5 Tips to Play Rust with Friends

Play Rust with Friend

Rust is one of the most fun games to play with your friends. Like Dota 2 or CS:GO, the teamwork involved creates a lot of excitement. But if you’re new to it, the challenges you’ll face might overwhelm you. Unless, of course, you understand the basic principles and know what to avoid. Here are 5 tips to play Rust with friends.

Play Rust with Friends

Play Rust with friends: Get Good at Gathering Resources

In Rust, everything revolves around resources. The more you can gather, the better. You will need them to build a strong base, craft tools, etc. And there are many categories of them:

  • Metal Fragments
  • Stones
  • Wood
  • Metal Ore
  • Fertilizer
  • Crude Oil
  • Explosives
  • Etc.

The better you gather resources, the more successful you will be in general, and the better to play Rust with friends.

One thing that you can do to improve your resource gathering capacity is to craft tools such as a hatched or a pickaxe. The first one will allow you to gather wood faster, while the second one will speed up the process of mining stone, metal, and sulfur ore. The value of these tools is underrated, so make sure you use them!

When you gather resources, try to do it during the daytime. Nights are pretty dangerous because it’s easy to lose your way and many players are on the hunt.

The initial resources you have should be utilized to gather new ones immediately. Search for wood and stone and fill up your inventory.

Build a Safe Base ASAP

To play Rust with friends one of the fundamental elements in Rust is the base. This is where you’ll keep your loot, and this is where you’ll make your stand when other players try to steal what’s yours.

Rust bunker bases require resources and can be of many types. The game gives players much freedom when it comes to this part, and you can get an edge by studying one of the current robust base designs. 

YouTube is full of good videos about this. The recipes are quite sophisticated, so you must study them yourself and experiment. Two things to keep in mind: resources and the number of players.

The more sophisticated the base, the more resources it costs to build it. If you can’t afford a strong base that gives you a lot of protection, at least build something viable until you can afford something better.

If you want to play Rust with friends, don’t build a base designed for just one person. Build it for 2, 3, etc., depending on your group size.

When you build your base, make sure you choose a good location. The last thing you want is to place it where others can easily spot and raid it. 

Another thing to keep in mind here is that the goal of a bunker base is to make you more survivable and to protect your loot better. Therefore, you should strive to make it as hard to raid as possible. If the looters would need to use a lot of resources in the attempt while having a low chance of success, this will act as a significant deterrent.

Now and then, someone will get cocky or will feel like you can be conquered. Strategize ahead for such moments and use the advantage of fighting the enemy on your ground. In such situations, the better your base design, the more significant the advantage of the defender. 

Place Your Sleeping Bag in a Safe Location

In Rust, your sleeping bag is a marker on the map that determines where you’ll respawn after you die. And make no mistake, you will eventually get killed.

Players generally place their sleeping bags in what is called a suicide bunker. This is a place where other people cannot enter, but the bad part is that you cannot join it yourself either unless you die. Hence the name, suicide bunker.

Inside the bunker, you should also store a TC or a tool cupboard with your sleeping bag. These two items will give you a safe place to respawn and prevent the bunker from decaying.

Try to synchronize with friends and choose a wise location for your sleeping bag when playing with friends. Some people like to put their sleeping bags very close to each other, while others like to maintain distance to cover more ground. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.

Find the Right Server for You

Some Rust servers are very crowded and full of people who are experts at the game. Others are relatively empty and easier for beginners. Remember that this game is played on servers, just like Team Fortress 2, and the difference between these servers can be huge.

One of the significant advantages of less populated servers is the amount of time and space you have to gather resources without worrying about being killed or raided. With fewer people around, the chance of that happening is much lower.

Highly populated servers are suitable for those who know exactly what they’re doing and are searching for a fight.

Expect Looters – They Will Eventually Come

Looters are your worst enemy. But then again, you’ll be one of them yourself. The game was designed to invite people to fight each other for resources, space, and loot. Rust is not a pacifistic game. Instead, it gives you the feeling of an ancient world in which the rules of engagement are poorly defined. So you can’t trust anyone.

In the anticipation that looters will come, you need to devise a plan for how you will stop them from killing you and taking what’s yours. Good experience with first-person shooters can help, especially when it comes to aiming and landing headshots, but Rust is much more complicated.

This is a game in which strategy can become highly sophisticated, and the better you strategize, the higher your chances of thriving.

Posted by
William Westerlund

William is an author, editor, and an avid gamer with over 10.000 hours in CS:GO (Counter-Strike 2). He also enjoys playing Rust, Dota 2, and TF2 but never became a top 1% player in any of those games.