Rust Beginner's Guide (2026): Your First Wipe

You spawn naked on a beach with a rock and a torch, and within about twenty minutes someone will probably try to kill you. That's Rust. Your first goal isn't to win a fight or raid a base — it's to gather a bit of wood, put a locked door between you and everyone else, and live long enough to do it again. Get that far and you're already ahead of most fresh spawns.

This is a game about the wipe cycle, and everything you build gets deleted on a schedule. So don't get attached. Learn the loop, and each wipe you'll get further, faster.

The first ten minutes

Punch a few trees and hit some of the grey stone nodes lying around — you're after roughly 100 wood and enough stone to make tools. Your rock is slow and terrible, so the first thing you craft is a Stone Hatchet (40 wood, 80 stone) for wood and a Stone Pickaxe for ore. Both are free to make, no workbench needed.

While you're at it, grab hemp (the little green bushes) for cloth, and kill a couple of animals for meat and leather. Cloth matters more than it looks — you need it for a sleeping bag, and a sleeping bag is your respawn point. Without one, dying sends you back to a random beach, usually nowhere near your stuff.

Keep moving while you gather. Standing still on the beach with a rock is how you become someone else's first kill of the wipe.

Craft a sleeping bag first, then a base

The moment you have 30 cloth, make a sleeping bag and drop it somewhere quiet, away from the coast and off the main roads. This is the single most important thing a new player skips. Die without one and you lose your gathering progress and your location. Die with one and you're back in seconds. Bags have a cooldown, so a lot of players place two or three. It's cheap insurance.

Your first base: keep it tiny

Don't build a mansion on day one. A 2x1 — two floors' worth of squares — is plenty to start: room for a sleeping bag, a box, and later a furnace and workbench. Small bases are cheap to maintain and don't scream "loot in here" to every roaming player.

Place a Tool Cupboard in it immediately. The TC is what stops your base from decaying and what stops other people building onto it. No TC, and your walls rot on a timer even if nobody touches them. Put a door on, and put a code lock on the door. An unlocked door is an open invitation.

Building tiers, and why stone is the sweet spot

Everything you build starts as twig — 10 HP, and it decays in an hour. Twig is free but useless for defence; anyone can punch through it. Upgrade with a hammer as soon as you gather the materials.

Here's what each tier actually gives you, straight from the current build:

Wood is a stepping stone — it burns to a fire and dies to a couple of satchels, so don't sleep behind it longer than you have to. Stone is where most players live. It's cheap enough to afford early, immune to fire, and forces raiders to bring real explosives. Sheet metal and armored are stronger but cost a lot more upkeep, which matters more than the HP number when you're solo. Want the exact cost and decay for a tier? The building tiers page lays each one out.

Upkeep: the tax nobody warns you about

A tool cupboard doesn't protect your base for free. It drains resources every day to pay upkeep — roughly 10% of your total build cost per 24 hours at a full TC. Bigger base, bigger bill. Let the cupboard run dry and your structures start decaying exactly like they had no TC at all, and then you log in to no walls.

Build only as big as you can afford to feed. A solo running a huge stone compound they can't stock is worse off than a solo in a tight 2x2 they can. If you want to see the daily drain before you commit, the upkeep calculator does the math from your build cost.

Doors, airlocks, and not getting door-camped

Doors have their own health, separate from walls. A Wooden Door is 200 HP and gets meleed down in a fight; a Sheet Metal Door is 250 HP and, more importantly, needs explosives to break. Get to sheet metal doors as fast as you can afford the metal.

Build an airlock — two doors with a small gap between them — on your main entrance. It means you're never standing wide open to the outside when you go in and out. Without one, someone can sit outside, wait for you to open up, and push straight in. Getting door-camped as a fresh spawn is a rite of passage, but you only have to learn it once.

Getting your first gun

You don't need an AK to survive the first day. Your realistic early options:

• chevron_rightEoka Pistol (75 wood, 30 metal fragments) — dirt cheap, no workbench. It's wildly unreliable and often won't fire, but "eoka rushing" a distracted player is a real strategy because the gun costs nothing.
• chevron_rightRevolver (25 metal fragments, 25 wood) — cheap, no workbench, actually functional. This is the honest pick for your first proper weapon.
• chevron_rightHunting Bow — quiet, good for hunting and ambushes.

Skip the eoka if you can spare the metal for a revolver. It'll frustrate you less. The bigger guns — the Semi-Automatic Rifle at Workbench 2, the Assault Rifle (AK) at Workbench 3 — come later once you have scrap and components. The weapons list has every gun.

Scrap is the real currency

Wood and stone keep you alive, but scrap is what actually moves you forward. You need it to unlock blueprints and to research at workbenches. Early on, most of your scrap comes from barrels along the roads, crates at low-tier monuments, and recycling components and junk.

