If you get hit, shot, bit, fall too far, or anything else that hurts, your health goes down. Health, just like in every game with a health meter, is how close you are to death. The three bars you see on the bottom right of your screen at all times are health, calories, and rads. Thankfully, most of the stats you need to worry about are staples of the genre and analogs you can easily equate to real life. To do that, you need to understand how to stay alive. The key word in a survival game is, well, survival.

Smaller community servers also have a reputation for being relatively hacker-free, or at least have admins who will actively ban cheaters, which is just another thing you don’t want to deal with early on. These are just the servers where you have the best chance of other players not hunting you down for sport. Bear in mind that even if a server is titled something like “friendly,” players can absolutely still attack and kill you. Normal servers, especially ones with tons of players in them, are often packed with veterans who would love nothing more than to ruin your first time with the game.

That might sound boring, but you will have enough to worry about early on without having to deal with griefers constantly setting back your progress. From that list, aim for one with as few people as possible. As new meat in the world, your best chances of having a smooth experience will be to go to the Community tab of servers and use the search function for terms like “friendly” or “beginner” to at least start off with others around your skill level. The last thing you want to do is pick one at random just to get playing as fast as possible. Before you even take your first step in Rust, you will have a very important decision to make - the server you choose to play on can make your first experiences with the game pleasant or downright miserable.

Rust for beginners console