Emma's Adventures: I painted landscapes in the horribly violent world of Rust

Ah Rust, the perfect game for relaxing and enjoying the scenery, right? Wrong. It's a nightmare zone full of death, paranoia and the most irritating players you'll find in a multiplayer game. It's been made that way by design, of course - the driving idea behind Rust is survival, and having to watch your back for other players is a key part of this. Base-building becomes a matter of outwitting other players with solutions such as fake walls, impenetrable cave bases, and chests hidden under bear rugs. Journeys into the wilderness, meanwhile, require careful planning: just how much are you prepared to lose, and what backup resources do you have on standby for when you inevitably die?

It's a brutal, anarchic environment. Moments where players deviate from the cycle of violence are rare - and perhaps all the more precious when they do happen. That being said, developer Facepunch has left opportunities for creativity within Rust's world, one example being the game's collection of musical instruments. As I discovered in a previous article, you can even connect an actual MIDI keyboard to these should you want to go Christmas carolling. If you haven't read that piece yet, bookmark it for when you're feeling festive. We're not far off that time of year again.

For this month's column, however, I wanted to focus my attention on a different creative outlet. Art! Or more specifically, sign art, which has been popular in the Rust community for as long as I can remember. The game allows you to paint wooden signs which can be attached to your base, adding a touch of 'personalisation' to your home. Admittedly, most of the artwork I've encountered in-game has taken the form of graffiti, memes, or crudely-drawn genitalia. Some people, however, have taken sign art more seriously, figuring out that it's possible to connect a drawing tablet to the game in order to create more detailed paintings. Which got me thinking: what if I did that, and connected a drawing tablet to the game so that I could go painting en plein air to create landscape art of Rust's world? Surely this would be a nice relaxing thing to do in my spare time.