A fresh spawn who spends the first hour running roads and cracking barrels will be crafting guns while the guy who only farmed wood is still swinging a hatchet. Roads over resource nodes, early.

Recyclers turn junk into progress

There's a machine at Outpost and Bandit Camp called a recycler, and it's one of the best tools in the game for a new player. Feed it the components you don't need — gears, springs, tarp, sewing kits — and it spits back scrap, metal fragments, and sometimes high quality metal. A single Gear recycles into 1 scrap and 13 metal fragments, which adds up fast when you're clearing barrels.

Don't hoard random loot. If you're not going to use a component, recycle it. The recycle chart shows exactly what everything breaks down into so you're not guessing.

Workbenches and blueprints

To craft most of the good stuff, you need a Workbench, and there are three tiers. Each one unlocks a bigger pool of items and lets you spend scrap in the tech tree to learn blueprints. You either research a found item at a research table, or unlock it directly through the workbench for scrap.

Early priority: get a Workbench Level 1 down, then work toward Level 2 for the Semi-Automatic Rifle and the tools that make farming faster. Don't blow your first pile of scrap on something you can't defend yet. If you're unsure what to unlock first, the tech tree guide walks the path per tier, and the craft calculator tells you the raw cost of anything before you commit.

Monuments: where the loot lives

The named locations on the map — the ones with buildings and crates — are monuments, and they're how you gear up past the beach. Start soft. Outpost and Bandit Camp are safe zones: no PvP inside, a recycler, vending machines, and a place to sell scrap. Learn these first. Gas stations, supermarkets, and mining outposts are tiny, low-risk crate runs. Bigger monuments like Airfield, Launch Site, and the oil rigs have far better loot but radiation, locked crates, and other players who want the same thing. Save those for when you have armor and a gun.

The monuments guide ranks them and tells you what you'll find, so you don't wander into a high-rad zone in cloth armor.

Radiation, cold, and the environment trying to kill you

Rust doesn't only kill you with players. Some monuments have radiation that ticks your health down without proper gear — a Hazmat Suit or radiation-resistant clothing handles most of it. The snow biome will freeze you if you're underdressed, and the desert cooks you at night. Keep a set of basic clothing on, carry food and water, and don't sprint into the arctic in a t-shirt. Animals are a threat too, especially bears; early on, a bow and a bit of patience beats trying to melee a bear and dying to it.

The wipe cycle: nothing you build lasts

Rust servers wipe on a schedule. The big one is the force wipe — the first Thursday of every month, around 19:00 UTC, when Facepunch pushes the monthly update. On force wipe, the map resets and your blueprints reset too. Plenty of servers also run a weekly wipe on top of that, usually a map-only reset.

So there's no point turtling forever. Play the wipe: rush progression early when everyone's weak, do your fighting and raiding in the mid-wipe window, and don't cry when it all disappears. It's supposed to. The wipe timer shows exactly when the next one hits so you can plan your session.

Getting raided (and how much it actually costs)

At some point, someone will try to break into your base. Knowing what your defences are worth helps you build smart instead of paranoid. A Sheet Metal Door takes 1 C4 or 4 satchel charges to blow. A Stone Wall is 2 C4. A Sheet Metal Wall jumps to 4 C4. Every one of those costs the raider sulfur and time, and that's the whole point — you don't need to be un-raidable, you need to cost more than you're worth.

As a solo, your best defence isn't thicker walls, it's being boring and hidden. A small stone base tucked in the trees that nobody notices survives longer than a giant metal fortress on open ground. If you want to see what any wall or door costs to break, the raid calculator has every structure.

Roam, KOS, and reading other players

Out in the world, assume KOS — kill on sight. Most players will shoot first, especially near monuments. That doesn't mean everyone's hostile; some will let you pass, a few will even help. But you plan for the worst.

Move between cover, not down the middle of roads. Listen — footsteps, gunshots, and doors are all audible and tell you where people are. And pick your fights: a fresh spawn with a rock has no business pushing a guy with a rifle. Back off, gear up, come back.

Ten things I'd tell a new player

1. chevron_rightPlace a sleeping bag before you do anything else.
2. chevron_rightLive in stone, not wood — it's the best value tier for a solo.
3. chevron_rightPut a code lock on every door and build an airlock on your entrance.
4. chevron_rightRun roads and smash barrels for scrap, not resource nodes.
5. chevron_rightRecycle everything you won't use.
6. chevron_rightKeep your tool cupboard stocked or your base rots.
7. chevron_rightDon't build bigger than you can pay upkeep for.
8. chevron_rightLearn Outpost and Bandit Camp before touching the scary monuments.
9. chevron_rightPlay the wipe — rush early, don't hoard, expect the reset.
10. chevron_rightBeing hidden beats being fortified when you're solo.

Do those and you'll go from beach-death fodder to a player who actually has a base, a gun, and a plan. That's the whole early game. The rest — raiding, electricity, farming god genetics, running a group — builds on this same loop.