You will usually start dead or asleep. Depending on the situation you left the game.
In Rust your character always stays in the game, even if you log out of the game. This means, if you want to keep your items and stay alive, you will want to create a save place to logout.
This will be our first goal in this little guide. If you are with a group, you can share your home with others, making it easier to get things done and a safe place to stay, but for this guide, I will focus on solo survival.
Hit the Respawn Button or the Wake Up Button and and you will find yourself in the gameworld.
You find your avatar in a random spot in the gameworld. We could argue that the model of your character is ugly or not, but for now thats the only one we get. No female character models either for the time being.
You start in first person view (you can switch to third person and back with F3) If you want to access your inventory, the crafting menu, or equip items on your avatar, you can open the interface with hitting Tab.
As some might consider this highly NSFW I blanked out the character model, as its the same for everyone anyways.
On the bottom right, you see your basic three stats. Food/Hunger, Thirst and your Health.
Food and thirst currently both only fill up with eating food, the health bar will start out with ~54 health and you can raise it either by waiting (slow) eating food or using medical supplies.
If any of the bars goes to 0 you will sooner or later die, with the food and thirst bars slowly depleting your health bar once they are empty. Once your health hits 0, either by getting damaged, by players or animals, radiation, cold, starvation or any of the other perils, you are dead and will have to respawn again without your items from the beginning.
Directly above these bars you will sometimes see temporary status effects. This might be a bleeding status, a wet status or crafting information when you pickup or loose items.
The next window above is the crafting menu. You can click through the tabs and it will show you the different items you can create. Every item you want to craft requires a certain amount of ressources. Once you have aquired these ressources you can simply click the item name of the item you want to make and the item will appear in your inventory. On vanilla servers there is a crafting time associated. On the cohhilition server crafting might be instant, or depending on what will be decided in the coming days, it might still take time to craft items, but will be lower than vanilla crafting times.
In the center you see your inventory. This represents your virtual backpack with all the items you carry with you. For now you can carry a high amount of items and weight does not seem to be important, so it mostly comes down to how many free slots you have, many items like wood and stones stack nearly limitless.
Directly below at the bottom center of the screen is your action- or hotbar. These are the items you can scroll through with the mousewheel or directly equip with the associated number keys. Once something is in your hand, you can then use it, either tools to gather ressources, weapons to fight or structure items to place on the map. You can drag and drop items from your hotbar to your inventory and the other way around. Make sure you always keep items you want to use quickly and a lot like tools and weapons on your hotbar, readily available if you need them.
On the left side below your avatar representation, are some item slots and statistics. Currently clothing items and armor seem to be purely cosmetic and have no effect on either of these stats.
3) Gathering Ressources - I want all the things!
Now that we went over the basics we should get going to make our life more pleasant. Being naked out in the wilderness seems like a bad place to be and we quickly want to build our poor avatar some sort of shelter.
You start out with 2 items. A rock and a torch. The rock is pretty straight forward. You leftclick in order to hit things in front of you. Ressource nodes will be slowly - very slowly - harvested, while enemies will take - who would have guessed - some minimal damage.
Lets just say it is a bad idea to go into fights with either animals or other players with just a rock.
What ressources are there?
There are several main ressources. First of all there are trees, of all shapes and sizes. Most trees, no matter if they are tiny saplings or huge oaks, except for shrubbery which does not count as a ressource node, give the same amount of wood. Snow Biome trees give twice the amount of wood a normal tree yields.
Next there are stones. All stone nodes give a certain amount of 3 ressources. First of all they give Stones, then they give Metal Ore and third they give Sulfur Ore. Depending on what type of stone you harvest each type gives more of one stone ressource than the others. Metal Rocks give more Metal ore, but will still also give Stones and Sulfur Ore in smaller amounts and so on.
Stone Rock Node
Sulfur Rock Node
Metal Rock Node
There is also a variety of animal ressources, but more on those later.
For now you want to gather some wood from any of the trees you can find, and some stones, from any of the three stone node types. Stay away from animals for now.
You will quickly notice that harvesting these nodes with just a rock gets tiresome very fast. Thats why our first item we want to craft should be a stone hatchet. The first tool that will make our life easier by giving us a vhast improvement in gathering speed.
For this we will need to acquire 200 wood and 100 stones.
Once you have the materials, you find the stone hatchet in your tools menu. Just click it once and you will craft a stone hatchet, consuming the materials and giving you the tool for them.
Equip your new stone hatchet by dragging it from your inventory to the hotbar and then selecting the corresponding key to use it. Your Rock might have served you well, but its inferior to the stone hatchet in every way so you can drop it if you like, freeing up another slot in your inventory.
From this point onward there are many paths to go. You could hunt down your first animals with a stone hatchet, chasing them down or get into fights with a wolf if you know what you are doing, but the easiest and safest way is to make a stone spear next.
A stone spear has not only better reach, but also better damage. Same process as before, gather the materials with your stone hatchet, which should work way faster, then craft a stone spear.
4) Time to Hunt - What do we hunt again?
Now equipped with a stone spear it is time to get some animal blood on our hands and progress further. What animals are there to hunt in the first place?
There are a few animals to choose from.
Chickens, Boar, Deer, Wolves and Bears are currently in the game, with Wolves and Bears somewhat aggressive once you get in range and the others running away from you once in range.
A stone spear is nice, but especially as you might be new to the game, fighting a Wolf or Bear with it, might not be the best idea for a healthy long life, so the best would be to start by finding a Boar or Deer during daytime, as nights are too unpredictable. If it is nighttime, stay near the beach and other light areas where you dont accidentally stumble into aggressive animals and farm some more wood and stone. You will need a lot of it later for sure.
Animal - Wolf
Animal - Boar
Animal - Deer
Animal - Bear
[Insert Bear Picture here]
Once you have hunted down a Boar or Deer (chase them till they change direction then get in a hit or two till they die and make sure you be careful not to chase it into other aggressive animals.
Once its down, switch to your stone hatchet and harvest the corpse. This will give you bone fragments, possibly a skull, meat and animal fat and cloth.