Survive your first Rust wipe.

Punch a tree. It's slower than a hatchet but you don't have a hatchet yet, and you need wood before you need anything else. Aim for around 200 wood before you stop to craft.

Craft a Stone Hatchet and a Stone Pickaxe as soon as you have enough wood and stone — both cost almost nothing and multiply how fast you gather everything after them.

A small, ugly base beats no base. A single 2x1 with a door and a bed is enough to keep your early loot safe while you figure out the rest of the map.

Don't build in the open near a road or a monument — those are the highest-traffic areas on the server and your unfinished base will get noticed fast. A treeline or a hillside gives you natural cover while you're still exposed mid-build.

Avoid monuments and main roads for your first hour or two — that's where players who already have guns are looking for easy kills. Rivers and forested areas are safer for early gathering.

If you hear gunfire, that information is free — it tells you where NOT to be for the next few minutes. Use it.

Grouping up, even with one other new player, roughly doubles your odds of surviving the first day. Two sets of eyes catch threats one set misses.

Once you're stable — a base, a bed, basic tools — the next things worth learning are how crafting and research actually work, and how to build a base that can survive a real raid attempt, not just casual looters.

Everything above still applies if you're playing alone, but going solo changes the math on almost every decision. You can't split gathering and defending between two people, you can't have someone watch your back while you loot a monument, and if you go down, nobody's picking your gear back up for you. Plan around that instead of fighting it.

Base design is the clearest example. A group can justify a bigger base because more people means more hands to defend it and more upkeep coverage. Alone, a sprawling base is just more upkeep you have to cover by yourself and more walls you can't watch at once while you're offline. A lot of solo players do better running two or three small, cheap bases spread across different parts of the map instead of one large one — if someone finds and wipes one, you haven't lost everything, and each one costs less time and material to put up in the first place.

Fights need a different filter too. In a group, someone else can call a bad fight and pull you out of it. Solo, you're the only one tracking your own health, your ammo, and whether you actually know how many people you're up against. Decide before you're in a fight what makes you break contact — low health, an unknown number of enemies, or no clean escape route — and treat any one of those as your cue to leave rather than push for a kill you might not need.

Once the basics click, our settings guide covers the video, input and audio tweaks that actually matter. Ready to run your own server instead of squatting on someone else's? See our Rust server hosting plans.