Decay and raiding in Rust, explained: what actually destroys your base

Two separate things destroy a Rust base: decay, which eats anything the Tool Cupboard isn't paying upkeep for, and raiding, which is other players bringing explosives to your door. A base survives decay by keeping the TC stocked. It survives raiding by being expensive to open — not by being big.

Decay: what the Tool Cupboard actually does

A placed Tool Cupboard (TC) gives you building privilege in the area connected to it, and it's also the only thing standing between your base and decay. Drop resources into it — wood, stone, metal fragments, high-quality metal, whatever your walls are made of — and it burns through them as upkeep, a fraction of what the base cost to build, paid roughly once a day. As long as there's enough of the right resource sitting in the TC, nothing rots.

Run out, and decay starts on whatever material ran dry first. A base built from mixed tiers doesn't fail as a whole: if the TC still has metal fragments but no stone, only the stone parts start losing health. Once a piece's upkeep is gone, it takes a fixed number of hours to go from full health to rubble:

That's the honest answer to "how long can I be away": it depends entirely on how much upkeep is sitting in the TC when you leave, not on the material alone. A stone base with a stuffed cupboard can sit fine for a week; the same base with an empty one starts dying within hours of the resources running out. There's one grace period worth knowing: if your TC itself gets destroyed — in a raid, say — it converts whatever upkeep it was holding into up to 24 hours of decay protection for the base, so a broken TC doesn't mean instant free-for-all decay.

The materials, in order

Rust currently has five building tiers, each one a flat upgrade over the last in both health and resource cost:

Every one of these has a hard side and a soft side. The side facing outward when you place the piece takes far less damage per hit than the inward-facing side — a stone wall hit from the hard side shrugs off tools that would chew through it from the soft side in a fraction of the time. Anything an outsider can reach only has to matter on its hard side; anything they could get behind, doesn't.

Raid cost: the number that actually matters

Forget square footage — the figure that decides whether your base survives is the raid cost: how much explosive it takes to get from outside to your loot. Current numbers put stone walls at around 2 C4 charges or 4 rockets, sheet metal at roughly 4 C4 or 8 rockets, and armored at close to double sheet metal again. Those exact figures shift with each balance pass — Rust gets rebalanced around its monthly wipes, and raid costs specifically have been a repeated target of those changes — so treat the ratios (metal costs roughly double stone, armored roughly double metal) as the durable fact, and check current numbers on a wipe-by-wipe basis rather than trusting a screenshot from six months ago.

The reason raid cost matters more than total health is that explosives are themselves expensive to make, mostly in sulfur. A base that forces a raider to burn through two or three walls just to reach the first room — a technique usually called honeycombing — doesn't have to be unbreakable. It just has to cost more in explosives than whatever's inside is worth. That's the actual design goal of a good base: not "can this be raided," because everything can, but "is raiding this worth it."

The mistakes that make a base cheap to raid

• The Tool Cupboard is reachable from outside. If a raider can walk up to your TC without breaking a wall first, they can destroy it directly and skip the honeycomb entirely — TC placement inside the base, behind multiple layers, is not optional.
• The outer wall is the only wall. A single layer of stone or metal, no matter how upgraded, is one raid cost away from your loot. Honeycombing — extra walls between the outside and anything valuable — is what turns one raid cost into several.
• A wood door on a stone base. Doors are almost always the weakest point regardless of what the walls around them are made of; a wood door falls to a fraction of what the wall next to it costs, so raiders go through the door. Match your door tier to your wall tier, and put a second door behind the first where you can.
• Soft side facing out. Placing walls so the low-durability side faces the direction people actually approach from undoes a chunk of the tier's raid cost for free.
• Big instead of expensive. A sprawling base with thin walls has more surface area to defend and often less raid cost per room than a small, deliberately honeycombed one. Size doesn't buy safety; layers do.

If it's already gone

If you come back and the base is gone, don't assume it means your build was wrong — it might just mean someone decided your loot was worth more than your raid cost, which is the outcome the whole system is built around for high-value bases. What's worth checking is why it went fast: a TC that was reachable, a single-layer wall, or a wood door are the three most common reasons a raid takes less than the material would suggest. Fix the one that applied, keep the Tool Cupboard fed so decay doesn't finish the job on what's left, and rebuild with the loot moved further from the outer wall than it was.