September 18, 2024
I’ve had rust in my steam library for over 3 years before I finally decided to play it. Part of the reason why I put it off was because Rust was fairly resource intensive and I felt my 1050 might not cut it. The other part was the steep learning curve.
It all changed one fine day, bored of playing Overwatch I decided to give Rust another go. As one might expect, I died frequently be it other players, the local wildlife and more often that not, to my own stupidity. A fair amount of those can be attributed to learning to fly the mini copter.
A few sessions in, I gathered enough resourced to consider settling in somewhere. I was concerned about having to expand later on so I went ahead and created a 4x5 that scaled to 3-4 floors high. It was very basic and poorly defended.
Finally, I had enough resources to consider creating a base. Most of my initial bases sucked to put it mildly. They were modelled after conventional houses and not defendable bunkers. I got raided frequently. Over time I slowly started expanding from walls and floors to honeycombs and half walls. From square foundations to triangle foundations. I considered ditching stairs for furnaces, you know the sort of tricks you pick up with experience.
While I might have gained some experience, most of the crafting tree was alien to me, the prospect of researching my way up daunting.
That was when I came across PVE and Build servers. This was a great opportunity to try out different base designs. During one of these sessions I decided to try out electricity. Until then my experience went as far as setting up a wind turbine or a solar panel and hooking it up to a battery. Then I’d just use the out to power whatever I needed.
Since I didn’t know about Branches, Root combiners or Splitters, what I could was very very limited. I didn’t have any concept of active draw, blockers or some of those fancy circuits you’ve no doubt seen. Over many such sessions I began to branch out and try these things. It wasn’t easy but over the course of many many youtube video and reddit threads I could finally make my own circuits!
One such circuit was a three-way power set-up where I had turbines, a large battery and generators. I even ended up buying the industrial lights DLC for this. Turbines power the base and shunt the excess to the batteries. If the main power goes off we start drawing from the batteries. If both fail I force start the generators with the help of a small battery. Once either power is restored I send a signal to force stop so they get switched off.
My understanding of industrial is perhaps the shallowest. I understand storage adapters, conveyors and the nuances of combiners and splitters but I have yet to make anything substantial with them. I can rig up a auto smelter easily enough, auto loot sorter on the other hand will take some planning.
Fluids are pretty straightforward, they’re only really used for farming after all. Fluid pumps were easy to understand as long as you considered elevation. I had a blast rigging up a 3x9 water puller with purifier for my budding tea farm.