Learn These Rust Tips To Outsmart Your Enemies
If you've ever heard of the Facepunch game Rust, you know that the community can be hostile at times (that is, all the time,) the game can be grind-y, and is "impossible" to play solo.
Learn how to be the king of the server, raid like a champion, and build the compound of your dreams with these tips. And in the words of Shadowfrax, a Rust content creator, stay Rusty!
Tools First, Weapons Later
In the first few minutes of spawning into a server, you're faced with a choice-- tools or weapons? Since much of your success in the game comes with building bases, killing animals, and mining nodes, be sure to make tools a priority. Tools like the Stone Hatchet, which takes 200 wood and 100 stone to create, or around ten hits to a rock node and twenty to a tree, can speed up your progress on getting a base, weapons, and tools exponentially.
Keep Your Bow at Your Side
The bow, which is arguably the most important early-game weapon, is inexpensive-- you can craft it with 200 wood and 50 cloth, which is easy to craft. It uses arrows, which can be crafted from 25 wood and 10 stone. If you are one of the first people to get a bow, you have a definite range advantage over your spear-armed adversaries.
Important Components
Components, which are a staple of the game, are used to make everything from armor to tools to decorative elements for your base! You can find them in crates, at monuments, and in barrels along the road. The most useful items that you can find are springs, gears, and rifle bodies, which you can use to make guns.
Keep Your Friends Close, and Monuments Closer
Being close to monuments are important for farming components and using the recycle at the monuments to get scrap (which you can use to research new items.) But be warned, having a base close to a monument means that more people will be out and about near your home, which can make it hard to farm in peace! Be sure to weigh the risks and rewards of basing near a monument before placing your base.
Footsteps Matter
Like in other survival games (and other games in general,) you can often hear enemies before you see them. Keep an ear out for animals, other players, and, on some modded servers, zombies! Knowing when they are coming can make a world of difference in your Rust experience. Different animals have different footsteps, which are even distinct from other players. Using these distinctions can give you an edge on the other players on the server!
Early Game Low-Grade
Early in the game, low-grade is important-- you need it to power boats, create furnaces, and power lamps and lanterns, if you plan on doing anything at night. You can get low-grade from animal fat and cloth, both of which you can farm from animals. Farming animals is easy if you have a ranged weapon like a bow. Low grade can also be found in mining helmets outside of mines and in red barrels marked with a hazard sign, which can be found along the road and at monuments.
Upgrade!
Keep raiders out and your friends safely inside with an upgraded base. Tiers of your wall or door, like stone, which you can reinforce with stone, sheet metal, which requires metal fragments, and armored, which you can get with metal fragments and high-quality metal, are all harder to raid than wood or twig are. Although these can be expensive in the early stages of a wipe, they are often worth it in the long haul, as they offer more protection of you and your loot!
Above: The three middle tiers of building reinforcement
Watch Rust Build Videos
Looking to build the compound of your dreams? YouTube content creators pore tirelessly over their builds, which are constantly updated as new updates for the game come out. A new, crafty base build can be the difference between an easily raided base and a compound that is virtually un-raidable!
Try Batttlefield Servers
Want to learn the best way to get better with weapons without losing them? Try Battlefield servers! You often spawn (and re-spawn as necessary) with a semi-automatic rifle, AK-47, Bolt-Action rifle, or any other gun in the game, which are all essential to learn to succeed at the game. Being able to use these weapons effectively can be a huge factor in your success from wipe to wipe.
Combat Tag with Your Friends
Want to 1 v 1 one of your friends to prove that you are better? Try getting into a combat tag server! You can battle it out in single arenas or compete on teams against other players. If you want to see more PvP in your Rust experience, you should check out combat tag servers!
Organize Inventory
Keeping your tools, food, and ammo on your hot-bar means that you can always see them and easily switch to your gun or hatchet as needed. Knowing how much ammo you have on you is very important, especially if you are away from your base for a long period of time. Running out of ammo in the middle of battle can be fatal!
Hidden Sashes
Hiding important guns, explosives, or similar loot? Make a stash! Stashes can be made from ten cloth and can be hidden underground. To find a stash after you've hidden it, look at the ground around where you’ve placed it. To help you remember exactly where you put your stash, take a screenshot of the location—you'll have a perfect record of where you hid it.
