Rust Boats Guide: Every Watercraft, Prices & Where to Find Them

Most players treat the ocean as the edge of the map. It isn't. It's the safest highway in Rust — no roads to camp, no roam gangs, and every coastal monument, oil rig, and underwater lab is a short ride away if you have a hull under you. This Rust boats guide covers every watercraft in the game: the kayak, rowboat, RHIB, tugboat, and both submarines, with real datamined stats, where each one actually comes from, and which is worth your scrap. It also covers the two things the Naval update bolted onto all of this — building your own boat from parts, and the Deep Sea region that finally gave the ocean a loot table.

The short version: a rowboat is all most players ever need, the RHIB is the squad upgrade, the tugboat is a floating base rather than a taxi, and the subs exist for one job — underwater labs and torpedoing other boats.

Every Boat at a Glance

These numbers are datamined straight from Rust's server files, not copied off a wiki:

Each vehicle page linked above has the full datamined stat sheet, and the vehicles hub covers everything with an engine, land and air included.

Kayak: The Free Boat

The kayak is the only watercraft you can realistically have within your first hour. It's craftable at a Workbench Level 1 for 200 wood, 75 metal fragments, and 50 cloth, and the blueprint is a token 15 scrap to research. You'll also need a Paddle — 200 wood, 15 metal fragments, and a metal blade, no workbench required — which doubles as a serviceable melee weapon in a pinch. Fishing Villages also sell kayaks and paddles outright if you'd rather not craft.

Two seats, 200 health, zero fuel. That last part is the whole pitch: a kayak never strands you because the tank ran dry. It's slow and it's fragile, but for a quiet paddle out to a fishing spot or a sneaky coastal approach where an engine would give you away, it earns its keep. I keep the blueprint learned on every wipe.

Rowboat: The Boat You'll Actually Use

The rowboat is Rust's default watercraft and honestly its best value. Four seats, 400 health, a small storage box, and a sip of a fuel bill — 0.1 low grade per second, so a single stack of low grade keeps you moving for ages. Six low grade a minute is cheap enough that fuel stops being a decision.

You get one two ways: find one spawned along the shoreline — walk the beaches after wipe and you'll trip over them — or buy one from the boat vendor at a Fishing Village. Either way, check the engine for leftover fuel before you push off; abandoned boats often have a splash left in the tank.

For fishing runs, dive site loops, and general coastal errands, this is the boat. If you're planning to sit offshore with a rod out, the fishing guide is built around exactly this setup.

RHIB: The Squad Boat

The RHIB is the rowboat's bigger, angrier sibling: six seats, 500 health, more storage, and an engine with two and a half times the thrust. It drinks accordingly — 0.25 low grade per second, 15 a minute — so bring a real fuel stack, not pocket change.

RHIBs are sold at the Fishing Village boat vendor. You'll also see NPC RHIBs crewed by scientists around events; those aren't yours until the scientists aren't anyone's.

This is the boat for a group hitting oil rig or moving a raid kit along the coast. Fast enough to outrun a rowboat, tanky enough to eat some incoming fire on approach, and big enough that your whole team plus loot fits in one trip. Solo players can skip it — you're paying RHIB fuel prices for seats you'll never fill.

Tugboat: The Floating Base

The tugboat is a different category of thing. 3,000 health — six times a RHIB — with a claimable, buildable interior. You claim a tugboat the way you'd claim a Tool Cupboard, and from then on it's yours: lock the doors, place deployables inside, and you're living on the water.

You don't buy a tugboat. You find one out on the water and take the helm. The engine is a monster (its datamined thrust is over thirty times a RHIB's, moving a lot more ship) and it burns fuel like one: 0.33 low grade per second, roughly 20 a minute. You don't commute in a tugboat. You relocate in it.

The floating-base angle is real. A tugboat parked offshore has no neighbors, no door campers, and can up and move the entire base when the grid gets hot. The trade-off is that your whole life is inside 3,000 HP of hull with no honeycomb — a determined raider with explosives can open it like any other base, and you can't rebuild walls mid-fight. Treat it as a mobile forward base for a coastal wipe, not a main.

Submarines: Solo and Duo

Both submarines are Fishing Village exclusives: the Solo Submarine costs 200 scrap and the Duo costs 300. The Solo is a one-seater with 500 health and its fuel tank mounted externally at the rear — worth knowing, because refueling means climbing out. The Duo carries two (driver plus a torpedo gunner), has 700 health, and its fuel is accessed from inside via the passenger seat.

Fuel burn is modest for both — around 0.025–0.03 low grade per second at idle and 0.13–0.15 flat out — and the controls are identical between the two. The Duo's extra 100 scrap buys torpedoes and the second seat.

Below the surface, the clock is the real enemy. Submerging starts a hull-air timer — you get roughly ten minutes of internal oxygen, tracked by an icon above your health bar, and when the submarine icon flips to a lung the hull air is spent: surface, or find a moon pool. The other classic fatal error is muscle memory: Spacebar does not ascend, it ejects you into open water. Shift surfaces, Ctrl dives. The full key list is on the submarine controls page.

