Rust bunkers, ranked — and the one you should build this wipe

Every door in Rust is a known cost: so many rockets, so much C4. A bunker removes the door. The way in is a piece of the building itself — a twig triangle, a vending machine, a foundation buried in a slope — that only someone with building privilege can rebuild or pick up. A raider with no privilege has one option left: destroy walls until they are standing where the loot is.

That is the whole trick, and it is why bunkers are the cheapest raid cost you will ever add. A sealed 1x1 of stone costs you a few hundred stone to seal and a few seconds to open. To a raider it costs the same as any other stone cell they cannot door-camp, soft-side or eco-raid.

• Higher raid cost for less stone than one more layer of honeycomb.
• Offline protection: the cell is sealed whether or not you are online to defend it.
• Loot spread: three small bunkers in three places mean a raider pays for all three or leaves with a third.
• No door to camp: there is nothing for a raider to wait at.

Stability bunkers are the oldest and the most common. The rule behind them: a building piece needs a minimum stability to be placed, and twig is the only tier you can afford to break and rebuild every time you come home. Deployable bunkers are newer and simpler, which is why they lead the tier list.

Ranked on three things, in this order: does it still work, how fast can you open it when you are being raided, and how much space does it cost. Price barely matters — every bunker here is cheaper than the honeycomb around it.

• Solo, first night: a vending machine TC bunker. It takes a vending machine and a doorframe; you can have it before your first furnace is lit.
• Duo or trio, main base: a freehand external TC outside, multi-TC loot rooms inside. Two TCs to take, loot in three places.
• A base that trades: a vending roof bunker. It pays for its own honeycomb.
• A sloped plot: a terrain bunker at the entrance, because nothing beats a sealing piece no one can hit.
• Cheap raid cost, right now: two or three stairs bunkers in a row. Not elegant, but each one is another cell a raider has to pay for.

Want a base that already has the bunker designed in? The catalogue tags them: browse bases with bunkers, then load any of them on the Greenhouse with one command and walk through the seal yourself.

1. Soft side. Every foundation, floor and wall has a side that takes full damage from melee tools. A tall raised foundation shows its soft side to the outside; a raider with a jackhammer needs no explosives at all. Cover it, or pick a design without one.
2. Splash. Rockets and C4 damage everything within their radius, through walls. A twig triangle one wall away from the outside is a twig triangle a rocket can remove from outside — and then the bunker is open. Honeycomb the sealing piece as carefully as the loot.
3. Shooting through gaps. If the sealing piece leaves a gap you can see through, an explosive round can go through it and hit the sleeping bags inside. No bags, no respawn, no way to open it yourself. Face the gap at a wall.

The S-tier designs are S-tier because none of these three apply to them cleanly: a snapped vending machine has no soft side and no gap, and a freehand bunker's twig is inside the sealed cell.

1. Placing the vending machine loose in the frame instead of snapped, so the TC can be reached over it.
2. Leaving stock in the machine and locking yourself out of your own TC.
3. Sealing a stability bunker with the bags outside it. Die once and you are a raider at your own door.
4. Forgetting that the piece next to the bunker is the real door. A stone bunker inside twig honeycomb is a twig base.
5. Building a design from a video without checking the date. Four of the designs on this page are in thousands of videos and none of them work.