Blueprints First, Components Later
If you've just started on a server, you'll need blueprints-- which can be found using research table and scrap, which you can find by recycling components. Blueprints are essential for creating tools and weapons-- without the blueprint for a gun, you can't make it using the resources that you have! In later wipes, (or later in the wipe,) you can keep components, but initially, prioritize blueprints as much as possible.
Don't Trust ANYONE
There's a reason that the Rust community has such a big reputation, and the reason is this—in Rust, you should assume that everyone is out to get you—because most of the time, they are. Whether you've just spawned on the beach, are out farming, or have everything you could ever need, look out for other players and be sure to run or be willing to fight at the hint of danger.
Silent Raid
Want to raid without the big, attention-drawing booms? Try a semi-automatic rifle, explosive ammunition, and a silencer. This combination, known as a silent raid, allows you to gain access and take over other bases quietly and more efficiently, which is great for mid- or late-game players who aren't as interested in the PvP aspect of the game. Since one sheet-metal door requires 65 shots with explosive ammunition, bring a whole stack or two along per raid in case things go wrong!
Satchel Raiding
If you're really into booms, but don't have the resources for C4 explosives, try satchel raiding! Four satchels are required to blow through a sheet metal door, and more if satchels turn out to be duds (which happens at random.) The chance of one turning out to be a dud is currently unknown.
It's High Noon
Revolvers are the perfect early to mid-game weapon. They are inexpensive, easy to use, and scarily accurate. A few well-placed revolver shots can get you better gear off an unsuspecting player. They take basic pistol ammo and are perfect for roaming and fighting in the early game!
Above: the revolver in all of its glory.
Biome-Based Bases
Want to have a base that is left alone? Build in the snow! Deserts are great for nodes, which are essential to the game, and forests are full of trees, cloth, and mushrooms. Decide what you want out of your base and run with it! They do come with risks, though-- you need more cloth for clothing in the snow, deserts can get hot during the day, and forests are full of hiding places for your enemies to hold against you.
Islands and Sandbars
Want to use the boats that Facepunch recently added to the game? Try building on an island or sandbar! Although these builds can be hard to farm the wood, stone, and other resources for, they are easy to defend and maintain. Component farming is easier than if you were to have a land base , with the floats and scuba-diving sites present in the game.
Play with Friends
Rust is best played with friends! Rust is an intense game, and one that requires lots of time farming, playing, and building. Having friends to play with makes the game easier and more fun and allows you to get closer to your homies.
Solo-Only Servers
Don’t feel like playing with your friends on this one? Try a solo-only server! If you are just starting out and trying to learn the game, solo-only servers are great—you get single players out to raid or fight you, instead of whole groups of people. Solo-only servers are also a great way to make friends and to build your community, if you’d love to play with friends later!
Bolt-Action Rifle for Base Defense
A bolt-action rifle, or’ bolty’, as it is colloquially known, is easy to defend your base with if you are under attack. It is scarily accurate, and with a 4x scope, which you can make with high-quality metal, you can snipe enemies from over 100 meters away! It can generally be found in airdrops, made, or bought from other players, and is not a common item. However, the combined punch of damage and range on this weapon makes it worth it!
Don't Hoard Weapons
Scared of losing your weapons? Don’t be. It is better to have fought and lost than have never fought at all, and weapons can easily be remade! Going out to fight with your weapons is a great way to get experience in the game, learn the mechanics of each gun, and build up your confidence in your abilities.
Collect Cards
The puzzles at the outpost have some tasty loot, and the keycards for them are easy to find! If you’ve played Skyrim (which you should, if you haven’t,) you’ll easily understand the mechanics of the puzzles, which combine tiered keycards with fuse boxes to open doors. Behind the third, or top tier of doors, you’ll find everything you could ever need-- guns, radiation suits for protection at the monuments, components, and in some cases, armor and medicine!
Collect Wood
Wood is essential! You'll need wood to build a base, craft simple weapons, and, once you reach higher tiers of equipment, you'll need wood to cook sulfur, metal fragments and high-quality metal. Wood will always be used, whether you're building a wood two-by-two base or you're cooking sulfur to go on a C4 raid, you’ll be using wood.
