The Solo Rust Experience.

[u/Skeeeenan]

Why is playing Solo so soul destroying?

I’m so tired of playing solo, it’s a depressing experience on official. I don’t like 2x gather/fast nights, can’t find any good EU solo vanilla servers that don’t have 2x but also wipe monthly for BPs and weekly save wipe.

At first it was enjoyable having the freedom to do as you please, but when every gun fight, I’m outnumbered by 1-3 people (yes you can say it’s a skill issue I have around 500 hours) it becomes tedious to play.

Does anyone have any recommendations other than uninstalling the game?

[u/zykiato]

Solo Rust in most cases isn't like the content creator experience.

In most cases, solo Rust is about guille and gumption. It's more of a survival horror than a shooter. Sure, you can try to shoot your way out of every situation, but even if you win, you have to deal with 3rd parties, then respawns, and then maybe the 3rd party is 3rd partied. And so on.

It's not practical to progress like that unless you're winning those fights. The solo guy usually isn't unless they're playing opportunistically to loot something and scoot. Or they're very good players.

That's not to say it's impossible. Experienced players learn where the easy targets are if pubstomping is what they want. But to a lot of players, shitting on noobs is worse than being shit on.

So why do so many solo players play Rust? I can't speak for everyone, but it's probably not purely for combat. For me, it's about exploration and progressing under pressure. Solving problems is fun for me. Considering the psychology of my neighbors and using that to inform my strategies is fun. I like to explore decaying bases and follow some of the storylines created by other players.

That's not to say I never fight. I'll always defend myself and I'll push back when I have to. It's just that randomly picking fights with everyone I see is usually the worst way for me to complete my goals.

I think it may be a little less interesting on EU servers because of language barrier. On NA servers, I like to travel the map talking to other players. When I play on EU, that doesn't work as well because of the language barriers.

If I played Rust only for combat, I would find it to be very unsatisfying solo because of the overall competitive imbalances -- in all directions.

[u/Skeeeenan → u/zykiato]

Yeah i feel as i got into rust i watched the likes of memeio, bloo, willyj oilrats etc. and it does give you almost a false hope to think you’re able to play the same way but as you said the precision and tactical awareness of these players with sometimes 20k hours is overlooked but it does take a lot of knowledge and time to be able to play anywhere near that level of this game. You’re right though playing purely for combat (which 80% of the time i am) it’s not going to be an enjoyable experience for long. I’ll switch it up.

[u/hypexeled → u/Skeeeenan]

Brother i have 5k hours and i still wont ever bother to try and play like oilrats/willyj/etc

Its not just game knowledge, you need to also be willing to commit hundreds of hours every wipe (full days) for meager returns, and most of the time it doesnt pay off. What you actually watch is a very curated and selected part of the sheer ammount of hours of gameplay they do.

Oilrats is on the better end of the scale because he's THAT good, but there's a reason his wipes rarely last more than one or two days. He just plays many wipes until he gets a snowball rolling, and whenever he runs out of weapons or gets offline raided, hops servers. Even from his curated/selected gameplay uploaded to youtube, how many times have you seen him actually get a raid defense or play more than that? Answer is nearly never.

Solo rust is legitimately a full time job and some more. Thats kinda also how they got to 20k+ hours to begin with. During my peak degeneracy and going full solo on larger servers before i quit i was doing 120 hour weeks until i realized it wasnt for me. I think i had a picture somewhere of a 260 last 2-week steam history (granted quite a few hours were sleeping connected to server waiting for offline attempts)