Zunayed101
- Here's a beginner's guide with tips and tricks for new players in Rust.
- Picking a Server
- Getting Off the Beach
- Choosing a Base Location
- Building the First Base
- Weapons and Gear
- Furnace and Progression
- General Tips
Here's a beginner's guide with tips and tricks for new players in Rust.
Rust throws new players straight into the deep end. Everything from server choice to base building has a learning curve, but getting the basics right early makes the whole experience far less punishing.
Picking a Server
Start on an official low-population Rust server - somewhere between 30 and 50 players is ideal. Too many players means constant competition for loot and monuments. Too few means no PvP practice, which is a core part of the game.
Check when a server last wiped before joining - a fresh wipe gives everyone an equal start. Servers wipe on different schedules, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, so pick one that matches how much time is available to play.
Getting Off the Beach
Spawning happens on the beach with nothing but a rock and a torch. The goal is to get off the beach as fast as possible. Pick up everything along the way - wood, stone, metal ore, sulfur, and hemp plants.
Three hemp plants are enough to craft a Sleeping Bag, which acts as a respawn point. Place one down early and keep crafting more along the way to the chosen base location. Each one placed is progress saved if death happens.
Keep health at 100 at all times. Bandages are cheap to craft from cloth and heal five health each while stopping bleeding. Staying at full health means surviving a first hit that would otherwise be a one-shot kill.
Choosing a Base Location
Open the map with G and right-click to place a marker. Look for an area near monuments, roads, and train lines, but not so busy that large groups are already settled there.
For solo players, a dense forest area is ideal in Rust - resources are plentiful, and a small base is much easier to hide among the trees. Avoid deserts early on, as resources are more limited there.
Building the First Base
Craft a Building Plan and a Hammer. Place two foundations with a triangle at the front, wall frames for double doors, and fill in the rest with walls and a ceiling.
Always make sure walls are placed with the soft side facing inward - the jagged or rough texture faces outward. Soft-sided walls can be breached much more quickly, so getting this wrong is a serious vulnerability.
Place a Tool Cupboard immediately and lock it. Without one, the base decays. Add resources to it to cover the upkeep timer.
Place it in the corner of the base and keep it behind as many doors as possible - it is the most important thing to protect. Add a Sleeping Bag inside so respawning back into the base is possible after dying.
Add an airlock as soon as possible - two doors between the outside world and the interior. Always close the inner door before opening the outer one. If someone camps the entrance and kills the player outside, they cannot just walk straight into the base.
Upgrade everything to stone as fast as possible. Wood breaks quickly, and raiders will walk through it. Do not forget to upgrade door frames - they are easy to miss and leave a wooden weak point even when everything else is stone.
Weapons and Gear
A Crossbow and Nail Gun work well together early on. The crossbow hits hard from range, while the nail gun fires faster up close. Pair them with a Wooden Shield, some Bone Armor, and Bandages for a solid starting kit.
Keep a spare kit inside the base so getting back out after dying does not require starting from scratch.
Furnace and Progression
Kill animals to get Animal Fat, which, combined with cloth, makes Low Grade Fuel. Use that to craft a Furnace and start smelting Metal Ore into Metal Fragments. Metal fragments are needed to upgrade wooden doors to sheet metal and to craft the Tier 1 Workbench.
The workbench unlocks crafting and researching better gear in Rust. Use a Research Table to unlock blueprints from found items for far less scrap than going through the full tech tree.
General Tips
Loot runs should be frequent and small rather than rare and large. Dying with a full inventory is far more painful than dying with very little. Collect Scrap Metal constantly - there is never enough of it.
Use nighttime to chop trees under the cover of darkness rather than mining stone, which is harder to see and farm at night. Place a map marker on the base so finding it in the dark is not a problem.
Stay away from bases with Auto Turrets on them - they will shoot on sight. The Patrol Helicopter will also target anyone carrying weapons or wearing armor, so put those away if one flies overhead in Rust.
Also, check out our other guides below :
