The raid cost our base planner works out is the sulfur for the cheapest explosives that get a raider from outside to the tool cupboard. How much each explosive does to each building grade is read from the game's own server, and in October 2026 we set the explosions off on our own Rust server to check those numbers.
Where each raid number on the site comes from
- Bases designed in our 3D base planner: the planner's raid simulator, run when the base was submitted, finds the cheapest way in. Where a planner base has no simulator answer saved, its page shows the rockets to destroy every piece instead, and says so.
- Bases from YouTube videos: the rockets the base's creator gives. We have not raided those bases ourselves; where the creator gives no number, the page says "Not measured".
- Your own base in the planner: Raid path (press R) works it out live while you build.
- The raid cost calculator still uses a community table from RustLabs and the Rust wiki, not the numbers on this page, and some of its counts differ (a wood wall: 1 rocket there, 2 here; a stone wall: 185 explosive ammo there, 182 here).
How one piece is priced
Every building grade has a fixed amount of health, and every explosive does a fixed amount of damage to it, after the grade's protection. Explosive ammo (explosive 5.56 rounds) does less to the outside of a wall (its hard side) than to the inside, and these counts are for shooting it from outside. They come from the game server itself (protocol 2634.289.1, the public build of early October 2026), not from a wiki.
| Wall grade | Health | Rockets | C4 | Satchels | Explosive ammo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wood | 250 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 48 |
| Stone | 500 | 4 | 2 | 10 | 182 |
| Sheet metal | 1,000 | 8 | 4 | 23 | 399 |
| Armored | 2,000 | 15 | 8 | 46 | 798 |
Sulfur is counted from the game's own crafting recipes, down to raw sulfur: a rocket is 1,400, a C4 2,200, a satchel charge 480, one round of explosive ammo 25. Satchel counts assume every charge goes off; in the game about one in five is a dud.
A raider does not have to stick to one explosive, so each piece is priced at the cheapest mix:
- Wood wall: 48 explosive ammo (1,200 sulfur).
- Stone wall: 1 C4 + 82 explosive ammo (4,250 sulfur). The cheapest single explosive, 2 C4 (4,400 sulfur), costs more.
- Sheet metal wall: 3 C4 + 70 explosive ammo (8,350 sulfur). The cheapest single explosive, 4 C4 (8,800 sulfur), costs more.
- Armored wall: 7 C4 + 30 explosive ammo (16,150 sulfur). The cheapest single explosive, 8 C4 (17,600 sulfur), costs more.
How the cheapest way in is found
The planner maps every room and gap in the base and prices every wall, door, window, hatch and roof as above. Then it searches every route from outside to the tool cupboard, including over the top, because ladders and twig towers cost a raider nothing. Pieces that share a seam, like a wall and the floor it carries, can fall to one volley aimed at the joint, and it counts that. Any auto turret, flame turret or shotgun trap that can see a hole on the route has to be cleared first, and that is added to the cost (a switch in the planner turns this off). For a very large base the planner may run out of time before it is sure, and then it marks the result as approximate; on an approximate result the turrets may be priced along the one route it found, or not counted at all, and the planner says which.
What we checked in the running game
- October 2026, on our own Rust server running the public build of early October 2026: one piece and one explosive at a time, shooting until it broke, for every building grade, the doors, hatches and other inserts, the deployables we price and every gun that fires explosive ammo. That is 287 breaks, and 277 took exactly the count the planner uses. The other 10 are explosive ammo on armored walls, garage doors and hatches: the round bursts a little short of the piece, so the game needs more rounds (an armored wall took 802, against 798 in the table). The planner allows for that. In the same round we measured how far the auto turret, flame turret and shotgun trap reach, and the planner uses those reaches.
- October 2026, on our test server (an earlier build, protocol 2632.287.1): the building rules we were not yet sure of, put to the game itself. What can stand on top of a spiral staircase, one piece per socket, where a floor can go on a wall (checked with the real Rust game client), how stability passes through roofs and walls, decay with and without a tool cupboard, and two cupboards in one building all matched the planner. So did the build cost of all 20 building pieces in all 5 grades, 100 of 100.
- September 2026: which deployables fit side by side, measured in the running game. 1,101 of 1,172 pairs agree with the planner; the rest are known differences we have written down.
- August 2026: a 1,070-block base built in the game. Rust's stability rule, replayed in the order the game linked the pieces, matched the game on all 1,066 blocks still standing, to within a fifth of a percent. The planner uses that rule. Where two supports are equally close to the ground, Rust leans on the one built first, so the same base built in a different order can show different stability.
Build costs and upkeep are read from the game files, and upkeep is worked out the way the game's own code does it.
What we have not checked, or do not count yet
- In the game a large box, a small box or a furnace blocks a raider's body the way a barricade does, so one standing in a narrow gap could shut it. The raid cost does not count that yet.
- The rockets on bases from videos are the creators' numbers, not ours.
A Rust update can change any of this. The dates above say when we last checked.