Offline Raid Defence
Published 2026-05-15
Defending your base while you sleep
You can't prevent every offline raid in Rust. What you can do is make your base expensive enough that nobody bothers. The honest goal of defence isn't invincibility — it's economics. Cost the attacker more rockets than your loot is worth and they'll walk away.
The economics: cost-to-raid vs loot-inside
Every external wall, every airlock, every honeycomb layer adds rockets to the raid bill. A typical garage door is 4 rockets. A high-external stone wall is 8. Sheet doors are 3. A naked 2x2 with two doors costs maybe 5 rockets to clear — trivial. A well-honeycombed 2x2 with proper airlocks and metal-armoured doors might cost 30+.
Most solo/duo bases get looted because the raiders calculated they'd break even on sulphur. Make that math fail.
1. Hard-side your TC (the only mandatory rule)
The tool cupboard is the prize. If raiders break to your TC, they own everything — they can authorise themselves, decay your base from the inside, demolish walls. Honeycomb at least 2 layers around the TC, on every face including the floor and ceiling. Most cost-efficient layout is a 1x1 TC core inside a 3x3 outer shell with the floor below also walled off.
2. Split your loot — never one big box
If everything you own is in one room, one ladder hatch and a satchel charge ruins your wipe. Spread loot across at least three separate compartments, each behind its own door. The raiders have to commit explosives to each one — at which point the cost gets real.
Decoy compartments containing scrap and low-tier guns are also cheap — they bait raiders into thinking they've cleared you and leave with 200 scrap when your sulphur stockpile was untouched behind another wall.
3. Airlocks > single doors, always
A single front door is one C4 from inside your base. An airlock — two doors with a sealed box between — forces them to break two and burn an explosive before they even see your interior. Two airlocks in series is meta for any base that has to hold against actual raiders.
Sheet-metal doors on the inside, garage doors on the outside is the standard mix. Garages are tankier per unit cost.
4. The roof exists — don't forget it
Roof raids are how most solo bases die. A roof entry usually bypasses every door you have. Triangle-roof + ceiling honeycomb on top of your TC core. If you have storage upstairs, double-layer the ceiling above it too.
5. Burying the base (advanced)
On terrain that allows it, a buried base — entry through a foundation hatch with the visible footprint underground — is significantly harder to raid because raiders can't orient. The downside is exit speed; you'll lose roams to people who spot your ladder.
6. Get an alert before they break a wall
Defence design assumes raiders need many minutes to drill in. That gives you a window — but only if you know they're there. On MistyWisp, our Base Radar DMs you the moment a non-authed player enters within 50m of one of your tool cupboards. If you're in Discord, you'll see the alert before they finish placing a ladder.
Even if you can't log in, that window matters: you can warn your duo, ping admins to watch, or just resign yourself to losing the base in time to move loot to a hidden stash.
7. Trap bases — fun but not defence
Skull-trophy-and-shotgun-trap rooms are entertaining but don't deter committed raiders. They're worth building for the laughs and the clip, not for security.
What actually breaks even
The rough rule for solo/duo: your defence is "working" if a raider needs at least 1 hour and 20+ rockets to clear you for your full inventory. Below that, you're a target. Above that, you're a chore — and most raiders pick chores carefully.