I started playing Rust 3 days ago with a buddy of mine and am really hooked.
I pretty much just got it on a whim without really reading much about it and certainly didn't read anybody's advice or tips for starters, so it was kind of neat figuring things out on my own.
We joined a big official server with no pvp where some players have towering sky scraper structures.
We ended up trying to build a wooden shack right by the road but we used a wooden door. That was a mistake, wooden doors can get destroyed by a hatchet in a few minutes, less if there is a team of raiders like our case.
We were nearby when this happened and my friend ran in to try and salvage some stuff and he went up stairs (it was a 2x2 hut with a 2nd floor) but then they quickly destroyed the stairs (which are much weaker even than wooden door) and placed a ceiling, effectively trapping my friend upstairs because we found out that ceilings are invulnerable and wood walls require explosives to destroy. However he did have some spare materials and we didnt place a roof yet so he was able to build stairs to jump out the top.
Anyway, we realized building right by the road was another mistake. While we were there we were constantly being harassed and have players stand by our door hoping to sneak in when we enter/exit.
We scouted more remote areas and found a pretty big foundation and framing of a house that was never completed, so we took it over. We'd keep trying to build it up and every day people were trying to break in. I wasn't finishing the roof more concentrating on walls and we had raiders build stairs outside of our walls so that they can jump over the top. But we kept building and adding floors making it more difficult to get to our loot and sleeping bodies and then one day someone did something very suspicious: by this time the house was quite large, 5x5 footprint 4 stories high but again the roof wasn't finished and not very secure, but we had so many empty spaces inside with so many metal doors in maze-like halls we thought we were pretty safe unless someone used a lot of explosives.
However I log in one day dead, and when I run to the house to see what happened I see yet again a staircase built up to jump over onto the roof and then they dropped down to a section I didnt finish yet between a tall outer wall and an inner wall and built one staircase which got them directly adjacent to the one tile in my entire house where I was sleeping and had loot. This was a 1x1 space with 2 walls, 2 doors, ceiling and floor in a house now of probably close to 80-90 'boxes' of interior space, and thats the one space he pinpointed and penetrated. The rest of my house isnt empty either, I place large crates in many empty spaces to act as decoys because I know its possible to see through cracks in walls, but this guy didnt go for any of them, and several other stashes of loot in the house were untouched too, which were more accessible and easy to reach. Somehow he saw that one room on an upper floor I was in without being able to be adjacent to it without building that one staircase he built within the exterior walls.
And to make it even more weird, when I got into that space all the doors, walls, ceiling and floor were intact. Everything inside was destroyed including crates and sleeping bag. And I found him sleeping inside carrying a full load of my shit! wtf? I can only guess he used explosive to take out one wall, break in and carry some loads of my stuff home and then return to rebuild the wall he broke and disconnect inside, just to seriously fuck with me!
But despite how fun the game can be already the biggest problem I feel is the server lag and rubber banding. It is brutal and it happens often. I thought it was just the official server so I did join a small community server for a couple of hours and it too had these periods of time where the game would just suddenly become a lag fest for a couple minutes then stop. It's like the server takes a break from the game to mine bitcoins for a few minutes.
And BTW I did not have any fun on the small populated server. It was too easy to get resources and raid the rad towns, and thus boring. It was pvp too but everyone was friendly. It just didnt give me that excitement that the official server had where someone was always trying to break into my place.