The RUST Foundation Freehand Placement & Floor Stacking Guide
The RUST foundation freehand placement guide is brought to you by our partner Evil Wurst.
Foundation freehand placement is a process where players manually position and place the RUST building blocks in order to create unique building techniques, such as floor stacking, multi-TC buildings, or special types of bunker bases. Freehand placement is very tricky and non-intuitive, even to veteran RUST players.
In this video tutorial, Evil Wurst walks through numerous techniques that will help to educate and guide you around RUST foundation freehand placement. He walks through numerous techniques sourced from other RUST community members, such as Budsatawny, Cohen, Rula Novelis, Salty, and Viceless Gaming. Once you’ve learned about freehand placement, it’s very difficult to go back to the standard methods of building RUST base designs.
With that, you’re here to watch his video!
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Video Transcript
One new wave of building techniques which I missed during my break is floor stacking. Technically this refers to one of the applications of the freehand placement of foundations. Why is this great?
Firstly, you can change the elevation of foundations freely and use this to create double layers of ceilings. Secondly, this allows you to create multi-TC bases without having to use wall stacking methods, such as building out 8 squares and coming back with four half-moons to slightly offset foundations. Finally, it enables new types of stability and roof bunkers.
One of the reasons why this is not mainstream yet is because getting the alignment of the freehand place foundations right is not trivial. Therefore I went back to school and took lessons from the grandmaster of floor stacking, budsatawny. This channel is a goldmine for truly innovative ideas and concepts.
In this video, I’ll share the lessons I’ve learned from him and my subsequent research in a comprehensive format.
Matching the Orientation
Floor stacking requires the exact placement of foundations. Unfortunately, the standard controls do not allow precise movement and rotation. To hacks can help to increase your placement accuracy.
To make rotational placement more accurate, lower the sensitivity of your mouse. Some advanced mice allow to lower the DPI with a button, another option is to use the menu. You find the mouse sensitivity settings under options, control. You can also set them directly from the console, via the command
input.sensitivity.
The second hack is about making our movements more accurate. The simplest approach is to equip flippers or any other piece of attire that slows down the movement speed of your avatar, such as heavy plate armor. With these two hacks, it would be a lot easier to place foundations with the required precision.
Floor stacking often requires to match the exact orientation of two foundations. Unless you have an exceptional sense for whether two objects are parallel, but budsatawny certainly recommends to use the compass to maintain a fixed orientation.
What worked best for me is to align the center of the screen with one of the small tics of the compass. I would attempt to center the small tick inside of the larger tick. If you place foundations with this reference, it’s so much easier to place them in parallel with each other.
The compass tics also provide orientation if you need to turn by 90 or 120 degrees, to place an offset foundation on a different side.
Finding the Correct Height
One of the key features of freehand placement of foundations is that you can slightly alter the height of the adjacent foundations, which allows you to stack floors. If floor stacking is your goal, budsatawny recommends to use those two logs, the small and the big one on the twig foundations as orientation.
As a rule of thumb, you want the big log to be at least as high as the small log. This way you can get two floor tiles incredibly close to each other. The next challenge is to determine how close to place the free-hand foundation to the initial one. Here budsatawny taught me to observe normally built foundations.
Equip a hammer and learn where the poles of those triangles are. As you can see they overlap substantially with the adjacent foundations. Wherewith squares the overlap is less pronounced. Their poles are overlapped partially.
This overlap is what you’re trying to recreate if you want the walls to actually connect. For multi-TC bases, you want to create a little bit more space so that the walls do not register as connected. This is the versatile nature of the free-hand placement.
It’s up to your placement whether the offset foundations are kept buy the central or external TC.
Align with Floor Tile
One advanced trick to get the placement right, which I first saw by a short clip by Cohen, is to use a floating floor tile as reference for a foundation. On an existing foundation place a half-wall and floor tile. Jump onto the floor tile and position yourself in the center the best you can. Then visually align the foundations with the floor tile. Here you can choose whether to try and recreate the overlap of normally connected foundations or whether to slightly move it out in order to create offset foundations for multi-TC bases.
Align via Gap Between 2 Foundations
So far all the approaches I’ve shown you still rely on your skill to position yourself correctly, however, there have been attempts to make the placement foolproof. One of those approaches which I first saw on Rulon Ovilus channel, is the use of foundations on both sides to guide the placement.
Place a row of 5 triangles and destroy the three ones in the middle leaving a gap like this. Place twig walls on the adjacent sides. These building blocks now guide the placement of free-hand placed foundation.
Find the position where it’s still blue but gets stuck between the walls. You can now place walls at different heights that will stick to the walls next to them. This approach already helps considerably with the placement.
Align via Gap With 0 Mouse Sensitivity
An approved version of this method, by salty, will allow you to always get the placement perfect even if you have the most shakey hands. Have your ever top point slightly downwards, like this, turn the mouse sensitivity to zero.
Crouch and place a row of five triangles. Then as before, destroy the three ones in the middle and add walls to the remaining triangles.
Now build a square foundation and another row of four triangles. Destroy the square in and the central triangle and place low walls left and right of the gap that this created. If you jump into the triangle and move back, this will position you exactly in the middle of the gap.
Again place the foundation in the position where it is still blue but gets stuck between the walls.
Application #1 for Floor Stacking
So far I have seen 3 major applications of free-hand placement. The first one is to stack ceilings, as for example in budsatawny’s two by two. Since it’s two parts are at a different height level, it creates a double layer of ceilings. Another new meta is to build a ring of raised foundations around an existing footprint, which allows the base to be protected by a double layer of ceilings, it also enables a new type of peaks.
Application #2 for Multi-TC Bases
The second one is to create multi-TC bases without having to build 8 squares. This, for example, is a footprint by budsatawny where he created a 3-part multi-TC base. It works very well if the part you intend to offset is just one or two foundations, such as in my recent quick-and-dirty multi-TC base video.
Application #3 for New Bunker Types
The third one is to create previously impossible bunkers, since free-hand placement allows to disconnect the sockets of building blocks. A height offset floor tile would not receive stability from a neighboring wall, which allows to build sneaky new types of stability bunkers. Further, it allows offsetting walls to enable old school roof bunkers as seen in a recent video by Viceless Gaming.
I hope you found this tutorial on free-hand placement helpful. Since I reference a lot of other builders I will maintain a list of links in the description. If I got one of the references wrong, please let me know and I’ll update the list.
Take care of your selves.
Evil Wurst out.
