This guide is primarily designed as a beginner’s guide to Rust, however, the guide expands on raiding information and Rust configurations that advanced players may find useful to improve their raiding experiences/skills. Furthermore, this guide is structured into different sections to facilitate streamlined reading and information access during tense/chaotic raiding situations.

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• Any explosive deals the same amount of damage to the soft-side and hard-side.
  
• You are going to want to always keep your walls with the hard-side facing outwards of your base, so it takes longer to melee through from the outside of your base.
  
• Doors do not have a soft-side, however, opened doors will receive less damage from explosives and therefore will cost more destroy, around 50% more durability than closed.
  
• The soft-side on a foundation is the top of it, also, the soft-side of a ceiling is underneath.
  
• Wood & Stone High-external Walls do not have soft-sides, they take equal damage wherever you hit them.

Here are some of the most important tips and tricks when raiding bases in Rust. I will list them from most beginner friendly to most advanced for people newer to Rust and also for veterans who want to skip the beginner tips and learn some new tricks to raid safer and save more sulfur.

1. Flame Raiding & Fireballs
   • When using flame throwers or incendiary rockets, you may see what are called large fireballs fall on the ground and if they're close enough to a flammable structure or deployable like a wooden wall, wooden door or tool cupboard, it will deal damage for a long amount of time and save low-grade fuel/incendiary rockets. Additionally, explosive ammo, incendiary ammo and fire arrows have small fireballs which are visually smaller and do damage overtime only to flammable deployables like wooden doors and large wood box.
   
   
2. Counting Your Bullets
   • When using my guide and making sure you save explosive ammo, you don’t need to count each shot. You can see how many bullets are in your magazine and quickly figure out how many magazines and extra bullets you need to break a structure. For example, a sheet metal door takes 63 Explosive ammo, that equals to 2 AK magazines as well as 3 extra explosive ammo or 3 Semi-Automatic Rifle magazines and 15 explosive ammo.
   
   
3. Quiet Raiding Methods
   • Especially as a newer player struggling to fight players with over 4000 hours, raiding can be an issue as most methods can be heard from very far away making your raid known to others who can counter and steal your gear/explosives or continue the raid and take all the loot as well. Some of the quietest methods of raiding are flame throwing raiding wooden bases or wooden doors early game. Late game raiding, there’s really no other option to raid quietly than silenced shotguns or rifles using handmade shells or explosive ammo, although they bullets can still be heard from a medium distance, it is a big upgrade from normal explosive raiding. Just make sure to use a separate gun for PvP combat as silencers reduce bullet damage by 25%.
   
   
4. Benefits of Online Raiding
   • New players, try not to offline raid! This might be controversial “tip” or seen as counter-intuitive for veteran players but this tip is mainly aimed to new players trying Rust raiding for their first or second time. Rust is a game of trial and error where dying is a part of the game and is inevitable, improving at the game with PvP and playing smarter comes with practice and a good way of improving is online raiding players who can fight back. Online raiding will help you think on your feet, understand how to fight enemies better as well as enjoying your time more than raiding a base for 10+ minutes with your own explosives being your only enemy.
   
   
5. Splash Damage
   • When raiding with rockets and explosive ammo, there is a feature especially with these two called splash damage. Wherever you shoot the bullet or rocket, there is a small explosion which damages surrounding structures and deployables as players. This can be used to your advantage if 2 single or double doors are next to each other on triangle foundations, use can use both explosive ammo or rockets to damage both, or an even better scenario is when 2 or 4 walls’ corners are touching, you can damage them all which will break all 4 walls for the price of 1 wall and a half because sometimes the splash damage won’t damage all walls equally.
   
   
6. Raiding from Above
   • Another really strong tip is to raid from above, especially with bases that have large amounts of honeycomb (extra unused walls to increase the number of walls raiders have to go through) and only 1 or 2 floors. Floors and walls have the same cost when raiding which can make it more sulfur efficient but most bases have SAM turrets and shooting floors to make it harder to access and raid from the roof.
   
   
7. Ladders, Ladders, Ladders
   • Following on from the previous tip, raiding from above can be difficult as falling down into the base with no way out could lead to the base defenders killing you and taking your remaining explosives. This is why ladders can be your best friend when raiding with the ability to get out of the base easily as well as move away from a explosives blast radius to avoid the damage and accidentally killing yourself.

1. Silent But Deadly
   • Raiding a base by surprise can be one of the stronger advantages’ raiders have over defending, but if a player is online in their base and hear 1 of a group of people’s footsteps around their base, they are certain to be on high alert. Normal movement includes crouch walking, walking and sprinting, with the first being the only normal fully silent method of traversal. However, there is a way to move a similar speed to walking while being completely silent called crouch walking, to pull it off you need to start sprinting, moving forward with the W key and keep crouching in short bursts. It may take a while to practice and master but can make you a ninja sneaking up on enemies or when countering a raid without them knowing you’re there.
   
   
2. Long Distance Relationship
   • Typing “combatlog” in the F1 console will give you important information in PvP situations, especially fighting from long distances to check if someone is downed or what health they are on from your last hit. This can also be used to a structure’s health as well, shooting the building with any projectile or even throwing a rock will show a structure’s health in the console. This can be used when raiding from a further distance to consistently check what a wall or door’s health is on without walking up to it with a Tool Hammer, exposing yourself to a quick death from a counter raider or the base owner waiting to open a door and kill you.
   
