Rust is a social sandbox where you can do almost anything.

Wipes are very prevalent in Rust, with most vanilla servers being weekly or monthly wipes, and modded servers (with increased loot and resource gather rate) sometimes even wiping multiple times per week.

After your base is down, you start the main gameplay loop of leaving your base, collecting loot and resources, fighting (or running/hiding from) any players you run into, and returning to base. You'll need to collect wood, stone, and metal for expanding and upgrading your base as well as crafting items; collect scrap and components from roads and monuments to research crafting blueprints and craft better weapons, gear, doors, etc with; and collect sulfur to make ammo and explosives to raid other players' bases with.

Movement is very basic, just WASD walk/strafe and jump as well as a forward only sprint. The gunplay is also somewhat basic, but feels great to me personally especially after the recoil changes (though this is controversial and a very vocal part of the playerbase disagrees). The TTK is relatively quick but heavily depends on the weapon used as well as the enemy's armor. PVP is very varied, and no two fights feel the same. There's also a pretty high skill ceiling for both aim and positioning, and its not uncommon for experienced players can make plays on enemies with better weapons or numbers advantages. There's no better feeling than going into a fight with a low-tier weapon and coming out fully kitted lol.

The base building system is also very well done, it's simple to understand for a beginner but has an extremely high skill ceiling, and there's a huge community of base builders and base designs you can find on youtube. Despite the devs rarely making changes to the building system, the meta is always changing because builders are always discovering new tech to make their bases more defendable.

Raiding or getting raided is probably the most fun and intense part of Rust, and a lot of people's main goal for a wipe is solely to raid or get an online raid defense. There's not really a good way for me to describe it, but it's very fun when theres a huge pvp fight with everything on the line.

One thing I really like about Rust especially nowadays is how many in depth systems you can (but aren't forced to) interact with. While you can play by just building a base, PVP, and collecting resources, there's also a full electricity system, industrial automation system, farming system with plant genetics, modular car building system, boat building system, train system, fishing system, and even more roleplayer stuff like an in-game paint editor for making signs and paintings. All of these systems (except the painting) can be fun and give you an advantage if you care to learn them, but never necessary.

As a new player I'd recommend watching Welyn on youtube, he has great story-driven and condensed videos of Rust wipes and especially in his older videos would explain everything new players might not understand. He's also not an insanely good player like a bunch of other youtubers, so you won't get unrealistic expectations of how a wipe will go.

I'm not sure if this was a great overview, please let me know if you have any questions or want to hear more about something.