Building: What You Need To Know

Basics Of A Good Base

In Rust, you have the freedom to make your base in any way you want. But there are a few things that all suitable bases have in common.

Locks

While key locks are great for the beginning of the game, you’ll want to upgrade to code locks as soon as possible. Key locks no longer require a key for the player that placed the lock (which is excellent for a solo player). However, they’re incredibly annoying if you play with anyone else. A code lock allows you to enter the code once, and you can automatically open the door whenever; make sure never to give your base codes out to strangers!

Tool Cupboard

This is the single most important item in your base. Whoever has access to your tool cupboard can build, upgrade, and demolish in your building's authorized area. Ensure that only completely trusted people have access and that it's tough to get to.

A tool cupboard prevents most building and all upgrading within its building privilege zone for unauthorized players. This zone extends 16 meters out from each outer building component such as a wall or foundation. The tool cupboard can be placed anywhere in your build and covers any connected wall or foundation. You add resources to the tool cupboard, and the cupboard reports how many resources are required to avoid decay with 16 storage slots to hold building materials that are depleted over time.

Twig floors and ladders can be placed within building privilege zones without tool cupboard access.

Examples of tool cupboard coverage using stone barricades:

Airlock

An airlock is where you have two or more doors between the innermost part of your base and the outside. It assures that if someone chases you to your base or door camps you, they won't immediately have access to your loot. The bigger your base, the more airlocks you'll want/need.

Upgrades

There are currently 4 upgrade tiers in building: Wood, Stone, Sheet metal, and Armored. 

Wood is the weakest at 250 health per wall. It can be shredded by fire and hatchets, and costs 100 to 200 wood depending on the building piece to upgrade. Easy and quick to upgrade to, but just having a wood base makes you a huge target.  You’ll want to upgrade as soon as you can to avoid losing everything to a single flamethrower.

Stone is second up, at 500 health per wall. It is completely immune to fire but can be picked down by pickaxes. It costs 150 to 300 stone depending on the building piece to upgrade.

Sheet Metal comes in third at 1000 health per wall. It’s immune to fire, and is also almost completely immune to melee weapons from the outside, most breaking before dealing a single point of damage. At a cost of only 100 to 200 metal fragments depending on the building piece to upgrade, it’ll make you look that much more menacing.

Armored is the strongest upgrade at a whopping 2000 health points. It’s immune to fire as well as melee weapons and tools from the outside. Not the best without reason, it costs 13 to 25 high quality metal depending on the building piece to upgrade to armored. Because of the steep high quality metal cost, these upgrades are rarely seen outside of massive groups, and usually only at the very core of bases.

Each upgrade will increase the amount of ‘extra’ resources of that upgrade needed in your Tool Cupboard (metal walls will require extra metal frags in the tool cupboard etc.) to stop your base decaying.  Make sure you have enough ‘extra’ resources when upgrading to the next level!

Building tiers from left to right: Twig, wood, stone, sheet metal, armored

Soft Side vs. Hard Side

One of the most critical parts of upgrading is accidentally leaving your walls with the soft side facing outward, rendering your upgrades nearly useless.

One way to ensure your walls are not soft-sided is to check their texture. Lighter or smoother textures belong inward, whereas rougher and darker wall textures belong outward.

For example, stone walls from the hard side take 1 damage point per 8 pickaxe hits, but from the soft side, they take 1.2 damage for every hit (so only 7 pickaxes for one stone wall).

Soft sides from left to right: Twig, wood, stone, sheet metal, armored

Doors

Wood doors are suitable for starting out; however, you will want to switch to sheet metal quickly. At only 200 health, wood doors can be taken down in less than a minute with a flamethrower and nearly as quickly with Eoka Pistols or Shotguns.

Sheet Metal Doors are stronger and provide better protection from quick raids. The strongest doors in the game are Garage Doors and Armored Doors, both of which require blueprints to learn or research through the tech tree.

Doors, from left to right: Wood, sheet metal, armored

Raiding

One of the most important, well-liked, incredibly hated, and hardest things to do in Rust is raiding. Raiding mechanics are constantly being tweaked and balanced, as players push this game to its limits. Just about any item that does damage can be used for raiding, but that doesn’t mean it should be.