Here would be additional screenshots from the Government Sep 2021 wipe.

One of the few screenshots of the wipe - a spare Gov base on 5th Sept:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3323335192

Main index
- Groups index
-- The Government
--- Government index
---- Government wipe history
----- Government Sep 2021 wipe

This portrait painting appeared in Blockhouse 60 on 17th December 2024. I assume it was painted by DuffyBox; I named it Son of Sponge.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3387321138

The painting appears to be the character Spongebob Squarepants, with his face obscured by a pineapple. I assume that it had been inspired by my recent painting The Son of Man:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3382891774

My painting of The Last Supper disappeared from the Classical Art Gallery (I assume the painting was destroyed) so I replaced it with Son of Sponge.

Main index
- Artworks
-- Paintings in Rust

A YouTube video titled THE BIGGEST RAID IN RUST HISTORY | 3000+ ROCKETS | RUSTORIA EU LONG | 80vs30+ was published on 18th July 2022, which was the source of information for this article.

The factions involved were noted as: ice, MLP, CC, and VVS against WWW and SUSU. A group named HOBO were also involved, which were the attackers.

Atleast 52 attackers gathered in a War Room, wearing the same colourful cosmetics. Atleast 10 RHIBs were used to sail to a beach, where atleast 36 raiders landed. A massive sheet metal clan base located on an inlet was the raid target, which featured a tall sheet metal wall protected by a wooden external wall.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3385809151

The raiders fired atleast 95 rockets at it - it was hard to count the number of rockets fired due to the edits and short length of the video. The initial action involved the raiders firing rockets from a cliff in daylight, using external walls as cover, before moving closer when night fell.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3385809813

It's not clear how many defenders were active, but the raiders were shown to be under fire, with some of them having been killed. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the deaths had been due to rocket accidents. The base was hit by atleast one MLRS strike; a comment noted that there were "repeated MLRS".

Were the number of players involved accurate? While only 52 players were onscreen at a time, the list of Discord users suggests that the number in the title (80) could be accurate, because only around 33 Discord users are shown in the voice channel which was cut off, with the list reaching as far as C in the alphabet.

Were the number of rockets fired accurate? About a quarter of the main wall was gone, and the foundation of the core was gone. Hundreds of rockets must have been fired. It seems possible that thousands of rockets were fired, though the 80 raiders would have needed to fire an average of atleast 37 rockets each if the number of 3,000 was correct.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3385810278

A similar raid was conducted by the Government 3 months later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36XKzjk11-E

Main index
- Battles

This agreement between The Government, Co-op, and Shelly's Group was a non-aggression pact. The groups were playing on Rustopia US Large in October 2022, and had crossed paths before (atleast by August 2022).

The Government village:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2876885987

Shelly's clan base:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3332730045

The Co-op village two months earlier:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3329819851

The Government President explained the situation in a private Government Discord channel on 20th October 2022, noting that the Government and Shelly's Group shared a mutual alliance with Co-op, and that the three groups would not raid eachother, although there was no restriction on getting into firefights while roaming - even if groups wanted an agreement to restrict firefights with eachother, it may have been impractical trying to keep track of each other's members.

It sounded like the Co-op were a popular group, as they approached the game with an interesting level of creativity. It's not clear how involved they were with negotiations, but they were certainly an important part of the agreement. In contrast, relations between the Government and Shelly were cold, as Shelly was banned from the Government Discord server on 20th October, and there had been fighting between the two groups.

The pact was documented as lasting no more than 24 hours, as on 22nd October Shelly's Group conducted a "massive offline raid" against Co-op, which provoked The Government to launch a massive raid against Shelly's Group on 23rd October.

Main index
- Groups index
-- The Government
--- Government index
---- Government wipe history
----- Government Oct 2022 wipe

I believe that Hail was the leader of Co-op (sometimes called The CO-OP), which was a group that made creative bases, but was also competitive. Their culture was said to involve farm bases. They had a Discord server.

A building in what I assume was a Co-op village in August 2022:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3329819851

They had mixed relations with The Government in 2022, having made a treaty in August, then made an alliance in October, before appearing to break ties in June 2023.

This group could be researched further; this article is partially a stub.

Main index
- Groups index

Their Discord was linked from their website, and had history dating back to atleast March 2017, with a peak of atleast 1,131 members.

The Ima Poob YouTube account linked to their website and had uploads of The Pipe n' Poob Tavern dating back to 23rd May 2018. The about section explained:

The Pipe n' Poob Tavern channel aims to capture the unique player interactions that occur in Rust while roleplaying at zerg proportions.

