This article was sponsored by Rend.
Rend is survival like you've never seen it. Set in a fractured, unforgiving proving ground overseen by Norse gods, Rend is a 60-player, team-based, PvP-centric survival game about building bases, controlling territory and collecting spirits. You join one of three 20-player factions—the Order, the Revenant or the Conclave—and compete in matches that last several weeks to represent your faction's banner and prove your worth to the gods.
It's a strategic race to Valhalla where only the strong survive, but at its core it's also a survival game, so let's take a look at what surviving means in the world of Rend. You start every match of Rend with nothing but your faction allies and an empty safe haven to build your base. You're hungry, thirsty, and defenseless. Let's tackle those problems in order.
Hunger and thirst will kill you as reliably as any beast, so it's important to secure water and food supplies. You can subsist by gathering fruits like melons, but you're going to need something more substantial in the long run. Settle down near a lake or river and you'll never want for water, and you'll find plenty of game lured in by the water.
Of course, if you're going to go hunting, you'll need weapons. And to make weapons, you're going to need some tools. There are five basic tools in Rend: axes for chopping trees, pickaxes for mining ore, mallets for breaking stone, sickles for clearing vegetation, and hammers for building. You'll likely start your journey the way all great survivalists do: by exploring and punching trees. But you'll soon develop an arsenal of tools, and your tools will only grow stronger as you obtain new resources and research improved crafting methods.
One nice thing about Rend is that, while you do start off naked and afraid, you're not alone. Remember: you're joined by all the members in your faction, which makes surviving Rend's harsh landscape much less daunting. By sharing resources and equipment, you and your teammates can accelerate each other's growth and help make up for each other's weaknesses. This makes it much easier to establish a solid foundation, which frees you up to play more adventurously, explore your surroundings and, perhaps most importantly, focus on building.
Building is critical to Rend, making your hammer arguably your most valuable and flexible tool. You can enter 'build mode' at any time and set up shop virtually anywhere using Rend's intuitive, dynamic building system. Building up your central base should be your first priority. You need to defend your faction's Divinity Stone, for starters, and you also need a place to house everyone's valuables—or, in the event of a siege, everyone!
And you're by no means leashed to your main base. There's a huge amount of freedom to Rend's building system. You can build outposts in strategic locations, and you can even build and claim a small base of your own. But there's one thing everyone can get behind, and that's defending. See, it's not enough to build a base. You also need to upgrade it to improve its resilience, and outfit it with defenses like traps and ballistas to ward off attackers. The prettiest base in the proving grounds won't do you any good if it's indefensible, so be sure to build sturdily.
Rend is fundamentally a survival game, but there's a uniquely competitive throughline to it that transforms the way you approach basic tasks like gathering resources and building bases. It's both cooperative and competitive, so you need to outfox the other factions and work together with your own. The faction that can do that will not only survive in Rend's brutal world, but thrive in it.
Rend will launch on Steam Early Access on July 31. You can find more information about Rend on its official site.
