The Best Ways to Find Cloth in RUST
Perhaps more important than gathering stone and wood is knowing how to find cloth in RUST. Having cloth is what will determine your effectiveness in RUST at every level of play. From your first sleeping bag after fresh-spawning on the beach to your end-game raiding and PVP tools, the cloth will be a necessary resource every step of the way.
New players often overlook the necessity of Cloth. It may seem merely a source of clothing at first glance, and so a lesser priority over gathering wood and stone to get a starter base going. But, getting cloth is the early game decision that separates vulnerable players who are gathering resources from advanced mobile threats, capable of defending their haul and taking other players’ loot.
Eventually, the cloth resource becomes a staple of mid-game explosives, such as Small Stashes, and is required for resource generation to make Timed Explosive Charges and Rockets. These are just a few applications of cloth in RUST.
Cloth finds its way into:
- Early game weapons
- Early to late-game medicines
- Simple and advanced explosives
- Components and Resources
- Essential items for roaming and at base
- Clothing and armor
- Most fun items
Finding cloth in RUST, however you choose to do it, takes time and dedication, but once you know how to gather cloth effectively, you can do it without having to invest much time or effort. Since cloth is a requirement at all levels of play, several methods are best suited to different wipe stages.
5 effective ways of finding cloth in RUST are:
- Collecting Hemp Fiber Plants
- Gathering from Cactus
- Harvesting from Fauna
- Recycling Unused Components
- Mass Cloth Farming Cycles
Collecting hemp fiber plants
Hemp plants are capable of spawning in all biomes on the island. However, they do have vastly different spawn rates for each. Grassy and forested areas feature the most hemp, particularly in the areas assigned as spawning beach zones. Deserts will feature small clumps of hemp fibers, and they are even rarer in mountainous and arctic biomes.
Identified by their star leaf pattern, hemp plants are harvestable without tools by simply mousing over the plant and pressing the E key. Depending on the size of the hemp fiber harvested, you receive 2 to 10 pieces of cloth and a singular Hemp Seed from each plant relative to the plant’s age.
This method is the least practical but is all you can do in the very early game. However impractical, it is worth doing as you begin your initial stone and wood gathering phase. Taking a moment to grab any hemp fiber plants you see on your path from tree to stone nodes will provide you with enough cloth to craft yourself the first pieces of effective head armor, notably the wood armor helmet and the bandana mask.
Alongside armor, your early-game cloth is also well-invested into a hunting bow, an invaluable tool as you compete with other fresh spawns for precious resources. Having a bow is the difference between finishing a PVP engagement before it begins and is far more dependable than flailing wooden spears and bone clubs. Doubly so if you also made the armor mentioned above.
Gathering from cacti
If you decided to start your wipe in the desert biome, you will find fewer hemp fiber plants than you would have if you began in the greener areas. The compromise for this is the cloth that you can gather from the cactus. Tall cactus will yield 15 cloth, whereas a standard cactus will give 10 cloth.
It’s important to note that the only tools capable of getting cloth from the cactus are the stone, metal, improvised hatchets, hammer, and Chainsaw. You can also use a rock or a Bone Club, but they only have a percentage chance of gathering cloth on each hit, unlike the abovementioned tools.
Harvesting cloth from the cactus can be tricky. Cactus will damage you if you get too close and sometimes as you swing. Be sure to give them a wide berth, and strike from as far away as possible to avoid getting spiked. The added benefit of this method is the additional cactus flesh you’ll gather on the way, which is an excellent source of food and hydration early in the game.
Harvesting from fauna
Large and small animals, and even humans, will yield cloth when harvested after death. The rate at which they do so varies widely. While all tools can harvest animals to some extent, the bone knife is the most efficient and cost-effective method of gathering cloth from animals.
While other tools can gather just as much cloth, the bone knife has the cheapest production cost by a large margin. Harvest any creature with a Stone Hatchet, and you will have enough bone fragments to create a bone knife. With the bone knife in hand, animals will begin to give considerably more cloth:
Cloth harvesting with the bone knife
- Chickens 6 cloth
- Boars 10 cloth
- Scientists 20 cloth
- Stags 25 cloth
- Horses 25 cloth
- Wolves 30 cloth
- Bears 50 cloth
Recycling unused components
Given that you invested your early cloth in bows, you can start making clothing and armor pieces. This equipment will give you the protection required to head deeper into the irradiated monuments and utilize the monuments’ recyclers to speed up your cloth production.
If you’ve started farming the roads and monuments, you will have plenty of resources you do not want or need. Any clothing or armor you’ve upgraded is a prime candidate for cloth recycling.
Most monuments host a recycler into which these items can be placed and broken down into their constituent parts. Any item that includes cloth in its production will yield some cloth guaranteed.
There are too many items to list in this guide that will break down into cloth. However, there are some standout materials that you will find in bulk that you likely won’t need a lot of, and therefore are prime candidates for recycling down to cloth.
- Tarp 50 cloth
- Snow Jacket 30 cloth
- Bed 30 cloth
- Jacket 25 cloth
- Rope 15 cloth
- Sewing Kit 10 cloth
Any clothing you find that you don’t need might as well be recycled, along with any unnecessary loot that might contain cloth. Tarp, Rope, and sewing kits, in particular, can stack in your inventory and make worthwhile trips to the recycler practical if you find yourself running short of cloth.
Mass cloth farming cycles
Since the Farming Update, farming your cloth has become the fastest way to mass-produce cloth. It does require fastidiousness and patience. The hemp seeds that come from picking hemp fiber plants can be replanted, either in the ground or in player-made planter boxes.
Planting them in the soil outdoors will eventually yield some small amount of cloth, but the cloth will always be at risk of being stolen by passing players. It’s not uncommon to hear your food and hemp being picked impossibly fast in the dead of night by a stray naked.
Farming indoors is a much more arduous but rewarding task. Setting up planters and keeping them lit and water will yield much more. Even more, if you take plant cuttings and exploit the plants’ yield gene, you’ll see an even better return. Advanced farming guides can point you in the right direction for this far more effective cloth-gathering method.
Knowing is half the battle.
Underestimating the importance of cloth is what separates the spongy nakeds, who will take a few days to get their two-by-two base going, and the RUST chads, who will let those arrow magnets do all the farming for them. Once you know how to find cloth in RUST, at whatever level of play applies to you, you’ll find yourself more effective and more deadly than your painfully unaware neighbors.