This channel was ultimately created to document an attempt at a roleplayers meta. Rust can be as much a game of diplomacy as shooting. The vending machines, apartment / hotel, and casino are designed to be more productive than boring towers surrounding a locked down compound. While we have reached zerg proportions, I started with this idea as a duo, when wooden shop fronts were released, and have carried it forward with amazing results. The allies I've made from returning gear after fights, or getting people up and teaching them the game has resulted in a booming shop/role player town/zerg compound. People are worth much more as allies than defeated enemies. All of the Pipe n' Poob Tavern's successes up to this point are rooted in this idea.

The iteration of the Tavern in March 2023 was documented in a Rust News article.

The Tavern in March 2023:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2947197415

• https://web.archive.org/web/20241216165947/https://www.youtube.com/@ImaPoob/videos
  
• https://web.archive.org/web/20240825212901/https://www.pipenpoob.com/

Main index
- Groups index

In August 2023, an art gallery was built, which was raided, with the paintings being stolen. At the end of the wipe, the raider returned the paintings that he still owned, and explained that the others had been stolen a second time when his own base was raided.

I wondered if paintings slowly travelled across the map, being moved from one base to another in successive raids, perhaps changing hands several times before a wipe ended. Wanting to test this theory in November 2023, I painted 50 small wooden signs with gnome characters and placed each one in a locked wooden base.

Each gnome had a coloured hat, with each colour indicating a certain area of the map - a red hat indicated that the gnome was originally placed in a base in the north-west area of the map, so if a red-hatted gnome ended up in the south-east then I'd know that it must have been looted by raiders and had been taken on a long journey. I asked around during the wipe if anyone had seen the gnome paintings.

Unfortunately, no evidence was found that any of the 50 gnomes had moved at all. I guess that players either weren't interested in them, or didn't admit to having stolen them.

Main index
- Artworks

I have fond memories of the initial Rust gameplay, but was concerned as updates drove the conflict by motivating the players to build near each other, contesting the resource-rich landmarks that contained the components now needed for firearms. Progression was present in Stranded, but Rust was now an arms race, which in a dark period had led to players frequently losing interest in a wipe after only 24 hours – destroying the sense of progression.

The popularity of Stranded fell off in 2014 as Rust was the new big thing, spawning a wave of survival FPS games over the following years, but that old concept of creative drama seen in roleplay was now replaced in the genre with genuine arguments and competitiveness to the point of motivating some to turn to cheats. It seemed whoever got the best guns by the end of the day (or just used cheats) dictated the culture.

Some roleplay items were sprinkled into Rust, such as painting boards and instruments, but these creative outlets felt like little more than light seasoning on the meat of violence. Out of 300 bases I mapped in a recent wipe, marking them on the island map with red dots (looking like an outbreak of measles) only one was an art gallery.

A slice of the map. Red squares were active bases. Grey were inactive. Yellow was the gallery:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3384807583

I felt like I had watched all these games and game modes evolve into vicious creatures, as a deviation from the deathmatching in Quake led to some roleplay in Half-Life mods, but this discipline was lost – returning the scene almost completely to deathmatching. Like wolves bred to be dogs, they evolved to return to their roots as wolves.

It would have been generous to call even the one roleplay structure I came across a "gallery" though, as it was no more than a wall with a few lines of colour across it. There was clearly room for more colour in the grey background of the stone bases dotting the landscape. But the deathmatching harming the roleplay was now a recurring theme, and the first gallery I built was burned down with the loss of every painting. Building a gallery felt like a waste of time when conflict was clearly the norm.

My first art gallery in flames, as a well-armed player started burning it down:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3361568966

There can still be more to the killing though. After 1,000 matches of Counter-Strike, I couldn’t say I remember any particular one, but I could chat for hours about the roleplay storylines from Gmod. Some of them weren’t even that playful or dramatised, but even the slightest roleplay can give meaning to otherwise routine gameplay, and that gameplay often did revolve around conflict. The key thing was some spark of dramatic context that we’d play into.

As much as I appreciate the creative initiative behind RP, I wouldn’t want to force it onto the scene though. The state of reddit (the subreddits of TF2, Gmod, and Rust) has been awful for the forced attempts at changing culture. I was permanently banned from /r/tf2 five years ago for posting TF2 memes despite them having the #1 popular spot. I was permbanned from /r/gmod eight years ago for posting a Gmod gameplay video.

