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

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"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

The Government played on the Rustafied US Long III server for their November 2023 wipe, which started on 2nd November.

By 3rd November, a Government member had raided one of their own bases, which had been marked with a painting of the Government logo.

A similar Gnome hut after being raided:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3074147304

The raider didn't seem to think that the base was owned by an actual Government member, and wanted control of local bases. The base had been in (or atleast near) the Government village.

Inside the base was a painting of a Gnome which was "destroyed in the fire."

An example of one of the Gnomes from that wipe:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3070388127

The raider then upgraded the building to stone after the raid, and moved the Government logo to another base.

The original owner returned to the building, and was teamkilled. The Government even looted the body, and didn't give the stuff back. Eventually the original owner was given control of the base again, but had practically been prim-locked by teammates, and was not given back the painting.

The original owner then tried to repaint the Government logo on 4th November, but was teamkilled again - the Government were not doing jump-checks. The raider didn't admit that they'd stolen the original logo until 14th November, but still didn't give it back. There were no ban court cases regarding the incidents.

This series of incidents had subtle impacts on the culture of the Government - it contributed (if only to a small degree) to further theft and civil conflict, and undermined respect for the ban court system (which clearly lacked consistency at the time). The raid was highlighted repeatedly over the following months.

It wasn't documented exactly which Gnome was killed in the raid, though it was mentioned to be red-hatted. No. 10 was replaced at some point, which had originally been a red-hatter, so perhaps the original No. 10 was the victim.

I think the later Gnomes were documented by grief-protection screenshots as a result of the raid.

The series of Gnome paintings had been placed low, as if they stood on the ground. Later Gnomes were placed above the TC, and the TC itself was kept opposite the door, so any repeated flame raids in future huts were hopefully less likely to harm the Gnome.

Government mistaken raid
Government theft

Main index
- Groups index
-- The Government
--- Government index
---- Government wipe history
----- Government Nov 2023 wipe

For the sake of mischief testing a theory, the Gnome Invasion started on 2nd November 2023 on the Rustafied US Long III server. The series included atleast 50 paintings of Gnomes, each housed in their own wooden building, which were found across the map in wooded areas. The colour of each Gnome's hat indicated the area it first appeared.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3383452207
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3383489546

Gnome distribution:

A map from that wipe:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3378318425

The only exception to the hat colour scheme was the RuneScape Gnome, which had a green hat but was counted as living alongside the red-hatters in the north-west. Some areas were more suitable than others, so there was a bias (particularly to the north-west). The far north was cold and violent, with few trees. The central forests offered enough wood but were a busy area. The south-west was mostly barren.

Each Gnome shed was marked with a flag painting, although the flag for no. 40 was an earlier one re-used. One of the early sheds had it's flag destroyed, which was replaced.

The early flags were Government logos, but following the cultural divergence, this changed to a mixture of the Rust News brand, the Blockhouse Serial Ident, and (primarily) the Rust Roleplay Village Shield.

Each hut having a Gnome and a flag meant that each hut had 2 paintings, so 50 huts amounted to 100 paintings. The 100th painting was finished on 7th November 2023.

Each Gnome shed was a wooden 1x1 with a locked wooden box, locked tool cupboard, and locked wooden door. They were given atleast a few days of upkeep (usually a week, sometimes 10 days or more). Stone hatchets were often used to gather the wood. A shed had an upkeep cost of 134 wood per 24 hours.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3384173892

The shed for no. 40 was re-used, and the original shed planned for no. 42 mysteriously disappeared before the tool cupboard was complete, so I wonder if a player sneakily demolished it with a hammer. Another had been partially blocked by a player before the tool cupboard was built.

One shed ended up with a cacti in one of the walls, which couldn't be hit, but would still hurt you if you moved around near the wall. It was pretty annoying trying to build the sheds when animals could see you in the dark and would always attack you, and could attack you through objects like trees.

Not all huts were checked to see if anything happened to them, but some interactions were noticed and documented.

A Government member accidentally destroyed a red-hatter with fire a few hours after it appeared. As a result, the Gnomes following the incident sat ontop of the tool cupboards opposite the door to be safe from flames. Gnome Hut 40 was raided hard.

Huts 3, 23, 24, and 25 were raided (softly) with the Gnomes being left in them to decay (the tool cupboards were destroyed, but the paintings survived the raid itself). The Gnomes of some raided huts were moved into other buildings, such as Blockhouse 56 ending up with two Gnomes. One shed was taken over, and two were griefed. I speculate that some of the huts may have been raided by an industrious group that made a massive furnace base featuring 36 vending machines.