Keep Up with Upkeep
Upkeep is a new mechanic that the developers at Facepunch introduced to give players a reason to play in the middle of a wip. Put simply, it’s like rent you have to pay—but instead of cash, you pay with the resources your base is made out of. If you have wood walls, floors, foundations or roofs, your upkeep will be based off how many you have. If you upgrade to stone, you will now be required to pay a stone upkeep. Farming up to pay your upkeep makes sure your base doesn’t decay and wither away. It’s always a good idea to have enough upkeep to last you until the next time you log on to keep your base at its best.
Skins = Wins, Kinda?
This is a highly debated topic in most games, but in Rust, skins actually have a use. In combat scenarios, it’s easier to identify who’s a foe and who’s a friend or ally with skins. Skins are also just a nice way to support skin creators and the developers back at Facepunch. If you would like to customize your base or your loadout, there is most likely a skin out there for your liking. But don’t worry—if you have concerns with this almost pay to win system, the developers have recently released a team system, making skinned articles of clothing an optional part of playing in groups.
Above: you'll always be able to tell your friends apart with skins like these.
Modded Experience
There are two main types of servers you will find on Rust in its current state—modded, and vanilla. Vanilla servers can be found under ‘official’ and ‘community’ under the servers’ tab, and modded servers have their own section. Modded servers introduce more control to the admins of the server, allowing them to change features part of rust such as the gather rate, respawn locations, and other factors. Modded servers can be a great place for new players to start up their endeavors in Rust, due to a majority of modded survival servers giving their players ‘kits,’ or items that you receive for free upon spawning, and higher gather rates, allowing the player to learn the game’s mechanics with less hassle.
Use Voice Chat
Voice chat is one of the two ways to communicate in Rust—one being in the text chat and the other in voice. Unlike the text chat, where your messages are broadcasted to the whole server, voice chat is only to players in your proximity. This can be used to trade goods with other players, trade information, ask them to buddy up with you or discuss the crazed lunatic with the AK-47 who killed you in your previous life for your rock and torch.
Try Befriending Your Neighbors
Picking your base location can be challenging, especially when you also must account for your biggest threat or your closest ally-- your neighbor. When first starting on a Rust server, the fewer threats to you the better. If you can try making friends with your neighbors, then you’ll be better off. Everyone in Rust can be quite psychotic—so try offering them resources they need to turn for protection for when you’re first starting off. If you try this strategy, just be mindful of how much they ask. If you’re lucky, you can persuade them for no cost: that is, if they’re friendly and understand the challenges it can be to be new to Rust. Just be wary, for betrayal comes from the ones closest to us.
Run!
In your beginning days of Rust, try not resorting to player vs player combat scenarios. When you hear gunshots in the near distance, you should run to your nearest safe location. Whether this is in the opposite direction of the gunshots or into your base, you’re going to want to avoid combat. Don’t play Rust completely avoiding combat your entire playthrough—but for your beginner days you’re going to want to avoid combat until you have a good sense of how the game works, then after, you’re going to want to engage in combat to better your skill.
Farming Minigames
When gathering wood from trees or stone, sulfur or metal from nodes, a minigame will appear. For trees a red “X” will appear on the tree after your first hit, after the “X” appears if you hit it, your gather rate increases slightly and you will begin gathering more and more each hit on an “X’ until you reach the cap gather rate of the tool you’re using. This will help you farm faster, making farming quicker and reducing the time you’re left vulnerable to other players.
Have Multiple Sleeping Bags
If you have the resources for multiple sleeping bags, they can come to a good use. If you have two in your base and you happen to be raided and they don’t reach your second bag, you won’t have to venture back out to your base to salvage what’s left. This bag would give you better control on where you can spawn on the map. Also, if you go out raiding or go out to a fight, having a bag near the battle or raid could grant you a faster time of returning and possible fighting for a second time if the loot wasn’t taken.
Airlocks
Knowing how to build a strong base is very important. To make sure for when you open door and you meet your demise to a shotgun having an airlock can become extremely useful. The airlock will prevent an intruder from getting straight into your loot, and causes raiders to go through more to get your loot. This costs a raider more resources and can give you more time. An airlock is as simple as having a triangle or square coming off the door of your base, covering it with walls and hiding one door way with a door. It acts as a buffer zone between the outside and the inside.
