Softcore 2.0: Rust's Raid Windows and 2x Rates Explained

Softcore used to be the mode nobody talked about. The Common Ground update changed that by giving it two things Rust has never had on an official mode: a fixed raid window and 2x gather rates. If you've ever quit a wipe because you got offline-raided at 4am, this is aimed squarely at you.

Raid windows: the headline change

By default, raids can only happen between 6pm and 9pm local time. Outside that three-hour window, building blocks and doors cannot be raided at all.

That is a genuine structural change, not a tweak. On a standard server your base is a 24-hour liability — the whole offline-raiding meta exists because your walls are breakable while you sleep. Softcore compresses that exposure into three predictable hours you can actually plan around.

The gap you need to know about

Protection covers building blocks and doors. It does not cover deployables — those stay fair game outside the window.

In practice that means anything outside your walls is still on the menu around the clock: external TCs, furnaces, boxes in an un-walled compound, turrets on the roofline. Softcore protects your *structure*, not your stuff. Plan your base so nothing that matters lives outside a wall, and check what each piece actually costs to break in the raid calculator.

2x gather rates

Softcore now gathers at 2x on trees, ores, harvestable corpses and collectables. The one carve-out is player-planted growables — your farm still grows at normal speed, so genetics and planters aren't trivialised.

Doubling nodes and trees but not crops is a smarter line than a blanket 2x. It kills the tedious part of Rust — the third hour of hitting the same sulfur node — while leaving farming as an actual skill with a real time cost. If you're building one, the farming guide still applies unchanged.

How this compares to vanilla and modded

• chevron_rightVanilla — 1x rates, raidable 24/7. The purest version and still where the highest-level play happens, but it demands you treat Rust like a second job.
• chevron_rightSoftcore — 2x gathering, three-hour raid window, official mode maintained by Facepunch. The middle ground that didn't properly exist before.
• chevron_rightModded (2x/3x/5x) — faster rates, but rules, plugins and admin quality vary wildly server to server. Great fun, zero consistency.

The interesting bit is that Softcore now overlaps heavily with what most people actually wanted from a modded 2x server — but with Facepunch's own rules and no plugin roulette. If you've been playing modded purely to avoid the grind, Softcore is worth a wipe. Browse what's live on the server finder.

Who Softcore is for now

It's for you if you have a job, a timezone that doesn't match your server's population, or you're tired of logging in to a hole in your wall. A three-hour window means you can defend your own base — which is the thing Rust has always promised and rarely delivered for anyone with commitments.

It isn't for you if the 24-hour threat is the point. A lot of what makes Rust *Rust* is that the danger never switches off; knowing your walls are invincible for 21 hours a day genuinely changes how the game feels. Some players will find that hollow, and that's a fair reaction rather than a wrong one.

Worth being clear on one thing: Softcore doesn't make you safe. You can still be killed anywhere, anytime, and your deployables are always raidable. It narrows *when your base can be broken into*, not whether you're at risk.

Does it change how you build?

Yes, and most people haven't adjusted yet. If raids are compressed into a known three-hour block, defensive design matters more than decay-proof stealth — you know exactly when you need to be online and behind a turret, so a base built to be *held* beats a base built to be *missed*.

It also raises the value of everything being inside your walls, given the deployable gap above. Bunkers and compact cores get better; sprawling compounds with external farms get worse. The base designs section has builds that suit both, and the raiding guide is worth a read from the other side — knowing how you'd break your own base is the fastest way to find its weak point.