Labor of Love Award Final Voting

Thanks to everyone that nominated Rust for the Labor of Love award. We have now reached the final stage of voting so we need your votes once again!

You can do so now by clicking the vote button above and to show our appreciation if Rust wins the Labor of Love Steam award, we'll give you (the community) control on designing a new deployable item in the game!

If you haven't already voted we'd like to show you in some words, pictures and videos why Rust is a Labor of Love for us!

Rust came to life because Helk and Garry felt there was something missing in the games they were playing and set about making a game they could play how they wanted to play it, Rust was started in Unity Engine 4 and was playable in a web browser and keys were sold in a dutch auction and as the player base grew the game was made into a standalone version and released on Steam in early access on 11th December 2013.

Work continued at pace, new features being added like the research bench, a new water system along with a new sky system, bugs being squashed, some quite serious.

It was decided we needed a better way of telling guys what we were doing in the background so weekly updates were started and with that came the Friday blog in March 2014.

Not long after this, we realised Rust was getting too big for Unity 4 and we were getting seriously limited on how much we could grow which would impact on how you could play and enjoy the game, it was decided we would switch to Unity 5 and while you continued to enjoy playing the game we would completely rebuild the game from scratch. It was a huge decision and task but made Rust what it is today.

In July 2014 we started the Community Blog which would showcase what our players and creators were doing in Rust from builds and raids to erm ... rituals to Garry.

By the end of 2014 the groundwork for the Rust reboot was set, instead of the same map on every server, the island could be generated procedurally giving every server it's own identity.

Custom weapons were designed and modelled to give more of a hand crafted feel

New tools were created to help you get the resources you need, including the iconic rock and the hatchet. Useful for farming the animals that were added for food and more resources.

Having resources meant you were going to need a nice base to keep them in and the building system came to life, not only could you create the design you wanted with new building pieces you could now upgrade it to different materials to give your base more strength. This progressed from late 2014 into early 2015 as a system you might recognise today and you could also use a Tool Cupboard to give ownership to your base!

2015 continued to build up on the groundwork set and the islands got more procedural features like roads and power lines between the monuments.

Everyone had the same male character so It was decided we should add more varieties and also a female character which could all be randomly assigned to players, we also gave them armour for protection from each other.

By the end of the year