The Metal Age

So you did it. You stayed alive long enough to get your first base down, you have a home, you feel safe.

First of all: Stop that. You are never safe in Rust. You’re just a zerg away from having your home burned, crushed or blown up. But nevertheless, you have a base, so you can be a little bit proud of yourself. But that was merely the start. So let’s get crackin’ again.

Your first goal should be to further fortify your base. To make it safe from flamethrowers and fire arrows, you should

Upgrade all your base’s parts (Walls, Foundations, Ceilings, etc.) to Stone

Upgrade Cost: Depends on base size.

Protection against: 10 Satchels, 182 Explosive Bullets, 4 Rockets or 2 C4 per layer

***PICTURE***

and replace your wooden doors with

Sheet Metal Doors

Crafting Cost: 150 Metal Fragments

Protection against: 4 Satchels, 63 Explosive Bullets, 2 Rockets or 1 C4

***PICTURE***

There are three ways to get Metal Fragments:

Recycling components

You can recycle components you find in barrels and crates on the street. To do that, go to a monument, find the recycler, and try not to get killed while recycling. Alternatively, go to a monument with a weapon and try to kill a guy who read this guide.

Components that give you a lot of Metal Fragments are:

Sheet metal (100/piece)

Semi Automatic Body (75/piece)

Empty Propane Tanks (50/piece)

Metal Blades (15/piece)

Gears (13/piece, but you should save some of those so you can craft Garage Doors later when you have researched them)

Buy metal fragments at Outpost for scrap. Only advisable if you have a lot of scrap that you don’t need (which is almost never the case) or if you are REALLY desperate.

Smelting Metal Ore

This is probably the most common way to obtain Metal Fragments. You will need to mine Metal Ore Nodes ***PICTURE*** OR collect the small quantities (50) that you can find on the ground ***PICTURE***. You will then need to craft at least one

Furnace

Crafting Cost: 200 Stone, 100 Wood, 50 Low Grade Fuel

Stone and Wood shouldn’t be a problem to get, since rocks and trees are rather peaceful, even in Rust. Low Grade Fuel is slightly harder to get, since it is currently still running around in the form of one of these:

***LITTLE PICTURES OF DIFFERENT ANIMALS***

As you would imagine, it’s not their life’s dream to become a furnace. Yet.

To persuade them, get a bow and kill some of them. At best, you manage to kill a bear. If you have a Bone Knife, Combat Knife, Hatchet (not Stone!) or Salvaged Axe to harvest it, it will reward you with 100 animal fat, which you can turn into 132

Low Grade Fuel

Crafting Cost: 3 Animal Fat, 1 Cloth ⇒ 4 Low Grade Fuel

But some Pigs, Wolves or Deere should also do the trick. I will probably write another guide about hunting in the future where I will go into further detail, but for now: Chop them up, and craft as much Low Grade Fuel as you can.

Now you should have enough for at least one Furnace. Craft it, Place it in your base, and put Metal Ore inside. As you will notice, your Furnace has six slots. One of them should be occupied by Wood, three by Metal Ore, and two should be left free for the results (charcoal and Metal Fragments). You can smelt 600 Metal Ore in one go with 1000 wood.

***PICTURE OF FILLED FURNACE***

Don’t forget to put some Metal Fragments into the TC as well! Otherwise your doors will decay. Now that you have your Furnace smelting and your base on the way to becoming an impenetrable fortress (Just kidding. Nothing is impenetrable in Rust.) you can turn your attention to getting a

Workbench Level 1

Crafting Cost: 500 Wood, 100 Metal Fragments, 50 Scrap

You can obtain Scrap by breaking barrels or recycling components. Scrap-rich components are for example:

Semi Automatic Body (15/piece)

Gears (10/piece)

Springs (10/piece)

Sheet Metal (8/piece)

Road Signs (5/piece)

Metal Pipes (5/piece)

Now place the workbench in your base. You won’t be able to pick it up, so be a bit careful when placing it. It’s quite easy to break though. (Be VERY careful when placing WB Level 2 and 3: Those things are frickin’ TANKS.) This workbench enables you to craft some new stuff when standing close to it. This includes, but is not limited to:

Nailgun (75 Metal Fragments, 15 Scrap): Primitive Automatic short-range weapon.

Gun Powder (30 Charcoal, 20 Sulfur ⇒ 10 Gun Powder): Used to craft anything that goes BOOM.

Compound Bow (100 Wood, 25 Metal Fragments, 2 Rope): Works like a normal bow if not charged, But if you stand still and aim for some seconds it charges up and can instant-kill a 100 HP guy in a Hazmat if you headshot him. Great for camping people in a bush.

PRO TIP: Due to the extremely long range of the Compound bow, it’s possible to shoot airdrops with it. Craft High Velocity Arrows and hit the bottom of the Airdrop-Container. It won’t come down faster, but the parachute will collapse and it will be a lot less visible for others, especially at night.

Crossbow (200 Wood, 75 Metal Fragments, 2 Rope): A very popular early game weapon. Shoots arrows and deals ~20% more damage than the Hunting Bow. It also makes the arrows fly faster and straighter. Aiming is considerably easier with it as well. The downside is the reload time of approximately 3 seconds.

Research Table (200 Metal Fragments, 75 Scrap): This is one of the most important deployables. If you find a tool, weapon or item that you would like to be able to craft, place it in there and it will show you, how much scrap you need to pay to research it. After you researched it, you will be able to craft it. The things you focus on at the start are:

Metal Hatchet: (Research Cost: 75 Scrap)

Makes tree farming faster and 100% efficient. Same for harvesting animals or cactee.

Metal Pickaxe: (Research Cost: 75 Scrap)

Makes Stone/Metal/Sulfur Farming faster and 100% efficient.

Beancan Grenade: (Research Cost: 75 Scrap)

Unreliable Grenade that’s mainly used for crafting Satchels.

Satchel: (Research Cost: 125 Scrap)

Unreliable Explosive and early game raiding tool. Sometimes it takes 10 seconds to explode sometimes it blows up right into your face and sometimes it doesn’t explode at all. (You can pick it back up and throw it again.)

This thing can fuck up your raids like a 3-man-full-gear-ak-group.

Garage door: (Research Cost: 75 Scrap)

Really quite a game changer in early game. It needs to be placed in a wall frame, just like a sheet metal double door. But at only two gears more crafting cost it provides more than double the durability, while virtually taking up no space when opened. If you find one of those you should research it ASAP. Once you did that you can also trade it, for everybody wants to get Garage Doors in the first hours after wipe.

Guns: Waterpipe Shotgun, Double Barrel Shotgun, Revolver

Ammo: Pistol Bullets, Various Shotgun Shells, Fire Arrows

Of course you can research other stuff as well, but remember to check what workbench you will need to actually CRAFT the item. The Level of the Workbench shown there is the minimum requirement. Crafting stuff at a higher Workbench Level than necessary will result in a shorter crafting time (half for each level). So for example if you craft a revolver (LVL 1 Blueprint) at a Workbench Level 3, the crafting time won’t be 1 Minute (as it would be at the LVL1) but 15 seconds.

If you are still not raided, and if you still haven’t thrown your pc out of the window yet after getting killed for the 278th time, I am really proud of you. Rust is a hard game, especially at the start, and getting your first workbench down and items researched is quite an achievement for a new player. You are on a good course now, and you will notice that getting better tools, weapons and other equipment makes the game a lot more fun. It is completely up to you how you want to continue from here. You can try to research Blueprints of higher tier items, but keep in mind that you won’t be able to craft them if you don’t have a Workbench of the corresponding level or higher.

Good luck, and stay alive!

~The Seb~