Rust Underwater Labs Guide: Getting There, Loot & Surviving the Dive

Buy a Solo Submarine. That's the short version of this whole underwater labs guide. For 200 scrap at a Fishing Village you get a vehicle that carries you to the lab, docks inside it through a moonpool, and waits there as your ride home while you strip crates that most of the server never touches. The labs are one of the least contested loot loops in Rust — the barrier is getting down there, and the barrier is cheap.

Underwater Labs are procedurally generated monuments sitting on the ocean floor. Every map rolls its own set of labs with their own layouts, which is why no two feel the same and why nobody can hand you one true floor plan. What stays constant is what's inside: rooms full of crates, armed Dwellers patrolling the corridors, keycard-locked doors guarding the best of it, and a recycler so you can process components without surfacing. Our Underwater Labs monument page covers the quick-reference version; this guide is the full run.

Three Ways Down

There's no wrong way to reach a lab, but there's a clear pecking order.

1. Submarine (the right way). Fishing Village vendors sell the Solo Submarine for 200 scrap and the Duo Submarine for 300. The solo is a one-seater with 500 HP; the duo seats two — driver plus a torpedo gunner — and takes 700 HP of punishment. Either one drives you straight into the lab's moonpool, which means you arrive dry, with your gear, and with an exit vehicle parked inside the monument. For 200 scrap this is the best value fast-travel purchase in the game.

2. Diving gear (the budget way). A Wetsuit costs just 75 metal fragments and Diving Fins cost 100, both craftable with no workbench. The tank and mask you won't craft on a fresh wipe — you find diving gear in crates instead; per our computed loot tables (verified 2026-08-04), ordinary wooden crates drop the diving mask at 4.2%, the diving tank at 2.5%, and fins at 1.7%, so a full swim kit accumulates naturally while you loot roads. Swimming down works, but you arrive slower, colder, and with sharks between you and the door.

3. Diver Propulsion Vehicle (the upgrade). The DPV is an underwater scooter: 1 tech trash and 150 metal fragments at a level 2 workbench, or 30 scrap to research. It drags you through the water far faster than fins. Fittingly, the labs themselves are one of the places it drops — it appears in both the lab elite and normal crate pools — so plenty of players tow their first one home from the monument it's built for.

Getting In: Moonpools

Every lab has moonpool bays — open pools in the floor of the structure where the ocean meets the interior. Drive your submarine up into one and surface, and you're standing inside the lab. Swimmers use the same openings. The moonpool room is your anchor point for the whole run: it's where your sub waits, it's your fallback if a fight goes wrong, and it's the room you need to remember how to find when your inventory is full. Procedural layouts mean corridors between you and it will differ every map, so take note of the route as you push deeper.

Two practical notes. Larger labs can roll more than one moonpool bay, and the big central pools are the obvious, watched entrances — when a lab offers a smaller side pool, docking there puts fewer sightlines on you as you surface. And fuel math favors patience: per our datamine of Rust's vehicle data (verified 2026-08-04), the Solo Submarine sips 0.025 low grade per second at idle but burns over five times that (0.13/s) at full throttle, so cruising to the lab instead of redlining roughly doubles what a tank of fuel gets you. The Duo runs slightly thirstier at 0.03–0.15/s.

The Loot: What Lab Crates Actually Drop

This is why you're here. Labs are stacked with their own family of crates, and our item database (built from Rust's own files) shows what feeds from each:

There are also standard Underwater Basic and Advanced crates scattered through the rooms, pulling from wide pools of tools, clothing and deployables. The practical read: a full lab clear feeds every part of your base — guns and attachments from the elite rooms, components for the recycler, meds and food to sustain the run, and fuel so the trip home is free.

Dwellers: The Lab's Scientists

Labs are patrolled by Underwater Lab Dwellers — the aquatic cousins of the Tunnel Dwellers you meet on the underground rail network. They're armed with close-quarters kit — think sidearms and SMGs rather than rifles — they roam the corridors, and they will absolutely delete a player who moonpools in wearing nothing but a wetsuit. Bring a real weapon and armor in your sub, fight them corridor by corridor rather than in open rooms, and loot the bodies — their drop pool runs from components like springs and road signs through clothing and deployables. Clear as you go; a Dweller you skipped is a Dweller that spawns behind you during the keycard room.

Keycard Rooms

Yes, labs have puzzle rooms. Our monument data flags Underwater Labs as a card-and-keycard puzzle monument, and the locked doors follow the same logic as every surface monument: keycards open the doors, and the best-stocked rooms sit behind them. Come carrying cards — there's no point diving to a lab and standing in front of a locked door empty-handed. The keycards guide covers how to build your card collection before the trip.

Because layouts are procedural, the exact rooms vary, but the puzzle modules follow the familiar tiering. Green-tier rooms are the simple swipes; blue-tier rooms add fuses and timer switches; and the red-tier rooms are the lab's jackpot, typically wanting a red card plus multiple fuses and a switch-and-timer sequence before the doors open. The practical packing list follows from that: bring your card set and more than one fuse — a deep lab run can eat several, and a burned fuse with an unopened red room behind it is the worst feeling in the ocean. Two consolations: labs restock their own supply, with green keycards spawning inside the locked rooms for the next tier of your collection, and the puzzle rooms are also where Basic and Advanced Blueprint Fragments turn up — both live items in Rust's current files per our datamine.

One more rule the labs enforce quietly: you can't build or place deployables inside. No sleeping bag behind a cleared door, no stash in a corner — whatever you open, you carry out the same trip.

Radiation, for the record, is low. This isn't a hazmat-mandatory monument like the big surface sites in our monument tier list — light protection covers it, which is convenient given you're probably arriving in a wetsuit.

CCTV: Why Your Camera Codes Don't Work

Every list of Rust CCTV codes covers Oil Rig and friends but goes quiet on labs, and here's why: because lab layouts are procedurally generated, their camera identifiers are too. The codes are unique to your server's map. Camera names follow room patterns — CANTINA, BRIG, INFIRMARY, OPERATIONS and the like — with a per-map suffix, so no published list can include them. The fix is inside the monument: labs contain Computer Stations pre-loaded with that lab's own camera identifiers, so scope the rooms from a chair before you push them. Our CCTV codes page has the full pattern list and every static code for the surface monuments.

Sharks

The ocean between you and the lab is not empty. Sharks patrol the water around dive spots, and per our datamine of Rust's files the live shark carries 148 HP — enough that poking it with a knife mid-swim is a plan you'll regret. A submarine makes the whole question disappear, which is one more argument for the 200 scrap. If you're swimming, keep moving, keep a weapon ready, and remember the shark wins fights it starts near the surface far more often than fights near the moonpool entrance.

Extraction: The Part People Fumble

Getting loot out kills more lab runs than the Dwellers do. The routine that works:

1. chevron_rightRecycle before you leave. Labs have their own recycler. Break down the component spam into scrap and raw materials on-site — denser loot, fewer trips.
2. chevron_rightRefuel from the fuel crates. Low grade from the lab feeds the sub that carries the loot.
3. chevron_rightKnow your moonpool route. When your inventory fills, you want a rehearsed walk back, not a wander through respawned Dwellers.
4. chevron_rightSurface away from eyes. A submarine popping up next to a Fishing Village advertises exactly what you're carrying. Surface near your base's stretch of coast instead.
5. chevron_rightDon't overstay. Labs feel private, but a docked sub in a moonpool tells the next diver everything. Take the run, leave, come back next respawn.