These Tips are Primarily for New Players:

Maintain Full HP:

• Try to keep your HP at 100%. It may sound obvious, but many players—even some with experience—enter fights with low health. Your best chances of winning fights are when you’re at full health.

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, increasing your chances of winning.

Hover Loot:

• Use hover looting to grab items faster. You can even equip clothing directly onto your character while looting, 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.
• The quests at the large barn can give you scrap for hunting boar or deer. There’s also a treasure hunt quest that is usually profitable and can be repeated every hour. After an hour on the server, you can complete the quest, respawn, and start it again. For more details, check out this YouTube video Here.

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.

Collecting Wood:

• Farming wood can be time consuming. An alternative is to farm stone and trade 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 will make creaking sounds before they fall. Instead of fully cutting down one tree at a time, get several trees to their last hit. Then, finish them all off at once to reduce the chance of being detected. It is explained in more detail Here.
• Consider making wood teas, as even a basic tea can significantly increase your wood yield.

Farming:

• Farming is a great way to sustain yourself with food and cloth from hemp plants. You can also farm berries to make beneficial teas.

Teas:

• Teas provide various buffs, like increased HP, and can boost your yields of wood, ores, and scrap. They can be a game changer, especially for resource collection.

Fishing:

• Fishing is an underrated method of gathering food, low grade fuel, blue keycards, and scrap, especially at fishing villages.
• You can also create fishing trap farms for passive income. Some of the content creators listed on this site have in depth videos on how to efficiently set them up.

Building:

• Start with the Basics: When building, always consider the terrain and the resources you have available. If you don’t have enough materials to construct a 1x1 base with a door, you can 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 good idea. Ensure that you honeycomb your base for added protection, and place your doors strategically to create an airlock. This will make it harder for raiders or door campers to enter your base directly.
• 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 more advanced base designs, check out the Content Creator tab where I’ve listed some YouTubers who specialize in creating strong, efficient base designs. These can help you find the best base layout for your playstyle and resources.

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.

Fighting NPC's:

• Hazmats are a common choice for nearly everything in Rust due to their convenience, but you aren't just limiting your protection against players, you're also severely limiting your protection against NPCs like scientists, auto turrets, dwellers, bradley, etc. This causes you to spend more time and resources on healing. It is explained in more detail Here.

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-mid game gear loadouts.

• 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.