is what makes the game memorable. Proximity voice chat means a tense standoff can end in a trade, a truce, a betrayal or a firefight, and the island has room for quieter moments too, with musical instruments you can play for anyone within earshot.

Servers, Wipes and a Game That Keeps Changing

• Official and community servers: Join Facepunch's official servers or choose from community servers running Vanilla or Modded rule sets, from group limits and boosted gather rates to custom maps built with the community map editor.
• Host your own: Run a private server for your group with server-side modding support, and shape it around the way you want to play, whether that means a slower-paced building server or a relentless, raid-focused ruleset.
• Wipes: Servers periodically reset the map and everything built on it, so no advantage lasts forever. On the first Thursday of each month the Force Wipe arrives with the monthly update and resets blueprints too, putting every player back on the same starting line.
• Monthly updates: A guaranteed content patch every month brings balance changes, AI and graphics improvements, new monuments, weapons, vehicles and seasonal events. Recent additions include the Primitive game mode with siege weapons and vehicles, and a major graphics and environment overhaul.

If you have ever wanted a survival game where the stories come from real people rather than scripts, Rust is the one to try. Pick up a rock, find some friends or trust no one, and see how long you can hold on to what you build.