What is Tutorial Island?

New players will be prompted to start the tutorial when they connect to a compatible server, veteran players (>50 deaths) won't be asked and will need to manually start the tutorial via the Options menu. Once the player starts the Tutorial, they will be respawned on a dedicated island where an NPC will guide them through the first half hour of gameplay. This island is tightly controlled and cannot be reached by other players. Throughout this process players will learn some key concepts:

• Basic movement
• Crafting
• Building bases
• Upgrading bases
• Respawning
• Basic combat
• Resources
• Looting containers
• Cooking
• Using Furnaces
• Workbenches
• Using a vehicle

This obviously isn’t an exhaustive list of everything there is to learn in Rust, but we feel like this is a good starting point for a new player. Our guiding principle when designing this sequence has been - if a player emulates exactly what they did on the Tutorial Island once they get into the main game, will they have a fighting chance?

Enabling / Disabling Tutorial Island on your server

For server owners running mods that change core gameplay features, you may find that parts of the tutorial don’t work or maybe showing the tutorial isn’t appropriate for your server (minigame servers for instance). You can control whether the tutorial is active via the server.tutorialEnabled convar - it's false by default. While false players won't be prompted to start the tutorial on your server and they will not be able to manually start the tutorial. We’ve added a server tag to help players find and filter servers by their tutorial compatibility, add “tut” to your server tags to advertise your tutorial compatibility. Brand new players will have this filter on when they first use the server browser.

Convars

• server.tutorialEnabled true - Will enable Tutorial Island
• server.tutorialEnabled false - Will dsiableTutorial Island

Links

Facepunch Blog Post