Fans of online survival game Rust up in arms over sex change update

Some games let you spend hours tweaking the look of your character before you even start to play the actual game. Not Rust.

Rust is an online survival game where each player starts naked and alone, with no say in how they look. But until recently, there was one thing that players could count on: their randomly generated character would be male. Well, not any more!

As of this month, Rust’s entire world was reset and updated, and each player’s appearance was regenerated. And this time, in addition to randomly selecting things such as the arm length, skin tone, and facial features for each player, the game also chooses the sex.

So how are players reacting? Some players were so enraged by the change that they’re threatening to quit Rust. Others peppered Rust’s subreddit with suggestions for coconut bra tops; some asked the developers to add hair to the (entirely bald) characters so that the women don’t look like “a lesbian porn star with a shaved head”, in the words of one.

As online magazine Motherboard’s piece on some of the outrage noted, many of the worst comments responding to the change have since been deleted from a particularly active thread on Reddit’s Games section, comments that one of the moderators described as “mainly racist jokes and comments like ‘muh misogyny’ or ‘inb4 feminazis’”.

But others – in fact, a large segment of Rust’s players – are taking the whole thing in their stride. This is, after all, a game that (for male avatars) randomly assigns you a penis size, a feature that pretty much every player can see and comment on until you manage to acquire clothing.