Still Thinking About the Future.

The Premise

The land of Rust is torn between a savage arena where naked strangers discover the glory of a haphazardly thrown rock and a crude simulation of the dangers of capitalism. It's a play of domination wherein the pinnacle of success is to be the one gazing out across the twisted bodies of everyone else in your server. All told, it isn't a very friendly place.

I mean, it's not because people that play Rust are innately aggressive, but because people that play Rust are innately looking for entertainment. Entertainment usually comes from overcoming challenges, and the only complicated challenge that currently exists in rust (for the players, not the developers) is the presence of other players. This might stem in part from the lack of any kind of goal or ending or even objective winning scenario, but one thing is certain. Right now, there is a large lack of threats. Today's suggestion will deal with this absence of threats.

The Suggestion

Make players worry about something other than players.

That's sufficiently vague to merit a web of possibilities. Let's start by looking at what's partially built into the current system – Environment, Metabolism, and Animals.

The Environment can hardly be considered an obstacle, nor do I think it would add any kind of positive experience to simply make it more unforgiving. I think that it would be interesting, however, if biomes had natural obstacles built into them – generated pieces of terrain that posed a danger which could be actively avoided.

Metabolism is generally something in games which I don't consider an obstacle – it's simply another feature that makes you stop what you're doing to add a little bit of math (consume the object until your number is high enough to avoid danger). I think that the only way to make consuming food and water an interesting part of play, rather than a chore, is to make you think about what you're consuming in some way. Perhaps you have to eat and drink once or twice daily or you suffer some sort of mild debuff on the following day as a result of hunger/thirst. Maybe foods can be invisibly diseased, poisoned, or otherwise unfit for consumption, and you wouldn't know or notice until the following day when the effects would manifest themselves. I don't even think this would add another threat so much as it would make a sub-par mechanic a little more flavorful.

Animals - okay, there are two that can kill you and one that would actually be dangerous if you couldn't cheese it with foundations. The only issue with their current iterations is that they don't actually pose a threat to the player directly, merely a road bump on the path to the player preparing for the real obstacle – other people. The AI is BS, right? They clip through walls and don't make noise and levitate up mountains. To be honest, I think that it would be better if they were even more BS, the kind of BS that actually makes people worry about them – maybe they clip through your walls, destroy your sleeping bags and change your code locks. Maybe they come in packs of ten, smash through your doors, and leave your base an empty husk.

While saying that sounds silly, the idea is that there should be something out there that bumps harder in the night than your face-mask-wearing, AK-toting neighbors. Something that makes your neighbors, in fact, glad that they have neighbors that can lend a hand. Rust needs an enemy bigger than itself.

TL;DR: Add a challenge that's bigger than other people.