In Rust, there are many ways to approach a wipe. You could build and decorate your ideal base, create a farm, rush the endgame with the goal of raiding, or simply play however you like.
If you're new to the game, the early stages are fairly similar for everyone. You spawn on the beach with a rock, gather resources, craft tools and/or a bow, and choose a location to build your base.
For solo players, it's important to remember that Rust heavily favors groups. Having teammates significantly increases your chances of success, so don’t get discouraged if things don’t always go your way. The odds are generally stacked against solo players, but that doesn’t mean you can’t thrive.
Below are some fundamental tips that I believe all players, new and experienced, should know and focus on for a successful wipe. Some of these points may seem obvious or repetitive, but my goal is to provide helpful advice for everyone.
Maintain Full HP
Try to keep your health at 100%. It may sound obvious, but many players, even experienced ones, enter fights without full HP.
You can survive a bolt-action rifle headshot while wearing a hazmat suit or wolf headdress if your health is full.
Healing:
If you have more than 100 food and 40 water, you can passively heal using comfort.
50% comfort heals you up to 80 HP.
75% comfort heals you up to 90 HP.
100% comfort heals you to 100 HP.
Medical kits will revive you automatically if you go down while carrying one in your hotbar.
Certain foods provide instant health, making them useful when you're about to bleed out and don’t have time to bandage.
Reviving teammates with syringes is faster than holding ‘E’ and also restores more HP. Using bandages is even faster, though this may not be intentional.
If you're fleeing from enemies shooting at you, pre-medding can be useful. Use a medical syringe at full HP so that when the animation finishes, you instantly recover from any damage taken. You can also cancel the syringe at the last second if you don’t get hit.
Have Multiple Respawn Points
Place multiple sleeping bags around your base, along with a bed inside. This gives you more respawn options during fights near your base, which in turn increases your chances of winning.
Recycling
You receive more resources and scrap when recycling at radtowns than at safe zones like Outpost and Bandit Camp.
Hover Loot
Use hover looting to grab items faster. You can also hover loot clothes directly onto your character, which is useful in high pressure situations.
Building on the Shore
If you’re playing solo or are new to Rust, building near the shore can be a safer option. You can collect scrap from floating junk piles and dive for underwater loot once you’ve gathered diving equipment, which can be found in crates or purchased at fishing villages.
NPC Quests
NPC quests are often overlooked. Quests at the fishing village can reward you with items like a pump shotgun, jackhammer, and medical syringes.
PVP:
If you're playing solo or are new to the game, consider staying near the water. Fighting in the water makes it harder for groups to swarm you, and since enemies can’t respawn unless they have a tugboat, you'll generally have more success in water-based fights. Additionally, escaping is much easier if you have a full diving set.
Proper Clothing
Regardless of your progression in the game, you should always maximize the protection your clothing provides. This video does a great job explaining it Here.
Fighting NPCs
Hazmat suits are a popular choice in Rust due to their convenience, but they offer minimal protection not just against players, but also against NPCs like scientists, auto turrets, tunnel dwellers, and Bradley APC. Wearing a hazmat means you'll take more damage, which results in using more healing resources. This topic is explained in more detail Here.
Using Cover
Whether you're fighting with a bow or an AK, always try to use cover to your advantage. Carrying wooden barricades in your hotbar can provide instant cover when under fire.
Scrap Farming
There are various ways to farm scrap, such as running along roads and breaking barrels or looting radtowns. For solo players, I recommend farming the ocean using a boat and a diving set. This allows you to safely collect floating barrel piles and untie crates from sunken wrecks.
Barn
The quests at the Large Barn can reward you with scrap for hunting boars or deer. There’s also a treasure hunt quest that is usually profitable and can be repeated infinitely after an hour. Once an hour has passed on the server, you can complete the quest, respawn, and start it again. For more details, check out this Here.
