The RUST Roof Bunker Fixed (2020)

RUST Exploit – The Roof Bunker – Community Features #2

The RUST Roof Bunker Fixed video, which is part of xRaw’s Community Features series, showcases building ideas and concepts of other content creators in the RUST base-building community.

In this episode, xRaw takes a look at Evil Wurst’s recent video, The Return of the Roof Bunker, which explores the return of conditional roof bunkers. However, in the September 2020 RUST update, there was a slight nerf to the method Evil Wurst employed. The update removed the ability for players to open roof bunkers from outside of the bunker, rolling things back to suicide bunkers. In this video xRaw walks us through some alternative methods that allow for a workaround.

With that, you’re here to watch the base design video!

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Video Transcript

Hey guys and welcome to the second episode of Community Features. This ongoing series is designed to showcase the building ideas and concepts of other content creators, as well as ideas that I’ve worked on with other members of the building community.

 

In today’s video we’re looking at a Rust Base Building Exploit that I have been working on with discord user “Toadlord66” since 3rd September 2020. This collaboration came about due to the monthly Rust update that was released earlier that day nerfing the roof bunker.

 

Just before we get into the video, for any of you interesting in joining my discord, you can find the link below. We are starting to make it more active for sharing ideas and discussing concepts and will be aiming to host more regular giveaways like this one in the upcoming future!

 

The Roof Bunker has taken many forms over the years but has essentially always provided a safe, and secure, method of sealing your base with a roof piece and blocking access via doors. Many of these methods were sealable from inside and out, whilst others could only be sealed from the inside or from the outside of the bunker.

 

I had used one of the older methods in many of my base designs in which I placed a roof piece half a wall high on the bottom floor, causing it to clip through the ceiling and then blocking the access to the door but there have been many methods over the years.

 

The Conditional Roof Bunker then made a return in base designs when Evil Wurst brought it back on the 6th August 2020 and was made possible due to the addition of the new triangular roof pieces. These building pieces allowed for experimenting with new conditional methods in opening the bunker seal. Whilst this hasn’t officially been ‘patched’ with the arrival of the September 2020 update, it has resulted in a slight nerf to the exploit by blocking placement of the roof from the outside of the bunker, providing the message “LINE OF SIGHT BLOCKED”. This means that it can no longer be opened externally and thus essentially turning it into a suicide bunker only, accessible with F1 kill.

 

As explained previously, whilst the update has definitely made using the bunker seal more difficult, there is a slight work around if you don’t wish to make too many changes yo Evil’s initial design.

 

You want to place a shotgun trap inside the bunker as I show here. The idea of using this trap is not to kill anyone trying to enter, although that would be a nice bonus, but rather to shoot the twig holding the bunker open and break it – causing it to close.

 

By utilizing this method, you will no longer need to close the bunker whenever you leave the base, allowing you to run in and out to farm and loot as necessary whilst online. Additionally, this workaround allows you to still close the bunker from the inside when you log out and re-open it whenever you log back in, from the inside. 

 

Looking at this you can see it’s extremely similar to the previous, in fact there are minimal changes to the design so it should more-or-less fit into any of the bases the previous did. The main difference is the entrance which we have raised to create an entrance ‘chute’, the reason for this will be clear in a minute. Entering the chute mechanism you cannot immediately see any differences however if you crouch down here you can see this is a low wall.

 

The reason we’ve swapped it for a low wall is because the patch blocks placement of the roof through another building item, so here we can clearly see through the gap in order to place the roof and open the bunker as we need. Of course the issue here is that now the raider can also make use of this gap to shoot rockets through… to counter this we can place shotgun traps aiming at the gap so that as soon as they drop in the chute, they are killed.


For those of you thinking that you can counter the chutes with grenades, let’s look into that next. If you stand at the top of the chute you cannot see that it is a low wall meaning you’d likely jump straight in and die, even from the furnace you cannot see the low wall and you may do the same.

 

So now lets assume the raider knows it’s a low wall and there are traps, it doesn’t look as though you can throw a grenade through here so the casual raider wouldn’t try. For any of you who don’t know, the bottom part of the roof is purely visual and it does in fact stop at the half wall height meaning you can throw grenades through the gap.

 

We can remove the furnace, forcing the raider to throw grenades from the top of the chute which makes it even harder but it’s still possible. The workaround for this would be to place a triangle metal floor frame here and place a trapdoor completely blocking the grenades but still allowing you access to the bottom to place the roof when you need.

 

Of course they could blow the trapdoor, then slowly begin to remove the shotgun traps etc however it certainly makes it more difficult for them and adds to further raid cost of the base.

 

With an identical setup to the previous, we can place a window frame here instead of a low wall. This allows us the ability to place a reinforced window glass which not only blocks grenades but also allows us to place the roof as required without picking up the window glass.

 

Of course we have the issue of this being soft sided by anyone who has far too much time on their hands. According to RustLabs, softsiding this would take you 26 minutes and 50 seconds with around 5 Jackhammers, not accounting for the time it would take to run to and from your raid base (if you have one) to refill these at a workbench. It also doesn’t include the cost, each jackhammer costs 150 scrap and the cheapest workbench is 50 scrap, meaning you’d spend 800 scrap to softside this. Based on this video I found of someone demonstrating an armored softside, I’d estimate 30minutes + to softside.

 

Assuming you place the ladder hatch as we did on the previous example, once they have the window frame gone they would still need to spend more explosives to access the chute and then the time and effort of destroying the shotgun traps etc, or draining them.

 

To summarize we have a number of potential workarounds here, some of which impact the strength of the bunker mechanism including the simple shotgun trap method which causes the bunker to borderline between a roof bunker and a suicide bunker. Let me know what you think in the comments, or if you’ve found a better way I’d love to hear about that too! Thanks again and I’ll see you in the next one.

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About Squishface

Squishface is the co-founder and owner of Corrosion Hour; a RUST community and website dedicated to helping server owners with the administration and navigation of the ever-changing landscape of RUST. As a programmer with over a decade in the field and a decades-long love of gaming, she spends much of her time in code researching and developing ways to bring meaningful content to help players and readers.

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