Torpedoes are cheap enough to keep stocked — one metal pipe and 30 gunpowder crafts five torpedoes at a Workbench 2 — but only the Duo can fire them; the Solo has no weapons at all, so its defence is depth and dry land.

Subs exist for underwater labs and ambushing surface boats. If labs are your loot route, the Duo is the better buy: more health, a gunner, and torpedo pressure on anything that follows you home.

Building Your Own Boat

The Naval update (February 2026) added the thing players asked about for a decade: genuinely buildable boats. The flow is simple. Craft a Boat Building Plan, deploy a Boat Building Station out in open water — it's a floating workspace, and it needs proper depth, not a beach shallows — then build your hull with the plan and bolt on parts. Every piece of the kit is craftable, and the costs are modest:

A few things the item data spells out that players miss. Sails are free propulsion — slow, but they cost nothing to run, and more sails means more speed. Engines are the opposite deal: punchy, stackable for speed, and they drink low grade the whole time they're on. The steering wheel is lockable, so your ship isn't public transport the moment you step off the helm, and the anchor exists specifically to stop the boat drifting while you're aboard a wreck or asleep. Planks are for boarding other people's boats, which tells you everything about where this system ends up. The cannon's own description admits "questionable accuracy but high damage" — it's a siege weapon, not a sniper rifle, and cannonballs are cheap enough to waste ranging shots.

The follow-up Shipshape update (March 2026) is what made living aboard actually viable: electricity, industrial, and water IO items can now be deployed on boats, moving vessels impose aim sway on everyone shooting from the deck, and cannon hits slow the target boat — so naval fights have real stakes beyond hull damage. It also added boat repair stations on Deep Sea islands and destructible sunken wrecks that give up loot block by block.

If "can you make a boat in Rust" brought you to this page: yes, properly, and for mostly wood.

The Deep Sea: Why the Ocean Finally Pays

The other half of the Naval update is the Deep Sea — a region past the map edge that opens and closes like a world event, and the first real answer to "why do I even own a boat mid-wipe." You need a hull that can take a hit to go out there: a RHIB, a player-built boat, or something you've stolen. A rowboat does not belong in the Deep Sea.

What's out there, per the update itself:

• chevron_rightGhost Ships — stationary, monument-like wrecks scattered through the deep, filled with loot and guarded by scientists on deck and on patrol around them. Some carry locked crates you hack under pressure, which is exactly the oil-rig formula transplanted to open water.
• chevron_rightFloating Cities — four variants, with docks to tie up at, NPC vendors, a farming barge, and a casino at the centre. Think of them as the ocean's Bandit Camp: a place to sell, resupply, and gamble away the run's profit without sailing home.
• chevron_rightTropical islands — a separate biome with its own resources, sometimes ruins, sometimes ore. Nothing respawns in the Deep Sea and there's no building out there, so everything is first come, first served.
• chevron_rightScientist boats — crews roaming in RHIBs and PT Boats looking for players to engage. They guard the hacked crates too.

The PT Boat deserves its own mention because you can take one. It's the scientists' gunboat — 1,000 health, seven seats, and a 0.3 low grade/sec burn in the datamined stats, with turrets aboard — and a cleared crew leaves an empty, drivable warship. Killing the scientists on one and sailing their own boat into a Ghost Ship fight is the best piracy loop Rust has ever had. It's Deep Sea exclusive, so if you want one on the main map, someone had to bring it home.

Fuel, Sinking, and Keeping Your Boat Alive

Every powered boat runs on low grade fuel, so your boat habit is really an animal-fat habit — which is one more reason fishing and boats pair so well, since fish gut into animal fat. Budget from the burn rates above: a rowboat errand costs almost nothing, a long RHIB haul wants a stack, and a tugboat move is an event you fuel up for.

Boats take damage from gunfire, collisions, and explosives, and a dead boat sinks — with your storage going down with it, so don't ferry your best loot in a hull at half health. Repairs are simple: hit it with a hammer while carrying resources, same as patching a wall, and do it before you leave shore rather than mid-firefight. Left unattended, boats decay over time like everything else in Rust; park yours by your base where you'll actually use it rather than stashing one "for later" and coming back to driftwood.

One raid note: boats are also raid tools. A RHIB full of raiders is the classic soft approach on a coastal base, and if you're costing out what it takes to crack a boat — or a tugboat someone's living in — the boat raid calculator prices it from the same damage data.

Which Boat Should You Get?

• chevron_rightFresh spawn: walk the beach for a free rowboat; craft a kayak if the coast is picked clean.
• chevron_rightSolo/duo doing fishing and dive sites: rowboat. Cheap fuel, storage box, done.
• chevron_rightSquad hitting oil rig: RHIB. Six seats and the health to survive the approach.
• chevron_rightUnderwater labs: Duo Submarine, 300 scrap at Fishing Village.
• chevron_rightLiving on the water: claim a tugboat and embrace the pirate life — just respect the fuel bill.
• chevron_rightDeep Sea runs: a RHIB at minimum, or a built boat with sails for the fuel-free cruise out — and steal a PT Boat if the chance comes up.