Written by Andy Chalk

Welcome to a new day in Rust! Life is hard in the multiplayer survival game (read our alpha review to find out why it's worth playing), but with the right knowledge, you can at least make it through a day.

Which brings us to our first tip: Check the time. If sundown is approaching, consider quitting for 20 minutes and coming back at dawn. It's cheesy, but spending a night in the open without food or shelter puts you at a real disadvantage.

Your first steps

Once you're ready to begin, equip the rock in your inventory, then find a pile of logs and hit it to "harvest" wood. Trees will do as well, but they provide far less wood for the same amount of work. Keep your eyes open for free-standing boulders and do the same to them to gather stones, metal ore, and sulfur ore. Work quickly, and when you have ten wood and five stones, press "Tab" to enter the inventory, pull down the crafting menu and make a stone hatchet. Bye bye, rock!

While you continue collecting wood and stones with the hatchet, keep your eyes open for animals. There are two you can kill at this stage: boars, which you can outrun, or wolves, which you won't have to. Wolves will mess you up badly, but you can usually take one down without dying by walking backwards and hitting it with the hatchet while it attacks; even so, do yourself a favor and try to find a boar.

Be careful while you're stalking your prey, because unlike the real world, the animals in Rust get along fabulously and where there's boars and deer, wolves and bears often aren't very far away. If you don't get at least five cloth from your first kill, find another animal and do it again.

It's probably best to avoid other people during this delicate time. Some of your fellow players may be very helpful but there are a lot of griefers out there too, and while it's easy enough to get away from a guy with a rock, dodging a spray of bullets is another matter entirely. Pay attention to the conversation to get a feel for how things are going; if you see a lot of players complaining about being killed (and they will most definitely complain) you should probably keep a low profile.

You can also simplify your life by turning off the grass with the F1 console command "grass.on false," entered without quotes. The denuded landscape isn't as pretty, but it's a lot easier to see things on the ground.

On the next page, craft shelter, armor, and weapons...