The paintings were finished on 7th Nov. On 13th and 18th Nov I asked in server chat if anyone had any Gnome paintings, but nobody answered. I asked the Government the same question, and on 14th Nov I was aware that a Gov member had taken a Gov flag several days earlier - we were teammates, so (ironically) it had been a case of theft - they knew I had painted the one they took but they still kept it. On 21st Nov I asked in server chat again if anyone had captured a Gnome painting, but again got no answer, and bizarrely was hit by an MLRS strike. I asked again on 29th November and 1st December but got no reply. The wipe would have ended on 7th December 2023.

About 3% of interactions were friendly:

• I was attacked 34 times (excluding times I was attacked by teammates)
  
• I was doorcamped 4 times
  
• 2 players pretended to be friendly but weren't
  
• 2 huts were griefed
  
• I had 1 friendly interaction

The player interactions speak to the evaporation of the creative/social aspect of the game following the Legacy era. Nobody seemed interested in the paintings. It would have taken a second for a player with a hammer to take a painting after the tool cupboard was destroyed, but nobody seemed to bother - the interest is only in items and resources. Exactly the same thing had happened in serious roleplay servers in Garry's Mod, where roleplay evaporated, so all you had left were players interested in collecting guns. The Gnomes weren't even a roleplay thing - they were just a bit of creative fun.

Government Nov 2023 wipe

Main index
- Artworks
-- Paintings in Rust

As paintings in Rust are commonly stolen or destroyed, painters sometimes take a screenshot of their painting as soon as it's finished, often in a secure location. Such screenshots (perhaps taken inside a clan base) might not as pretty as a ones taken in a public art gallery.

Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies (painting by Hudson633) screenshotted immediately after being painted in a base, before it was later moved to an art gallery:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3382892175

For various reasons (such as the painting being destroyed) these grief-protection screenshots end up being the only clear documentation of the painting.

Griefing

Main index
- Artworks

This painting was done by Hudson633 in December 2024. It was made for the Classical Art Gallery.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3382890176

It was painted on a Portrait Photo Frame, based on Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh's 1888 painting Sunflowers[en.wikipedia.org].

The threat of destruction and theft had limited the sense of motivation to add detail to the painting. The sideways sunflowers were omitted, as I think it would have taken time to make them look natural, rather than look like badly painted circles.

Paintings in Rust

Main index
- Bases
-- Base types
--- Art gallery
---- Classical Art Gallery

This painting was done by Hudson633 in December 2024. It was made for the Classical Art Gallery.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3382887316
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3382422481

It was painted on a Medium Wooden Sign, and was based on Spanish painter Salvador Dalí's 1931 painting The Persistence of Memory[en.wikipedia.org].

The threat of destruction and theft had limited the sense of motivation to add detail to the painting - why go the trouble of making a faithful recreation of the painting if someone was just going to destroy it? The original featured multiple clocks, while this recreation only has one clock, but hopefully kept the surreal aspect (and strange lighting).

Paintings in Rust

Main index
- Bases
-- Base types
--- Art gallery
---- Classical Art Gallery

This painting was done by Hudson633 in December 2024. It was made for the Classical Art Gallery.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3382888035
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3382422543

It was painted on a Huge Wooden Sign. and was based on Italian painter Leonardo da Vinci's 1498 painting of The Last Supper[en.wikipedia.org]. As a huge painting, it was one of two main features in the Classical Gallery.

Assuming that Jesus was seated in the middle - the Twelve Apostles weren't painted. The lack of fine detail in a Huge Wooden Sign would have made it awkward to position them all and give them correct proportions. The threat of destruction and theft limited a sense of motivation to add detail to the painting.

Despite it being incomplete, one of the first visitors to the gallery clapped after seeing it, but then died just after clapping. The lack of Apostles unintentionally gives a lonely feeling to Jesus sitting at a large table. Coincidentally, the article for this painting was the 666th article in the Rust archive.

By 15th Dec the painting was missing from the gallery. I think it must have been destroyed. It was the only painting that was missing.

Paintings in Rust

Main index
- Bases
-- Base types
--- Art gallery
---- Classical Art Gallery

This painting was done by Hudson633 in December 2024. It was made for the Classical Art Gallery.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3381864950

It was painted on a Portrait Photo Frame, and was based on Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's 1893 painting The Scream[en.wikipedia.org].

Paintings in Rust

Main index
- Bases
-- Base types
--- Art gallery
---- Classical Art Gallery

This painting was done by Hudson633 in December 2024. It was made for the Classical Art Gallery.

A safety screenshot of the painting in Blockhouse 60:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3382892175

The painting after it was moved to the gallery:
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3383421975

It was painted on a Medium Wooden Sign inside Blockhouse 60 before being moved into the gallery. The subject was based on French painter Claude Monet's 1899 paintings of a bridge over a pond of water lilies[en.wikipedia.org].

Paintings in Rust

Main index
- Bases
-- Base types
--- Art gallery
---- Classical Art Gallery