Underwater Labs
Underwater Labs are another great option for solo players. Depending on the lab's layout and the skill of the enemies you're facing, it can be relatively easy to hold. However, it can also be countered if you know what you're doing. Using grenades to create space and removing your diving tank before approaching the labs can help you enter silently. Even if you can’t hold the labs, on high pop servers, boarding and ambushing someone who has been farming can still be profitable.
Train Tunnels
Clearing the train tunnels is an excellent way to farm scrap. It is relatively easy to clear, and green crates, tool crates, and brown crates spawn frequently, making it easier to find blueprints. This Video. explains how to clear them efficiently.
Trading
You can trade cloth, fish, honey, corn, and fertilizer for scrap at Bandit Camp. You can also sell farmed goods to other players in exchange for whatever you need, as long as you set up an accessible vending machine.
Base Building:
Building on the Shore
If you're playing solo or are new to Rust, building near the shore can be a safer option. You can collect scrap from floating junk piles and dive for underwater loot once you've obtained diving equipment, which can be found in crates or purchased at fishing villages.
Start with the Basics
When building, always consider the terrain and the resources available. If you don’t have enough materials for a 1x1 base with a door, craft a wooden shelter and place it near your desired build location for temporary protection.
Beginner Friendly Base Design
If you're new to Rust, starting with a simple 2x1 base is a great choice. Honeycomb your base for added protection and place your doors strategically to create an airlock, making it harder for raiders or door campers to get inside.
Upgrade as You Go
Once you gather more resources, focus on upgrading your base from wood to stone, then metal, to make it stronger and more resistant to raids.
Base Inspiration
For advanced base designs, check out the Content Creator tab, where I’ve listed YouTubers who specialize in strong, efficient base layouts. These guides can help you find the best setup based on your playstyle and available resources.
Farming:
Hunting Bears
When hunting bears, you can place a twig foundation and run circles around it to avoid getting hit while keeping the bear’s aggro.
Collecting Wood
Farming wood can be time consuming. A more efficient alternative is farming stone and trading it for wood at Outpost, where you'll get more wood for your effort.
If you choose to chop trees, use the cutting mechanic to your advantage. Trees make creaking sounds before they fall. Instead of cutting down one tree at a time, bring several trees to their last hit, then finish them all off at once to reduce the chance of being detected. More details can be found Here.
Consider making wood teas even a basic tea can significantly increase your wood yield.
Farming Crops
Farming is a great way to sustain yourself with food and cloth from hemp plants. You can also grow berries to craft beneficial teas.
Rust is moving toward a gameplay direction where farming will have a larger impact.
Teas
Teas provide various buffs, such as increased HP and boosted yields for wood, ores, and scrap. They can be a game changer, especially for resource collection.
Teas and farm goods can also be sold in vending machines in exchange for other resources you might be struggling to get.
Fishing
Fishing is an underrated way to gather food, low-grade fuel, blue keycards, and scrap.This is especially good at fishing villages, as there is a fishing quest.
You can also create fishing trap farms for passive income. Some of the content creators listed on this site have in-depth guides on setting them up. This Video explaining how to do it.
Optimizing Crop Genetics
Perfecting crop genes can be tedious, but you can speed up the process using RustBreeder. Simply enter the genes you have, and the site will guide you through crossbreeding.
Finding Nodes & Resources
The best places to find ore nodes are near rock structures and cliffs.
You can check your server’s RustMaps to use the node heat map, which also helps locate animals, berries, hemp, and horses.
Misc:
Stashes
Stashes can be found using a hammer or building plan. Learn how to find them by watching this video Here.
Recycling
You get more resources and scrap when recycling at radtowns than at safe zones like Outpost and Bandit Camp.
Streamer Mode
Streamer Mode is an underused feature in Rust. It automatically assigns a unique, unchangeable username to every account, making it easier to remember player names since they can’t change them to hide. These usernames are usually short and distinct, and I’ve never seen two people with the same name.
However, one downside of Streamer Mode is that most players in chat probably aren’t using it. If you refer to someone by their Streamer Mode name, they likely won’t recognize it.