The reddit mods could have just removed off-topic posts, and let the on-topic ones get sorted by the karma system. There was no need for them to interfere, and it was certainly pointless for them to do so because to this day the TF2 subreddit is still mostly TF2 memes, and the Gmod subreddit is still mostly Gmod videos. Attempting to force changes in culture was clearly a mistake. I wrote 500 articles about Gmod, but I haven’t been able to post any of them to the Gmod subreddit due to the pointless banning.

Even on /r/playrust my Rust memes would get removed despite them being upvoted, and I then got indefinitely banned from the subreddit without being given a reason. Some users of the subreddit had been unfriendly to roleplayers, telling ones that criticised how the game updates lent towards competitive deathmatching that they should stop complaining and just leave.

The Government is a safe-haven where an art gallery can exist with a level of dignity to it – free to be built, and protected (as all citizens of the Government find their buildings protected). There have been calls to shutter the doors of the current gallery, over concerns that it is not easily defensible, but even Winston Churchill may have agreed with it remaining open.

While the United Kingdom was under threat of bombing and invasion during the second world war, Churchill was against the idea of sending the National Gallery paintings to the safety of Canada. Even before the war, he had said: "The arts are essential to any complete national life. The State owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them."

Two gallery paintings had been destroyed, I personally suspect by enemy action. This probably happened during a battle when two bandits ran inside and fired from the roof and out of a window, before being killed by Government soldiers storming the building only minutes later. During the fighting, a fire had been set near the entrance, and the painting nearest the door (a recreation of the background of Edvard Munch’s piece The Scream was destroyed) has since been replaced by an artwork depicting flames.

Battle of the Government gallery building, October 10th 2022:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2876408119

Out of the cutting of many trees and the blowing up of many bandit hideouts, the drama of the gallery paintings is a memorable storyline for me – one that I’d share with other people. Even through the loss of paintings, something is gained – a storyline worth telling. The destruction of some art was all that these uncultured bandits were capable of. Roleplay is rare in the scene compared to the days of Stranded all those years ago, which I think gives all the more reasoning to it being protected in its endangered state.

Access to the gallery roof was closed, and the windows were reinforced to negate any advantage to bandits trying to occupy it. The (now useless) water-catcher on the roof has been removed after a call was made to reduce the number of unnecessary assets in the area. The building was made for the people, and it’s future is in their hands. To me it represented the openness of the game concept – something that could have been swapped for any other creative structure.

It could have been a coliseum for all sorts of staged battles, or a supermarket full of convenient vending machines, or an apartment building that offers individual rooms for new members. The merit of such a building didn’t need to be based on utility alone, but could be engaged with just for the sake of fun.

Government Oct 2022 wipe

http://web.archive.org/web/20221031050151/https://rustne.ws/2022/10/16/fighting-for-culture/

Main index
- Rust News
-- Rust News articles

This was originally a Rust News article, posted 16th October 2022, and has been updated.

---

"The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see." – Winston Churchill.

Some research into the cultural history of the scene (and experiencing some of it) shone a light on a particular storyline. Valve produced three important programs that were conducive to a mixture of roleplay and deathmatching. The first was Half-Life (in 1998), no doubt influenced by late 60’s and early 70’s science-fiction shows and films. Half-Life dramatically placed scientists right at the spark of of an apocalypse, and the storytelling was as much of a hit as the game engine it ran on.

People with passion (but not necessarily money) modified Half-Life to create their own worlds. The city roleplay mixed with combat in The Specialists mod (although not all servers for it had RP) was one of those institutions, and the mechanics were later used in DarkRP. A hugely popular mod (Counter-Strike) motivated the creation of Valve’s second big program (Steam) which automatically distributed updates for Counter-Strike, and helped Valve publish their own products digitally rather than rely on Sierra’s method of shipping physical media (diskettes and disks).

A stand-off about to turn violent in The Specialists:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3384810616

Steam eventually (when the friends list finally worked) helped like-minded gamers to connect with each other, and the platform hosted the launch of Valve’s 3rd big hit. Half-Life 2 (HL2) expanded the sci-fi story in 2004, now fleshing out the facets of authoritarianism, and opened up the sandbox potential of a physics-rich game engine, although the map size was still limited. A couple of particular modifications helped propel roleplay to the attention of millions of people.

A modder named JB created a sandbox mod of HL2 (appropriately named JB Mod) but a rival modder (Garry) created (and importantly continued to develop the sandbox concept) called Garry's Mod (Gmod), and reluctantly sold it as a standalone game in 2006. Another noteworthy HL2 modification in this story was Zombie Master, and while it had a humble-sized player base, the mechanics of a “Serial Killer” server on it was turned into a formal Gmod game mode by one of Zombie Master’s developers, and was named Trouble in Terrorist Town (TTT).

