How to Remove Walls in RUST

Like Reagan in the 80’s we’re gonna tear down these walls

Our little homes in RUST are made secure by walls. We get to decide what kind of walls we want, how deep you run the honeycombing. The walls define everything about our base, whether it’s a small storage unit to a giant PVP stronghold. Setting up walls is essential to a sturdy base design. So when you make a mistake building, or an enemy places a barrier between you and your goals, you need to know how to take them down.

The different types of walls in RUST

Each type has its strengths and drawbacks, and many things to consider when deciding to bring a wall down. Whether you own the wall or it belongs to someone else, how much access you have to the wall and what tools you have on hand will alter your approach to demolition.

There are several ways to remove walls in RUST

• Using a building hammer
• Fire & picking
• Explosives & raiding tools
• Decay timers

Removing your base’s walls in RUST

If you’re looking to remove particular walls within your base, there’s good and bad news. Once you place a wall in twig, a 10-minute countdown starts. During these 10 minutes, you can choose to pull the wall down by equipping a building hammer, right-clicking on the wall, and selecting the demolish icon.

However, once the 10 minutes elapse, the wall becomes as solid as any other in RUST, and you’ll have to remove it the same way you would a wall in an enemy’s base. Fortunately, within your base, you’ll have access to the soft side of the wall, making pulling it down considerably easier.

Burning wooden walls in RUST

If your target wall is made of twig, then you’re in luck. Any melee tool or weapon will make quick work of twig. Twig is only expected to be the building base for the structure and never intended as a long-term part of any structure in RUST. Once your target wall has upgraded to wood, you can transition to using fire-based tools to burn the structure down.

Note that this can be difficult for wooden walls, as they have been made resistant to fire arrows, and fire from flamethrowers must be consistent. Fires that start on the ground near the wall’s base will slowly eat away at the wall’s health, but small fires tend to burn out from bases making burning walls not quite as reliable as burning doors.

It’s best to burn down wooden walls with a Flame Thrower, taking just over 40 seconds and 200 fuel to burn down. In contrast to Fire Arrows of which you’ll require 125 per wall costing over 600 Low-Grade Fuel.

Both flame throwers and fire arrows are blessedly silent. However, if you’re looking to burn the wall down fast, an Incendiary Rocket will take 20 seconds to burn out a wooden wall, at the expense of being loud enough to wake up every nearby player.

Picking through walls in RUST

Hugely popular due to its cost-effectiveness, picking out RUST walls is often the player’s first exposure to raiding in RUST. But what it saves you in materials is made up in time. For picking to be effective, you need a group of players to pick with you.

It’s important to note that walls have a hard and soft side in RUST. If the wall is in your base, always angle to take it down by the hard side. In an enemy’s base, you will more than likely be attacking the hard side at all times, assuming their base setup is correct.

Each tool has a different health bar and the amount of time required to pick through a wall using it. Typically, the more requirements for crafting the tool, the better the tool will pick through the surface.

You will have to produce cheap tools in bulk or invest in a handful of more advanced tools. You will need 59 Wooden Spears and strike the surface for 26 minutes to break a wooden wall. In contrast, you would only need six Salvaged Axes and only take 7 minutes to break through the same division.

Stone walls have double the health of wood walls and require a lot more patience to pick through. Once walls are upgraded to metal or armored, it will take unreasonable amounts of time to pick through.

Removing walls with explosives in RUST

When you’re raiding a target in RUST, you will often need to resort to Explosives. Each type of explosive has its advantages and drawbacks. Satchel Charges and Timed Explosive Charges are a viable option for blowing through walls in RUST. However, they are far more effective at blowing up or removing doors.

Satchels and timed charges

A metal wall will require four timed explosives to knock down. That same amount of timed explosives could o knock down four Sheet Metal Doors or two Armored Doors. Satchels, F1 Grenades, and time explosives also suffer compared to other explosives by not having splash damage. They will only damage the exact surface you place them on.

If you know which wall you want to break down to speed up a raid, then time explosive may be the way to go. Otherwise, it is better to depend on explosives with splash damage so that you take out more than one wall at a time.

Explosive ammo

Firing explosive ammunition from a SAR or Assault Rifle will get you through walls and do splash damage to the nearby surfaces. If you place your crosshair near a join in a wall or a corner, the explosion will take out both surfaces.

You can silence a weapon firing explosive rounds to dampen the sound of the gun firing, but not the sound of the explosive rounds going off. With multiple people firing explosive rounds, you can make quick work of walls.

Rockets

More expensive to produce than Explosive rounds, Rockets are the most versatile raiding tool. They will take out walls in fewer shots much faster than any other explosive. The trade-off is that rockets are incredibly loud and have a distinct noise that most players will recognize.

Rockets also have substantial splash damage and will do much to damage the surrounding surfaces. Much like the Explosive Rounds, aiming rockets for near corners and wall joints will capitalize on the splash damage field.

Letting walls decay in RUST

The slowest yet most cost-effective of removing walls in RUST is to remove, empty, or destroy a base’s Tool Cupboard. A tool cupboard prevents building decay and must contain the same materials that base components require to craft.

Once a tool cupboard is removed or emptied, the base will begin to decay unless there are some materials in the cupboard when you destroy it. When destroyed, a well-stocked tool cupboard will inject up to 24 hours of decay protection depending on what was in the cupboard at the time.

Depending on the material each surface was made of, it may take more or less time to decay and break.

If you can take out an enemy’s tool cupboard, you can simply wait for the base to begin decaying. It might take the better part of a day. But if you have no pressing need to clear out what remains of their base, placing an empty tool cupboard in their base and hiding it away is a perfectly viable way of getting rid of an offending base.

Break the walls to be set free

Base designs in RUST revolve around smart wall placement, and RUST raiding depends on the intelligent removal of walls. The fastest way to excel at removing walls in RUST is to familiarize yourself with the popular builds and understand the meta of base building in RUST.

The smartest way to raid is to take out the fewest walls possible to get to loot and tool cupboards. Once you’re accustomed to how people build, you will eventually know intuitively which walls to knock down and which ones to ignore, but it will take time and experience.

So get out there and get smashing. Those walls won’t fall over all by themselves…well, unless you’re a RUST admin using the remove command or happen to be on a modded server with the Remover Tool plugin installed.