Safe and Secure Key Locks
There’s two types of locks in rocks a simple key lock and a code lock. A key lock requires a key to open so if someone else was to get access to the key, they could open your door and take all your goodies. With a new update the person who crafted the first key to the lock doesn’t need a key, so after crafting a key lock and crafting a key, throwing away the key and letting it despawn in your base will let you have a door that only you can access, but with friends this can bring up an issue with getting in and out of the base. If you’re planning of playing with friends we suggest getting to a code lock as fast as possible. Just remember to always make sure your locks are set to locked and not unlocked. For code locks you must craft one with 100 metal fragments. After placing it on a door you can put in a four-digit pin—this pin number shouldn’t be told to anyone except people you’re going to base with. Do not write this code down anywhere in Rust. Giving an untrustworthy player access to this code can mean an end to your base.
Eat Up, Buttercup
Before venturing out, you’ll have to tend to your basic needs in Rust: hunger and thirst. Water is quite easy to access if you’re near a clean water source (that isn’t salt water.) This will mostly be rivers or small bodies of shallow water that aren’t connected to the ocean.
While we’re on the topic of rivers, they supply food from the crops that grow near the river. Naturally, you’ll find pumpkins and corn in large quantity as long as no one else has taken from the river. The food near the river will with no doubt supply you with enough food to go a long while without having to harvest any more. After picking a spawned crop, we get a seed and for eating a crop we get more seeds, these seeds can be used to grow more crops to keep a supply of food.
Another way to find food is small baskets of food found near monuments in small monuments such as the supermarket. Monuments are the marked places on your map you can see by hitting the default key “G” and going to these monuments can help the player gain resources other than food.
Another way to get food is by crafting fishing traps, these traps are very simple and cost cloth and wood. After crafting the trap, we have to place it near a body of water. By putting any food besides canned food into the trap you have a chance to catch minnows or a trout. Trout can be cut apart and provide raw fish, bones and animal fat. Minnows on the other hand are smaller and grant less food than trouts but come in larger quantity than trout. Sadly, in the current state of Rust, minnows can’t be used as bait to catch trout.
Another way to get food is by hunting. On the island of Rust, we can find bears, wolves, horses and deer. All of these grant a food correlating to the animal, hide or cloth, bones, low animal fat and only for the wolf, you can get a wolf skull to craft a wolf headdress. And a crueler and more looked down upon way of getting food in Rust in cannibalism, if you are to kill a player you can chop them up for food, bones and animal fat. Cooking this food will allow you to eat a fellow player, but eating human meat costs thirty hydration, so make sure if your last choice is to eat human meat, is you have water on the side to quench your thirst. Cooking these meats or putting them in fish traps can be used to feed the player and grant a small amount of hydration.
Another way to get water id in the wells spawned around the map. The wells supply water, but in turn cost a little of your calories or in simpler way to understand takes a little bit out of your hunger to pump the well. Stocking up on food and bottles of water is a good way to make sure you don’t die to natural causes.
Understanding Monuments
Monuments are locations spawned around the map. They come in tiers 1-3, with one being the lowest tier and three being the highest. In lower tiers, you’ll find common loot—barrels, tan crates, and the like. In higher tier monuments you have a higher chance to find rarer and more sought after materials in the same barrels and crates. When first spawning in, you’ll spawn around tier 1 monuments and, depending where you go to on the map, will determine your access to the resources found in these monuments.
Each monument has a unique style to it and some have challenges that come along, some have key card locks and fuses, and some have challenging parkour to reach a reward.
Hide Your Base
Building your base in an unpopular location may be useful for newcomers-- avoiding populated areas full of combat is a safe way to build your base and avoid being raided. Some nice spots to hide your base are in caves in the designed plots, side of some cliffs, areas that are far from hotspots like monuments, and other low-profile areas.
Find Your Spawn
When spawning in, maybe you want to be in a different area, maybe the spawn you have seems to be filled with players, is already looted or is on the wrong side of the map you want to be on. By hitting “F1” you can open up the console-- by typing kill, you character will die and you can try again to spawn somewhere else. Just a heads up, though: there’s a cooldown of one minute on the command, so try to explore a little bit before just resorting to the command.