TTT grew in popularity after winning the Fretta (minigame) Contest, but it was clearly more than just a minigame. It’s gameplay became one of the early content bandwagons when YouTube monetisation pushed editors to spam videos of any remotely popular subject, all aiming to get to the top of search results and recommended lists. The algorithm seemed to push for quantity (all the videos that ran ads) rather than quality of editing, and a flood of gamers seeing all these TTT videos now headed to Gmod.

The Gmod scene was rich in roleplay, as DarkRP (inspired by The Specialists) had a system parallel to what was later seen in rust, where players purchased doors to own a house (a base) which they operated out of to gain money (scrap) in order to purchase (craft) better weaponry. It was highly social, with gun dealers shipping in weapons and selling them individually, and likewise chefs did the same with food in response to the hunger mechanic.

The end of a storyline. A mayor is assassinated on Cidermod, almost exactly the same as DarkRP:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3384809191

DarkRP introduced players to a more serious style of roleplay in another gamemode that didn’t revolve around deathmatching, instead focusing on the readily available authoritarian sci-fi themes (and content) in Half-Life 2 (HL2RP). The impact of TTT’s popularisation on Gmod was an influx (leading to 20 million game copies sold) of deathmatchers to the scene, hopping from server to server and trampling the delicate culture that had developed.

Deathmatching can harm roleplay, as it’s difficult for a player to roleplay if they’ve been shot dead. This was certainly the case in WW3RP where (once serious) soldier characters now jumped around the map and ran straight to the enemy base looking for a fight, and ignoring the roleplay context. The authoritarian police in HL2RP turned from arresting and interrogating citizens to just shooting them.

Bodies lay strewn around the entrance to a train station in HL2RP in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting. The rarity of such shootings gave them a dramatic impact:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3384808336

There was a Gmod community named FearlessRP that had a rule on their server forcing characters to roleplay fear (ironically the opposite of their community name). Things were out of balance. Surely you’d want the freedom to roleplay as a brave character, like Winston Churchill that put himself in harms way on so many occasions that reading his life story might leave you wondering how he wasn’t killed during the numerous wars he fought in.

In the Stranded gamemode you couldn’t even shoot someone trying to get into your base, so there was clearly some middle ground between these rules preventing any deathmatching, and the raw deathmatching itself that was largely beating the roleplay out of the game. Looking at some of the modern DarkRP servers and CS:GO in later years, the casual social aspect has given way to bloodthirsty deathmatching and gambling.

Gmod Stranded was the crossroad to this story. It was a peaceful place to mine ore, cut trees, produce better tools, build a base, and craft weaponry and gunpowder to defend it. Although killing was so strictly forbidden on the biZ server that you couldn’t really do it without breaking the rules. Killing "low levels is highly frowned upon" and while "tribes" could fight each other, they weren’t allowed to "declare war for no reason."

A Gmod Stranded player designed their base to look like Helms Deep:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3384809909

To generate some action, someone should be allowed to start the conflict. Violence did become commonplace, but it opened the floodgate which almost entirely washed away the mutual interactions in roleplay, resulting in all the roleplay mechanics (like buying and selling items) in DarkRP to be automated by NPC shops. The player-made shops furnished with props were gone, and the automatic casinos and NPCs seemed to take their place. The creative and social aspects to Gmod were evaporating, with the exception of only a few serious RP and build servers.

The critical point of Stranded’s culture later turning adversarial was when Garry reportedly visited that biZ server and was repeatedly murdered. The murderers were punished, but it was too late. I think Garry got the wrong idea, and used Facepunch Studios to recreate this bloodthirsty vision of Stranded but with a larger map, which became known as Rust Legacy. Garry did want to see more "cooperation" and for players to "treat each other friendlier" but a sense of trust in a culture can be a fragile thing. He cited DayZ as the inspiration to Rust, but the similarities with the crafting system in Stranded were close.

Continued below

A form of Rust art involves arranging building walls (often on a build server) and then taking a screenshot of them.

16th Jun 2018:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1413154398

2nd Apr 2018:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1350083375

11th Jan 2018:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=522100394

29th Jan 2017:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=852256832

26th Mar 2016:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=653446497

4th Nov 2014:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=336908705

9th Sep 2014:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=311987673

7th Jun 2014:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=268208004

10th Jan 2014:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=214968704

Foundation art

Main index
- Artworks