General
Your First Day in Rust
You spawn on a beach with a rock and a torch. No explanation, no tutorial. This guide covers everything you need to survive, build your first base, and make it to nightfall.
You spawn on a beach with a rock and a torch. No explanation, no tutorial. This guide covers everything you need to survive, build your first base, and make it to nightfall.
You start with both. The rock is your only tool until you can replace it, which should be the first thing on your mind. It gathers wood and stone, harvests bodies, and can be used as a weapon. It does all of these things slowly and badly.
The torch is more dangerous than new players realise. Nights in Rust are genuinely dark, not dim, but completely black. The torch fixes that, but it also makes you the only visible object in the landscape. Anyone nearby sees you long before you see them. Keep it off unless you are inside with the door closed.
You also have a map. Press G to open it. It shows your position and teammates if you have any. Get used to checking it. Knowing where you are relative to monuments and roads matters early on.
Bottom right of your screen shows three bars: health, food, and water. Go below 40 on either food or water and you start taking passive damage. To recover health naturally you need food above 100 and water above 40 at the same time.
Early food comes from mushrooms, corn, and pumpkins on the ground, and from cooking animal meat on a campfire. Early water comes from rivers. Look down at the surface and you get a prompt to drink. See the farming guide and hunting guide for sustainable food production.
Your first two crafts should be a Stone Hatchet and a Stone Pickaxe. Both cost 200 wood and 100 stone. The hatchet chops trees properly, the pickaxe handles ore nodes.
When you hit a tree the first time, a marker appears on the bark. Hit that spot every swing and you harvest much more quickly. Rock and ore nodes have a sparkling glint on the surface. Same idea. Pick up hemp plants whenever you see them. They give cloth, which you need for sleeping bags, bows, and basic clothing.
Stone Hatchet (200 wood + 100 stone). Harvests wood roughly three times faster than the rock. Always hit the X marker on the trunk for bonus yield.
Stone Pickaxe (200 wood + 100 stone). Handles stone, metal ore, and sulfur nodes. Hit the sparkling spot for faster gathering.
Hunting Bow (200 wood + 50 cloth). Your first real weapon. Needed for hunting animals and defending yourself.
Hunt animals with your bow and cook the meat on a campfire immediately. Cooked food restores hunger and helps you heal. Raw meat will make you sick. Mushrooms, corn, and pumpkins scattered across the map are safe without cooking.
For water, drink directly from rivers by looking down at the surface. Bottles let you carry water for later. Stay reasonably close to a river until you have a water catcher at base.
Stay away from larger monuments until you have radiation protection. You will hear a Geiger counter clicking if you get too close. The beginner-safe spots: Gas Station, Supermarket, and Harbour. No radiation. Safe to visit immediately. See the radiation protection guide for advanced monument strategies.
Before placing a single foundation, think about where you are building. You need trees close by. Base construction burns through wood fast. Being near a road is also useful. Barrels and crates spawn along roads and give scrap, tools, and components. Scrap unlocks the tech tree and is the most important mid-game resource. Just do not build anywhere visible from the road itself.
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Stay out of the snow biome for your first base. Cold drains health at night without proper clothing. Do not build directly on the beach either. That is where everyone spawns and patrols. Move inland.
Build near tier zero or tier one monuments. Tier zero covers the Gas Station, Supermarket, and Harbour. No radiation, easy loot, and each has a Recycler. The Recycler breaks down items into raw materials including scrap, and getting access to one early changes how fast you progress.
Your first base does not need to be impressive. A 2x1 or a 2x2 with an airlock is enough for day one. What matters is that it is locked, has a Tool Cupboard inside, and has walls that are not twig.
See the building guides section for layouts. Look for airlock basics to understand why airlocks matter.
Before placing foundations, have these crafted: a sleeping bag (30 cloth) to respawn nearby if you die mid-build, a building plan (20 wood), a hammer (100 wood), and a tool cupboard (1,000 wood). Put the TC in the most protected room, open it. Hit Authorize, then lock it immediately.
Every wall has two faces. The outside face is the hard side. The inside face is the soft side and takes significantly more damage from melee. When placing walls, the hard side must face outward. You have ten minutes to rotate a wall with your hammer. Check every wall before that window closes.
Twig breaks with almost no effort. Wood takes some work to destroy. Stone is where you want to be. Getting through it requires rockets or explosive charges, which most players will not have on day one. Use your hammer to upgrade everything to stone as fast as your resources allow. A basic starter base at stone tier takes roughly 3,000 wood and 5,000 stone.
Once the doors are closed and the TC is stocked, your next two targets are sheet metal doors and a Workbench Level 1. For the doors: farm enough animal fat and cloth to produce 50 low grade fuel, then build a Furnace to smelt metal ore into metal fragments. Wood doors burn. Metal doors do not. For the workbench: collect 50 scrap from road barrels and build a Workbench Level 1. This opens the tech tree and moves you into the early metal age.
See the hunting guide for animal farming, the cloth guide for sustainable cloth production, and the decay guide for understanding how long your base survives without upkeep.