Another drawback is that Streamer Mode hides the map when you die, which can make it difficult to spawn on unnamed sleeping bags.
Middle Mouse button
You can press this on a craftable item to craft 5 of that item.
High External Walls
A recent change has now allowed players to upgrade High External Wooden walls to Stone if you have a crafted High External Stone wall in your inventory.
Helpful Purchasable Items:
Camouflage Skins
Different environments in Rust call for different camouflage patterns. The effectiveness of camo skins depends on your base location and surroundings. Choose skins that match your primary operating environment.
Transparent Door Skins
Some doors have sections which are transparent, allowing you to see through them to potentially check for doorcampers, even without setting up additional windows in your base.
Enhanced Iron Sight Skins
There are some skins that remove some of the extra bits from the ironsights, giving you a cleaner picture with a bit less clutter.
Unique Craftable Items:
Now we are getting to the stuff that offers a real advantage, other than just some extra or lowered visibility, but actual stats advantages from some of these items. They may only be crafted (at least by default) if you own a skin for the item.
Boonie Hat and Bandana
These two items can only be crafted if you own a skin for them, and offer very good protection for the cloth early game, especially the bandana, as it can be combined with many different head slot items and so is used throughout many early to mid game gear sets.
Frog Boots
For some tarp, these give you very good cold and radiation protection without the need of a workbench. These, plus the boonie hat, bandana, hide poncho, and burlap shirt, pants, and gloves, will give you 100% protection from the cold in the tundra biome, even at night, and I believe is the only primitive gearset able to accomplish this.
Headset
Another twitch drop item, this gives the same bullet protection as the boonie hat plus bandana combo but for 5 less cloth.
Surgeon Suit / Ninja suit
Very similar to the hazmat suit, giving just 5% less protection, this item can be crafted at a tier 1 workbench and doesn't require any blueprints. Fun fact, recycling a pair of tactical gloves gives you all the materials you need to make this outfit. Haul ass to the outpost while smacking some barrels to gather up 40 scrap, and enjoy a 25% damage reduction to your entire body within the first 10 minutes or so of wipe. *Ninja Suit was acquired from a twitch drop, basically same thing as Surgeon Scrubs.
Clatter Helmet
This is effectively just a bucket helmet, but it doesn't require a blueprint to craft. It also puts some lights on your head which makes you a pretty easy target, and the bucket helmet isn't great to begin with, but it's an option.
Beach Towels
These function exactly the same as a sleeping bag and have the same cost, but they are smaller and come by default with many colors that can blend into different areas. Due to their small size, they are often able to be almost completely covered by rocky terrain, and they may allow an extra deployable onto a 1x1 depending on how you configure them.
Chinese Lantern
Functions the same as a normal lantern, but goes on the ceiling, much more convenient and space manageable.
Water Pistol and Soaker
If you are being satchel or beancan raided you can spray the wall or door that is being raided and it will put out the fuze.
Boogie Boards
Let's you move faster in water without needing to buy a boat or kayak, very cheap to craft and could allow you to for instance try to retake oil if you get killed and lost your boat out there. Also keeps you dry so you can swim through arctic waters without pause.
Christmas Lights
In a similar vein to glowing skins, these can be placed within a base wherever you like and don't require electricity. Can be used to mark certain areas or something like a heli landing pad.
Skull Spikes
Can be used to light up an area and I don't believe requires low grade or anything.
Garry's Mod Tool Gun
Like a normal hammer but can repair and upgrade from further away, could be used during raid defense potentially.
Cursed Cauldron
Like a normal fireplace but you can't burn yourself on it, also takes up some extra space and I've heard there are exploits to pass items or light or something through walls I'm not sure.
Hobo Barrel
Like a normal fireplace, can be used as a jump up instead of a furnace if you haven't collected the low grade yet.
Sofa
Cheap default item that boosts comfort, allowing you to regenerate health faster in base once you respawn.
Beach Chair
Same thing as the chair, giving 100% comfort (I haven't tested this but I believe it's true), but is a default BP. Takes up more space.
