Play Rust Guide: House design

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PlayRust House Design - What You Should be Aware of When Building your Home

One of the greatest joys of Rust is creating houses and buildings. It’s incredibly satisfying to be able to build an impenetrable fortress that serves as a home, a base, and a place to store all of your important loot. No base is truly impenetrable, though, but there are ways to make attacking your base difficult enough to keep bandits off of your front lawn.

It’s not all about bandit protection, though. Sometimes it’s nice to have fields of resources and opportunity on your front door step, and being able to access your base easily is stress free.

You’ll have to carefully think about balancing between good location and ease of access over protection against bandits, and this guide will give tips on how to do it.


Location

In Rust, the location of your base is incredibly important. Ideally, you’ll want a place that has resources nearby, but far enough away that your base isn’t in plain sight of common looting areas. If you are too far away from a decent supply of resources, your time gathering supplies may lead into the night.

Getting back to your base safely in the dark can become confusing and stressful. Even with a torch it can be easy to get lost on your way back, and shining a torch or flashlight is only going to attract unwanted attention.

However, on the other end of the scale, if you’re too close to good resource and looting spots, you may end up with more unwelcomed visitors than you planned for. This kind of location set up will lead you to having players snooping around your home on a daily basis, and if you do get raided, it will be impossible to figure out who did it.

The best locations are far enough away from resources that it should keep away the majority of curious players, whilst being close enough to allow you to get in and out of a looting area before night time hits.

Finally, it’s important to know who your neighbours are. The world in Rust is fairly large, and you may encounter a whole new set of people if you were to live on a different side of the map. For this reason, it’s best to build a small house first, and learn just how friendly the locals seem before moving into a more permanent location.


Protection Against Bandits

The scary thing about Rust is that bandits can ruin dozens of hours of your work whilst your sleeping, and you’ll have no way to stop it. Eventually, a bandit will come across your home, and they will try to raid it, no matter how well hidden it is. However, the harder you make your base to raid, the less likely bandits will be to actually raid your place.

Protection against bandits in Rust is more about mathematics than most may care to admit - attackers have a limited amount of C4 or grenades to throw at your house, and your goal, to protect yourself against bandits, is to create as many doors and walls as possible between any forced entrances and your main loot room. Let’s take a look at a few various building techniques to prevent bandit attacks.


The Cheapest Bandit Repellant on the Market

The cheapest and most resource efficient way to avoid bandits getting all of your loot is to build a two foundation wide tower. The goal is to make the tower as tall as possible, with as many metal doors in the building. The two foundations will give you just enough room to place an ongoing set of stairs that could potentially be as large as you wanted it to be. At the top of each stair piece, a door frame can be placed down. This means that you could have a metal door at each and every stair piece.

The benefits to this design is that it’s cheap on resources because you’re using the smallest amount of resources per door. If built correctly, bandits will have to start from the first floor, and make their way up. This, along with the techniques shown below, will ensure that bandits will have a tough time breaking their way into your house.

This design doesn’t exactly look very appealing though. If you plan to make something else, and you’re happy to put extra time gathering resources, the best rule of thumb is to simply put metal doors at the boundaries of every foundation or ceiling piece that isn’t already covered up by a wall.
Protecting Your Walls

Unfortunately, there are ways to get around some building designs, and one of these methods includes building a staircase on the outside of your home to allow bandits to climb up the side of your house. Once at the top, bandits will find the best place, possibly at the top of your home, and they’ll blow the wall down.

To prevent this from happening, surround your house with foundations, and place pillars on the centers of the foundations. Keep placing pillars on top of each other until they are as high as your building. This will stop bandits from placing stairs on the side of your walls.


Breaking their Spirits

One thing that will make bandits think twice about wasting their C4 on you is to make it look like you have very little loot worth taking. To do this, all you need to do is put a wooden box behind each door, and spread your loot out as far as possible.

With the assumption that bandits will break through the front door first, you should consider leaving your first few boxes with gear you don’t mind losing - a couple pieces of leather or animal fat for example. Each time a bandit breaks down a wall, they are wasting 1-2 C4, and in return they will be getting bits of leather and other unwanted items. After about three or four doors of terrible loot, they will probably reconsider.


How To Keep Hidden

One time, I managed to build a base that no one even knew the whereabouts of. The server had a community of around 20 active players, as well as a few non-regulars. I placed my house on top of a mountain, right by the coast.

From a distance, the house could not be seen because it was covered by rocks, and up close, it was hard to climb up, so most players didn’t even venture up the mountain at all.

One of the best ways I’ve learnt to keep hidden is to build a small house on the top of a mountain. Don’t make it too tall because otherwise it will stick out like a sore thumb. To make sure you don’t get found, turn off your lights when climbing back up the mountain, and make sure no one is following you.

Finally, if a group of players seem to be interested in your activities, build a decoy house, and let them follow you towards it. The longer you can trick other players into believing you don’t live elsewhere, the better chance you have of staying hidden.

Base Builder

iGeordie on the PlayRust Forum also posted a web program where you can build and check your own design.  The link is http://jvickers.co.uk/basebuilder/ and the post he made is http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1376012.

Hopefully these tips have helped - feel free to read the rest of our guide on Rust here.


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