Having a good base and being able to survive in it is crucial to having a long and successful wipe in Rust. There are many ways to survive in your base such as utilizing electricity, using traps, or just adding enough honeycomb to make you feel safe. All of which will be discussed in this guide.
Making Sure Your Base Has the Resources to Survive.
In order to build out your defenses, the first thing you need to do is to make sure your base actually has the resources to survive. This is where your tool cupboard comes in. Besides providing building privilege, your TC provides your bases upkeep.
As you upgrade your base, you will find that it becomes more expensive to keep your base alive. To see how much it costs per day, press “E” on your deployed TC to open the Upkeep Management inventory.
There are only four resources used for upkeep. Those four include:
- Wood
- Stone
- Metal Fragments
- High-Quality Metal
Each resource goes up respectively with the amount of each resource you use to upgrade your base. For example, if your base is made of stone and has metal doors, you will need mostly stone and some metal frags. When you upgrade to armored doors or walls, your base will require High-Quality Metal to keep it alive.
If you do not keep your TC stocked, you will see the “Building Decaying” pop up above your health bar.
So, during your wipe, make sure you keep your TC stocked up enough so your base does not decay.
Adding Honeycomb to Your Base
Honeycombing is a pretty easy way to make your base harder to raid but at the cost of more resources to keep it from decaying. All honeycombing is is attaching layers of walls (usually with triangle foundations) around the main part of your base to make it more difficult for any potential raiders.
When building a base, you should always account for honeycombing, skipping out on it makes your base an easier raid compared to those that don’t even if you have other forms of defense. Often, if raiders see a base with extensive honeycombing, they will skip over it and look for an easier target just because of how annoying it is to raid.
Adding Traps to Your Base
Shotgun Trap, Flame Turret, Auto Turret, Tesla Coil, SAM Site
Adding traps to your base adds another layer of defense making raiding that much more difficult. Some are easier than others (especially after the introduction of electricity). We will start with the easier two of the five, shotgun traps and flame turrets.
Shotgun Traps and Flame Turrets
Both shotgun traps and flame turrets do not require electricity making it easier to add them to your base without having to worry about wiring them up.
After placing the traps, they require ammo/fuel. Shotgun traps simply take handmade shells which are really cheap to craft. Flame turrets on the other hand take low grade fuel as the ammo. Both of these traps will activate on anyone that does not have building privilege in your base so make sure everyone on your team gets access.
The other three traps all take electricity in order to operate which makes them a little more difficult to operate but usually are much more worth it.
Auto Turrets
For an auto turret to be functional, you must supply it with a weapon, the ammo for that weapon, and 10 electricity. Unlike the shotgun trap and flame turret, each person that doesn’t want to get shot by the auto turret needs to authorize on it while it is powered down.
To add a weapon, you first need to authorize yourself on it then you can open its inventory by pressing “E”
Now that you have a turret with a weapon, you need to supply power. Grab your wire tool and plug it in like so.
The turret also has three other ports on the opposite side that allow you to hook up lights or counters for the following actions:
- When the turret has no ammo
- When the turret is low on ammo
- When the turret has acquired a target
Turrets also have two different modes that can be activated:
- Peacekeeper – only targets armed and hostile players
- Attack all – attacks anyone that is not authorized
To access these, simply hold “E” on the turret, the following wheel will pop up.
On this wheel, you can also clear the authorization list, deauthorize yourself, and rotate the turret.
Tesla Coils
Another electrical trap is the tesla coil.
Tesla coils require a whopping 35 electricity and will lose health when they are active. Unlike the auto turret, tesla coils only have one port and that is the power in port.
These are mostly useful for trap bases where the whole point is to trap someone and kill them for their loot, they are not really effective in offline defense unless you have a complicated detection system installed.
SAM sites
The last and largest trap is the SAM site. These behemoths can be purchased from the outpost for 500 scrap and require SAM ammo to operate. They also require 25 electricity to run. Unlike any other trap, these will target any flying player. There is no way to authorize yourself on one of these. So, you most likely will want to hook these up to a switch to turn them on/off when you are flying around your base.
Those are the basics of traps, use as many as you would like as they are very effective at stopping potential attackers.
Adding simple electrical items to your base
In this guide, we will only cover certain things as electricity is its own monster. We will go over two items that are easy to set up and will alert you via the Rust+ app (if you have it enabled) when they are activated. We will go over:
- HBHF Sensors
- Storage Monitors
- Smart Alarms
HBHF Sensors
HBHF sensors will detect players within a 10m radius. You can choose to include/exclude authorized users (building privilege) and include/exclude all others. These work on line of site so if there is anything in the way of the player and the sensor, the player will not set the sensor off. There is an output on these that can either be hooked up to a light or speaker or if you want, you can hook it up to a smart alarm which will notify your phone whenever someone is detected (nifty when you are offline).
Storage Monitors
These can only be placed on TC’s or large storage boxes and can only be placed one way. Similar to HBHF sensors, there is an output that can be hooked up to lights or a speaker, or what you will most likely do is hook it up to a smart alarm. In the app, you can see all the loot that is in whatever storage device you attached it to. If you attach it to a TC, the app will even tell you how much upkeep you have left. Hooking up a smart alarm will alert your phone whenever the loot is touched.
Smart Alarms
Smart alarms are pretty sweet as there only purpose is to alert your phone whenever electricity is supplied to them. You can hook them up to whatever you would like. For example, you could hook them up to turrets to alert you when there is no ammo left, or you could hook them up to a button and make a little doorbell contraption. The ideas are endless which is why this item is so fun.
Remember, when it comes to anything electrical, it is always suggested to use the Rust+ app because that unlocks the true potential of many of the items Rust has to offer.
Conclusion
There is no one way to keep your base safe in Rust and hopefully after reading this guide you gained some new ideas on how you can improve your bases security. Experiment, find what is right for your play style. Maybe you hate the look of honeycombing or maybe electricity is too complicated for you, whatever it is, making sure your base is safe is a very important task during any wipe.
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