Rust Basic Survival Guide

Rust is a very tough game that demands a substantial time investment if you want to become good and enjoy yourself. Matches last one month but are made up of one-week games called wipes. Each week, there’s a server reset, and you lose most of your progress. And once a month, everything is erased. Here we will talk about Rust basic survival guide.

When playing this survival game, you must follow some basic rules. Rust is a brutal game in which hours of pure grind can be lost in seconds because of an unexpected death. This can lead to frustration. Which is why Rust is not as popular as other great games on Steam and only has around 1-2 million players.

Rust Tips for Improved Survivability

Here are a few tips that all the experienced players will give you:

Gather Resources Quickly but Safely

When you play Rust, the first thing that you must do is start farming stone and wood. Some of the more valuable materials are not accessible immediately. And you’ll need to search for them in crates and monuments that can be looted.

To gather resources safely, pick a server that’s not too populated and isn’t several days into the wipe. If you don’t choose the right server for your skill level or join too late, you’ll encounter plenty of other players who have spent many hours building a powerful base and crafting advanced weapons that can kill you with ease.

To gather resources faster, you will need to craft tools that speed up the process. Such as a stone pickaxe or a hatchet (for gathering wood). As soon as you have them, you will gather wood, stone, metal, and sulfur ore a lot more efficiently.

One thing to remember is that resource gathering is best done at night when most players are sleeping. If you do it during the day and aren’t well equipped, try to stay as far as possible from everyone else. In Rust, trust is mostly an illusion. And players will kill you as soon as the opportunity arises just to steal your loot.

Build Your Base As Soon As You Can

Rust players often make the mistake of delaying the base for too long and hoping that they can find enough materials to build something amazing. This is a bad idea that will get you killed in most cases. You need a base to store your loot, and even if it’s not perfectly safe, it’s still better than nothing.

When you build your base, make sure that it has a TC (tool cupboard) and that it’s placed in a safe location. Do not build it in a place that attracts a lot of attention.

A decent bunker base will keep you much safer at night and protect your loot from most players.

Rust Basic Survival Guide

Find a Good Place for Your Sleeping Bag

Your sleeping bag is essentially your respawn point. If you get killed, this is where you’ll restart your adventure. Any in-game tutorial will tell you to build a suicide bunker and leave your sleeping bag there. 

Such a place has the disadvantage that you can’t enter it without dying, but it’s a good safety net in case you get killed and want to ensure that you’ll get a decent reset.

Search for Valuable Resources

Initially, you may be contempt with finding lots of wood, stone, and metal fragments, but eventually you’ll want to work your way up the ladder. And to do that, you will need to find valuable resources such as crude oil,  fertilizer, and much more.

Gathering resources and materials requires you to learn the types of monuments you can loot and how they can be looted efficiently. Some require radiation protection, while others don’t pose any threat to you except in the presence of other players.

The more resources you find, the faster you’ll reach higher levels of development. In that sense, Rust is very similar to Age of Empires and other RTS games.

Your items must be returned to the base and kept in storage boxes. Each storage box will give you plenty of space for your loot, and as long as your base location is good, your stuff will usually be safe.

Avoid Fights

Rust Basic Survival Guide

Don’t get into fights if you’re not ready to fight. Make sure you have at least basic weaponry before attempting to kill someone. Until then, it is much wiser to farm and loot as much as you can. The goal of the game is not to fight continuously, although you will want to start doing that eventually.

The rules allow you to play in many different ways, and if you’re a novice, it’s best to avoid fights at all costs in the first few hours of a round.

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.