I can't in good conscience recommend this game at the moment. SCUM is advertised as an open world multiplayer survival game, but with many of the latest big updates has been deviating further and further from the survival genre. Many of the "survival" mechanics like cooking, fishing, farming, and hunting are rendered useless by the sheer abundance of food even on official settings as well as the trading outposts, and we still don't have proper water purification, food poisoning, and illness systems, (this is meant to be a survival game for god's sake). I can't remember the last time I died from the actual "environmental hazards" like hypothermia, starvation, or dehydration. The open world is so massive with limited player counts for server performance reasons that your odds of encountering other players after hours of play is very slim. The game has always struggled a bit with engaging people in those moments of traveling the wilderness between POIs but the introduction of the new horde system has only served to exacerbate this problem because they no longer spawn outside of the threat zones in POIs. Most of this stuff was excusable when the game was still very much in the early access phase but we're now halfway through 2024 with the game supposedly releasing this year and basic functions are still not being added. This game just seems so confused on what it's trying to be. I'm sure the quest system and new npcs will add a lot of fun to the game when 1.0 hits, but I still don't think the game will really wind up being the incredible "survival experience" that it had originally aimed for. My recommendation would be to hold off on buying SCUM till 1.0 release to see if the devs can figure out how to fix the weird mess of mechanics that is this game currently.

cant make your own server

There are cheaters everywhere. You have to prove that they are cheaters, the ban is not for hardware, so tomorrow the cheater will return to you from another account. The developers also help cheaters - they introduce planes from which it is convenient for cheaters to conduct reconnaissance and whose armor is stronger than any tank.