Be Sneaky Beaky
Crouching is a perfect way to add a layer of security to your roaming. You don’t have footsteps for others to hear and can get closer to animals and other players without them being aware! You will be able to get much closer to the animal while crouching, making your chances of hitting them with a melee weapon significantly higher!
High External Protection
High external walls are great to have on your person late-game. If you’re getting shot at, all you must do is pop up a wall between you and your attacker! With wood high-externals costing only 300 wood, there is no reason that you shouldn’t have these with you if you are running with expensive guns and armor.
Be Sure to Log Out Safely
When logging out, make sure to log out in a safe area inside your base. And no, this doesn’t mean inside of your front door—try sleeping in the most secured area in your base to increase your chances of waking up alive and untouched.
Come Prepared To Raid
Raiding is a very expensive and challenging part of Rust. Raiding in Rust takes many forms: using a flamethrower to burn through a wooden surface or wooden door, using satchels, C4, explosive 5.56 ammo or maybe a rocket launcher to tell your target how you truly feel about them—or maybe they made a mistake building and you’re able to pickaxe one of their walls down.
Making sure you have enough resources to get through a raid is important. Make sure to have enough ammo, medical supplies, strong enough armor and good guns with you before you even step out the door. Having these doesn’t guarantee a raid, it’s the skill behind these that make it successful or not, so with practice and the right tools you can up your chances.
Be aware of your surroundings when raiding—players around the map will hear the raid if you’re using satchels, C4 or rockets. And if you’re using explosive 5.56, try you best to have a suppressor on to muffle the sound. And just because you’re raiding using a quiet technique doesn’t mean you’re safe, either: roaming players or allies of your target could come and ruin the raid and the people inside the base, if online, can be another hassle to get over.
Radiation Treatment
When going through some monuments, you’ll encounter radiation. This can come in low doses based on your position of if you go to deeper into the monument, you can be given deadly doses of radiation. Now, how do we prevent this radiation? By wearing clothing, you can up our radiation protection, this allows you to go deeper to get loot in some monuments with high radiation. Or, we can get a radiation suit out of a crate randomly or off a player. These radsuits give the best protection against radiation and only has an issue in some spots in tier 3 monuments.
If we are affected by radiation poisoning and want to remove it instantly, we can radiation pills which will remove a decent amount of radiation we have built up for the cost of some of our hydration.
Zig-Zag
Dodging and weaving are the best ways to avoid being hit by bullets, eaten by wolves, killed by bears, or being smacked by players with spears. Running randomly is a great way to keep yourself as safe as possible in the wild wild world of Rust.
Waterpipe OP
The waterpipe, which is a simple, easy to make and use shotgun, is easily one of the most frustrating ways to die, but one of the best ways to get tools off other players. Hiding around a corner with a waterpipe is a sneaky way to get loot, and quick!
Early Morning Trappin'
Looking to get an edge up on your competition and don’t mind waking up early? Try getting up early to get online when the server population is at its lowest! Generally, 6 a.m seems to be the sweet spot. Without other players around, you are free to roam, farm, or go for airdrops with limited interference!
Lock Your Tool Cupboard
Locking your tool cupboard is very strong way to secure your base. It will cost your raiders more resources to get control to building access to your base, and if they don’t have enough to break it, locking it can possible keep the materials in your base safe and giving you building permissions to rebuild your base. This is important early game if someone is to get deep into your base so they can’t take it over or grief it.
Ladders Are Important Raid and Build Tools
You can get into and out of tight spots with a ladder! Ladders are an easy way to make a raid safer, easier, and more efficient, or climb up to a loft in your base!
Safe Houses
If you have resources to spare, placing small bases, equipped with sleeping bags and tools, are a great way to stop you from losing everything in one raid, as well as keep yourself safer when out roaming. Small one-by-one bases, especially those with airlocks, are great for this.
Pick Up Resources When Running Around
Each small stone, tree stump, or hemp plant can add up. If you are out farming, roaming, or even raiding, make it a habit to pick up these small resources, as they can be extremely helpful later (and in the early game!)
Keep Kits on Hand
In the event of a raid, lost gunfight, or death by radiation, bears, or wolves, you’ll want to be able to head back out there to retrieve any lost items. By keeping a spare set of clothes, armor, and a gun or two somewhere safe in your base, you can reduce the amount of time you have to spend grinding between each death.
