Rust - Starting Guide for Solo Players / Small Groups

Just a safer faster way to get started that what I see most people doing.

Rust Guides:

Here’s How to Get Started!

It’s what I do as a solo on official servers and it works well for me.

Step 1. Run along a road close to where you spawn, only gathering cloth for a sleeping bag, bow, and bandages. Only loot brown boxes, red tool crates, and food boxes. Hitting the barrels with just a rock will make too much noise for too long. Plus you have a good chance of finding a real tool or basic weapon.

Step 2. When you have a tool or weapon and a bow, I recommend making your way to an area near or on the beach and start gathering as much wood and stone as you can after you place down a sleeping bag somewhere discreet nearby, and stash your gathered items in small stashes nearby.

Step 3. Build either a 1×2 with a triangle airlock on one of the long sides of the base, or your standard airlocked 2×2. Move sleeping bag and items inside for now. I recommend building it in the water partially so that you can dock a boat inside with a double door/garage door. (Note: if the dock section is not deep enough then the boat will decay like it were just sitting outside.) You’re going to want to add a layer of honeycomb sometime soon.

Step 4. Take weapon or bow and go find animals, or hit red barrels on the road for low grade or crude to refine into low grade. If you choose to go with animals and only have a melee weapon, the easiest way is to have them chase you into water, where they will be much slower.

Step 5. Craft furnace and make sheet metal doors, code locks too if you are a group. After that head out and run along the beaches until you find a boat. Retrieve 10-15 low grade from base and drive it back. If you built in the water drive into the base or push it inside if you cant fit while driving.

Step 6. Drive boat out and loot floating junk piles. 10-15 minutes will give you around 300 scrap or more depending what you find, plus components for crafting. Repeat this a few times until you have a fair amount of scrap to start researching things and building tier 1 and tier 2 workbenches. Keep an eye out for spare boats while doing so as extras are always useful to keep.

Step 7. So the first blueprints you want after you find and research tools are typically med sticks and some sort of gun and ammo. For med sticks all you have to do is run to any basic monument with a med crate, (The brown one with a first aid symbol on it), and get a large med kit from it, recycle it for a med stick. For a gun and ammo, you have a few different options, you could try and doorcamp someone with an eoka pistol, (scummy as hell and might get you raided if they find where you live). You could buy one with scrap from outpost, at least a revolver or shotgun, but those are fairly overpriced but at least come with ammo. My option of choice is to buy an LR-300 from bandit camp for 500 scrap, it comes with a few round in it. Research one of them for another 250 back at base and craft more on a tier 2. Then go roaming until you find either a semi rifle or smg of some kind, higher tier armor would be a good find too.

Step 8. Once you get this far you should have enough to be able to decently defend yourself, and at this point you could move to a different area, perhaps closer to larger monuments.