I haven't seen much mention of Rust on the boards, despite it being a contender for DayZ's sluggish attempts at getting to standalone status. The creator has expressed his desire to move away from zombies as enemies, and they appear to be a placeholder of sorts, hopefully for something a bit more dangerous.
http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/252490/From the Steam page:
The only aim in Rust is to survive.
To do this you will need to overcome struggles such as hunger, thirst and cold. Build a fire. Build a shelter. Kill animals for meat. Protect yourself from other players. Create alliances with other players and together form a town.
Whatever it takes to survive.
From the creator of Garry's Mod is a rather interesting DayZ spinoff. Though to call it a DayZ spinoff would be hurtful, considering DayZ's current state of release. This is a survival simulator, that just happens to have zombie-like organisms that spawn in areas of radiation, but they're not the most terrifying of the local wildlife. You'll have to confront bears, wolves, and worse, other players as you try to eke out a living and make a shelter to protect you against these threats.
Currently in a fairly early alpha, Rust has a lot going for it. You spawn in with a rock, some bandages and a torch, and previously no pants at all. With this herring, you must harvest wood from trees, find rocks to mine in order to get stones, and build your way up the (fairly short) tech tree, while hunting zombies for research kits and blueprints in order to be able to craft new things. These things include things from a 9mm pistol, to explosive charges in order to bring down an enemies' (or some unsuspecting ponces') walls and doors during a raid.
Depending on the server, you may get some benefits, such as instant crafting, and some detriments, such as sleepers, meaning that much like HellMOO/HATEMOO, once you log out you leave a body behind with all of your equipped gear, passed out and defenseless, waiting for someone to come along and pick you off. Defaults include sleepers, so be very cautious on the official servers. Since the game's release into Steam, there are now literally hundreds of other servers to choose from, and it appears to be fairly easy to make your own as well.
As for the bad? As with any game of this nature in this day and age, hackers sometimes pop up, teleporting to you inside your home and killing you, whilst being invulnerable to any attempts to fight back. Valve Anti Cheat appears to be present on any server you join, per the loading screen, but I somehow doubt it. There isn't much to do once you get to the top of the small tech tree, other than make your fortress more impenetrable and raid people with less stuff than you. Random spawns are truly random; there's no telling if that field you ran through minutes earlier will later spawn a bear, wolf, zombie, rock, pig or wood pile. And of course, the sense of danger is paranoia inducing when you encounter players, as even on No PVP servers your sleeping, helpless body is prone to someone breaking in to attack and kill you anyway.
The game has a very long way to go before it reaches completion, but I'm fairly impressed by what I see so far. Haven't had any crashes, which I hear plagues DayZ like, well, a horde of zombies. There are plans for even larger maps, with the next one twice the size of the currently ~16km by 16km map.
Lastly, screenshots: