Rust

• Force wipe, first Thursday Facepunch ships the monthly update on the first Thursday of every month, and every server takes a fresh procedurally generated map with it. A base you lose on the last Wednesday of the month costs you nothing, so spend the final days recklessly.
• Weekly wipes are a server choice Most community servers also cut the map every Thursday and hold blueprints until the monthly force wipe. Read the description before you research anything: on a blueprint-wiping server, every gun you unlock dies with the map.
• Hour 0 to 2 is the naked hour Nobody has a gun, everyone has a rock, and the entire population is on the roads. Farm wood and hemp, take only fights you can end in two hits, and be inside twig walls before it ends.
• Day 1 night is when bases die The first night is when people log out inside half-finished boxes with a wooden door. Have a code lock on before you sleep, or do not sleep.
• Day 2 to 4 is raid season Groups have the top bench and a sulfur pipeline by now. If you are solo, this is the window where your loot should live in two or three small places rather than one good one.
• Late wipe is quiet and rich Population falls off, the sulfur fields go unwatched, and a solo with a bolt action can run Launch Site alone. The best solo hours in Rust are the last 48 before a force wipe, not the first 48 after one.
• Check last wipe in the list The server browser prints last wipe and next wipe on every entry. Spawning naked into a 25 day old server is a decision you are allowed to make, but make it on purpose.

• 1. Leave the beach You spawn with a Rock and a Torch on a coastline crowded with other spawns. Run inland until the water is out of sight. Every fight in the first five minutes is a coin flip for a rock.
• 2. Hit the marker After your first swing a tree shows a small X and an ore node shows a bright spot. Landing on that marker adds a large bonus to the swing, and it carries through the whole node. This single habit beats any tool upgrade in the opening hour.
• 3. Stone tools before anything else A Stone Hatchet and a Stone Pickaxe are the cheapest speed you will ever be given. Craft both before you commit to a serious farm, not after.
• 4. Hemp for cloth The yellow-green hemp bushes in grassland are your cloth supply. A Sleeping Bag is only 30 cloth, so place one the moment you have it; the drain comes later from bandages, clothing and sleeping bags you scatter around monuments. Cloth is the resource new players run dry on first, every time.
• 5. Place the bag early A Sleeping Bag near your intended build spot turns a death into a two minute setback instead of a restart on the far side of the map with none of your progress.
• 6. Run a road Road barrels are the best scrap source in the game for a player with no gear. Break everything you pass, take scrap, components and low grade fuel, and leave the rest on the ground.
• 7. Cook before you travel Raw meat spoils and gives you food poisoning on the way. Two minutes at a campfire turns a boar into a food supply you can actually carry.
• 8. Tool Cupboard before walls The Tool Cupboard costs 1,000 wood and is the thing that makes the ground yours. Without one, anyone can build on top of you. Place it inside, in the back cell, never near the entry.
• 9. Code lock the first door A Key Lock is a placeholder that lasts until you have the metal. A Code Lock is the difference between a base and a container that other people open.
• 10. Log out inside Your body stays in the world when you quit. Rust calls it a sleeper; other players call it loot. Never log out in the open, and never in the airlock.

• Where scrap comes from Road barrels, crates at every monument, recycled components, and the Locked Crate at the top end. Barrels are unlimited and nobody camps them, which makes them the correct answer for a solo almost every time.
• Recyclers are graded, and the grade matters Red, green and yellow machines pay differently for the same item. A red recycler turns one Gear into 15 scrap and 18 metal fragments; a yellow one pays noticeably less for the identical Gear. Learn which colour sits at which monument and route your components to the red ones.
• Do not recycle weapon bodies Rifle Body, SMG Body and Semi Body gate their weapons even after you own the blueprint. Pull them out of the pile before the recycler eats them, and hoard them across runs.
• Road signs are a high quality metal source Recycled road signs return high quality metal plus scrap, not fragments, and that is the real reason the Junkyard is worth the walk. Metal springs and tech trash pay out the same way. Road signs are also the cheapest route to Road Sign armour before you own a bench three kit.
• Research Table costs Researching an item you are holding costs a flat scrap fee that rises by tier: 15 to 30 scrap for most bench one gear, 60 around bench two, and 120 for the bench three list including the Assault Rifle and the Bolt Action Rifle. Finding a rifle and researching it is dramatically cheaper than walking the tree to it.
• The Tech Tree needs no item Each bench carries a tree you can walk with scrap alone, but you pay for every node on the way. Reaching the Assault Rifle through the bench three tree costs 780 scrap in total against 120 to research one you looted. The tree is the guarantee, the table is the bargain.
• Safe zone recyclers are the quiet ones Outpost and Bandit Camp sit inside safe zones where scientists open up on anyone who draws a weapon. The recyclers at Junkyard, Sewer Branch and Train Yard have no such protection, and people sit on them.
• The hostile timer is 30 minutes Attack someone near a safe zone and you are locked out of every safe zone for half an hour. Check that timer before you plan a route that ends at a recycler you do not own.
• The marketplace saves the walk Outpost has a terminal that orders from vending machines anywhere on the map and delivers by drone for a scrap fee. It is slower than driving there and very much safer than driving back.

• Every block has a soft side One face of a wall takes heavy melee damage and the other barely notices. The soft side is meant to face into your base. Place walls while standing inside and the game orients them correctly for you.
• A soft side out is a raid with no boom A raider with a pickaxe chews through a backwards stone wall in under a minute and spends nothing. Walk your own exterior and look at the seams before you log off for the night.
• Twig is a drawing, not a wall Ten hit points. It exists so you can see the shape before you pay for it. Upgrade it or delete it in the same session; twig left standing overnight is an invitation.
• Stone is the day one target Wood burns and folds to satchels. Stone at 500 hit points is the first grade that makes somebody do arithmetic before deciding you are worth it.
• Armored belongs to the loot room High quality metal is the scarcest resource in the game. Spending it on an outer ring instead of your top bench and your core is the classic overbuild mistake, and it is very hard to undo.
• Upkeep is charged every 24 hours The Tool Cupboard pays the bill out of whatever you leave in it, and the bill scales with how much you have built. An empty cupboard means your base is quietly decaying while you are at work.
• Decay timers differ by grade With no upkeep at all, twig falls in about an hour, wood in three, stone in five, sheet metal in eight and armored in twelve. Abandoned bases on the map are resources on a countdown.
• Skins change the look only The building skin sets change how walls and doors appear and nothing else. No hit point difference, no cost difference. Pick the one you like and stop thinking about it.

• The 2x1 starter Two foundations, cupboard in the back cell, one door on the front. It costs nearly nothing and it is meant to die. Build it, use it, do not get attached to it.
• The 2x2 with honeycomb Four foundations of usable core plus a ring of sealed triangle cells around them. The ring is deliberately empty: every cell is one more wall somebody has to pay explosives for.
• Honeycomb is the cheapest defense One extra ring can double the explosive bill for the same usable space. Compare that against upgrading everything to armored and the arithmetic is not close.
• Triangle bunker A triangle tucked under a square and sealed so the loot core has no wall touching the outside world. It takes an hour on a build server to learn and it pays for that hour the first time.
• Airlock, always Two doors with a dead space between them. Without one, a single person standing on your doorstep while you open up owns everything you have farmed.
• Never put the cupboard in the entry If your cupboard sits in the airlock, one door is the entire raid. Cupboard deep, loot deeper, and nothing worth taking in the first room.
• Split the loot Two small bases beat one impressive one for a solo. A successful raid on you should cost a bad evening, not the whole wipe.
• A shooting floor earns time A second storey with a floor frame lets you shoot down at someone standing on your wall. Raids are loud and slow, so make standing still expensive.

Two guns people expect to see on this list have no craftable recipe at all. The LR-300 is loot or a monument vending machine purchase only. The M249 is narrower still: Bradley and Patrol Helicopter elite crates and a couple of rare containers, nothing else. No amount of scrap or bench progress will ever put either one in your hands, so do not plan a wipe around them.

• Gunpowder 20 sulfur plus 30 charcoal makes 10 gunpowder, so every unit of gunpowder is two sulfur. Note the ratio: you burn more charcoal than sulfur, which means your furnace line is the bottleneck long before your ore is. Charcoal only comes from burning wood, so your smelting operation and your raiding budget are the same pipeline.
• Explosives 50 gunpowder, 10 sulfur, 3 low grade fuel and 10 metal fragments per unit. Chase the gunpowder back to the ore and one unit is 110 sulfur and 150 charcoal, all in.
• Rocket 10 Explosives, 150 gunpowder and 2 metal pipes. That is 1,400 sulfur on the ground before you have fired it, which is why nobody spends one on a wooden door when 16 explosive rounds open it for 400.
• Timed charge 20 Explosives, 5 cloth and 2 tech trash: 2,200 sulfur each, and cheaper per wall than rockets at every grade above wood. A sheet metal wall costs 4 charges against 7 rockets, and an armored wall 7 charges against 15.
• Satchels are the poor route Four beancan grenades, a small stash and a rope. Cheap, extremely loud, and they fail to detonate often enough that you should carry a third more than any chart tells you.
• Explosive ammo is for doors It tears through doors and barely marks stone. If the plan is a wall, bring the charges. If the plan is a door, bring the rounds and a second magazine.
• Where sulfur comes from Sulfur nodes on arid and rocky ground, a Mining Quarry, and the Giant Excavator Pit. Both machines run on Diesel Fuel, which you cannot craft: you buy it from monument vending machines with scrap. That turns your barrel route into the thing that feeds your quarry, which feeds your raid.
• Electric furnaces make no charcoal They are faster, need no wood, and silently kill your gunpowder supply. Keep at least one wood-burning furnace alive if you ever intend to raid anyone.

• Recoil is a pattern, not a dice roll The assault rifle climbs and then walks in the same shape every single time. Fifteen minutes spraying a wall on a build server is worth more than a month of learning it during real fights.
• Chest at range, head when you own it Most rifles roughly double their damage on a headshot. At 80 metres, with travel time and drop in play, the chest is the shot that actually connects.
• The facemask matters more than the plate A Metal Facemask converts a lot of lethal headshots into survivable ones. If you can only afford one piece of metal, wear it on your head and take the body damage.
• Heavy plate is a raid item It is the best protection in the game, and it slows you down and narrows what you can see. Wear it pushing into a base, never roaming across one.
• Attachments trade, they do not upgrade A muzzle boost adds fire rate and spread. A muzzle brake cuts recoil and adds spread. A silencer costs velocity and damage, and keeps one long shot from calling two other groups to your position.
• Never peek the same gap twice Your second peek is the one they are already aiming at. Move two windows along, or drop a floor, before you look again.
• Sound works in both directions Boxes, doors, crafting, repairs and reloads are all audible through walls. Crouching quietens your footsteps; it does not silence them, and it never silences a door.
• Hotbar the meds A syringe gives 15 health instantly and 20 more over time, and it does nothing for bleeding. A large medkit gives 10 instantly, 100 over time and clears the bleed entirely, but the animation is long enough to lose the fight during. Syringe mid-gunfight, medkit only once you are behind a wall, and neither helps if you are hunting the inventory for them.
• Wounded is not dead At zero you go down before you die, and a teammate can pick you up. Finish people properly, and do not stand over the body while you do it: that is how the friend upstairs gets you.

• Seeds carry six genes Every seed has six slots filled from G, Y, H, W and X. G is growth speed and Y is yield, and those are the two you are farming for. W and X are dead weight you breed out over a few generations.
• Cross-breed, then clone Plant weaker clones around a target and the target takes on genes from its neighbours. Once you have a six-slot plant you like, clone it and never plant a random seed again.
• A growth-heavy hemp plant is a cloth factory Good genes turn a single planter into a steady cloth and seed supply. It is the cheapest permanent fix for the resource solos run dry on first.
• Sprinklers beat watering by hand A water pump or a catcher feeding sprinklers holds saturation up without you standing there. Planters also want light, so ceiling lights on a timer are how underground farms work.
• Berries become tea A Mixing Table turns berries into teas. Scrap tea lifts what you pick up, ore tea lifts node yields, and healing teas are far cheaper per point of health than medkits.
• Drink tea before the route, not after Every tea is a timer that starts the moment you drink it. Pure Scrap Tea runs a full hour at plus 350 percent scrap yield, so drinking it as you arrive at Outpost throws away most of what you brewed. Drink it at the first barrel of the route instead, and plan the route to fit the hour.
• Power is measured in rW A solar panel peaks around 20 and gives nothing at night. An auto turret draws 10 and a SAM site draws 25. Batteries exist to cover darkness, and they charge slower than they drain.
• Conveyors do the boring work The industrial parts move items between containers on a filter. One conveyor from an ore box into a bank of furnaces deletes the most tedious job in the game and never forgets to do it.

• Logging out in the open Your sleeping body stays in the world carrying everything you had on you. Inside, behind a code lock, every single time, even for five minutes.
• An empty Tool Cupboard Upkeep is charged daily whether you are online or not. A base with a beautiful armored core and an empty cupboard rots exactly on schedule while you are away.
• Walls placed from outside The cheapest raid in Rust, and it costs the raider nothing but a pickaxe and a few minutes. Place from the inside and check your seams before you log off.
• One cupboard, one base, all the loot A single raid should never be able to take your whole wipe. Split it across locations and keep a small stash buried away from the base entirely.
• Researching before you have the parts The blueprint is only half the gate. Without the matching weapon body you own a recipe you cannot craft, and you spent the scrap to learn that.
• Starting a 15 minute timer alone The Locked Crate announces to the server where you are and roughly how long you will be standing there. Only start it if you can genuinely hold the room.
• Carrying everything to a contested recycler The recyclers outside safe zones are watched by people with better guns than yours. Split the run into two trips, or take the longer walk to Outpost.
• Building in snow with no warm clothes Cold drains you continuously and the biome forgives nothing. Hoodie, pants and boots before you pick the pretty corner of the map.
• Fighting a group at their base at their hour There is no matchmaking in Rust and no honour system either. You are allowed to leave, farm somewhere quieter, and come back when the server is thin.