   
3. Preparing for a Raid
   • The best tip I could ever give for raiding solo, small group or a large clan is to prepare by constructing a raid base fairly close by to quickly respawn and get back into the action, a tall raid base with a shooting floor can cover your teammates with all of your loot being secure if killed by a counter, lots of storage boxes to quickly and safely transfer the best loot from the raid target in case of a counter re-raiding the base trying to get the loot for less explosives, Tool Cupboard and Auto Turret outside the bases main entrance to stop a counter from the base owner, the wall or area you are breaching the base from to prevent counter raiders entering the base/killing you from behind and even a turret outside your raid base in case of people camping behind your raid base waiting to get all of the important raid loot and spare explosives. The main issue with a raid base however, is that it can be fairly time and resource costly by making a base with enough storage and height to be useful as well as constructing a base and quickly setting up electrical Auto Turrets, sometimes even wasting more materials constructing the base than you receive if the target is small or a decoy base with all loot moved elsewhere.
   
   
4. You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
   • Expanding from the last tip, always expect the worse base design possible when raiding, you don’t want to get 6 doors in to find out the base is a lot stronger than you expected with no resources to craft spare explosives to finish the raid. The aim is to secure the tool cupboard and have access to the main base to be able to seal any entrances you entered from and access to loot rooms after sealing. A smart way to predict how strong a base is, search YouTube for popular base designs as a lot of new players or inexperienced clans use the base designs showcased on YouTube which main weakness is that raiders know exactly where your loot rooms are and how much they need to raid. Also do prior scouting on the base shape, calculating all ways to get to the core of the base from above, doors, walls, smart/realistic estimates of the base’s wall tiers (sheet metal or armored), preparing enough weapons (raiding SARs and AKs), jackhammers, extra explosives, ammo, silencers as they break very quickly when using explosive ammo and extra building resources to either expand the raid base taller to have a better cone of vision on the entrance or to seal the base with higher grade walls/craft doors.

To enable these commands, open the Rust console (default bind is F1), then input the text.

Display Rust Performance:
perf 0 - Hide Performance Information
perf 1 - Display FPS
perf 2 - Display FPS + Frame Latency
perf 3 - Display FPS + Latency + RAM Usage
perf 4 - Display FPS + Latency + RAM + Ping

Field of View Zoom Preference When Aiming Down Sights:
graphics.vm_fov_scale false
or
graphics.vm_fov_scale true

Disables Hitmarker Audio for Invalid Shots/Damage:
hitnotify.notification_level 2

Removes Interaction Wheel Delay:
input.holdtime 0.1

Removes Inventory Open Craft Delay:
inventory.quickcraftdelay 0

To use these binds, open the Rust console (default bind is F1), replace the word "key" with the key you want to bind the action to, and input the text within the console.

Auto-attack Bind:
bind key +attack;+ duck

Auto-run Bind:
bind key forward;sprint

Open Combat Log to Display Damage:
bind f2 "consoletoggle;combatlog"

Toggle Field of View Zoom:
bind key +fov 90;fov 70 *

Switch Between Left/Right Weapon Handedness:
bind key +graphics.vm_horizontal_flip 1;graphics.vm_horizontal_flip 0

These launch options will significantly decrease frame drops, stuttering, and gameplay delays. To change your launch options: Steam > Library > Right-Click Rust > Properties

-gc.buffer 2048 -cpu_priority high -headlerp_inertia 0 -window-mode exclusive

Field of View: 90
Head Bob: Off
Compass Visibility: On
Max Gibs: 0
Creation Effects: Off

Resolution: Native
Mode: Fullscreen
VSync: Off
FPS Limit: 0

Graphics Quality: Potato
Render Scale: 1.0
NVIDIA DLSS: Off
Shadow Quality: 0
Shadow Cascades: No Cascades
Max Shadow Lights: 0
Water Quality: 0
Water Reflections: 0
Shader Level: 600
Draw Distance: 2500
Shadow Distance: 50
Anisotropic Filtering: 1
Parallax Mapping: 0
Global Rendering: On (Visibility) / Off (Performance)
Global Rendering Distance: 1500
Grass Displacement: Off
Grass Shadows: Off
NVIDIA Reflex Mode: On

Particle Quality: 0
Object Quality: 0
Tree Quality: 100
Max Tree Meshes: 100
Terrain Quality: 0
Grass Quality: 0
Decor Quality: 0

Anti-Aliasing: Off
Depth of Field: Off
Ambient Occlusion: Off
High Quality Bloom: Off
Lens Dirt: Off
Motion Blur: Off
Sun Shafts: Off
Sharpen: Off
Vignetting: Off

Thank you for reading up to this point, I hope you enjoyed my guide on everything related to rust raiding. I have spent countless months collecting, writing, and presenting the information within this guide. Information gained from my thousands of Rust hours across different accounts since Rust Alpha, alongside, tips and tricks learned from friends and general raiding knowledge that every new and advanced player should know.

If you want to support me and therefore this guide in the future; please Favorite the guide, give a Like, leave an Award to support me directly, and drop a comment with any suggestions for useful guide features, essential raiding information, or any raiding questions you need answering.

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