So, anyone have a Rust life?

I would recommend playing on a smaller player based server to begin with. Playing with more than 20 players by yourself can be very difficult. If you need a noob friendly server to play on, you should play on the one I play on. It's been up for about 7 days with a player base of about 9 people, so talk to me on steam and I will give you the details of the server if you're interested. Also, there are some helpful guides out there that you should check out. And as for the crashes, did you try typing in those lines of code Snak provided? That might help.