Rust raid cost chart
A sheet metal door takes 1 C4 at 2,200 sulfur, or 63 explosive 5.56 rounds at 1,575 sulfur. A garage door takes 2 C4. A stone wall takes 2 C4 or 4 rockets from the hard side. Mixing explosives is almost always cheaper than using one type.
What does each explosive cost in sulfur?[1]
Raw sulfur cost per explosive is 2,200 for C4, 1,400 for a rocket, 480 for a satchel charge, 120 for a beancan grenade and 25 per round of explosive 5.56. These are craft costs, so anything you find or buy is cheaper than making it yourself.
| Explosive | Sulfur cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| C4 | 2,200 | Reliable, sticks, no travel time |
| Rocket | 1,400 | Needs a launcher; can be shot from range |
| Satchel charge | 480 | Cheapest per unit but can dud and need re-throwing |
| Beancan grenade | 120 | Early game only; unreliable |
| Explosive 5.56 (per round) | 25 | Efficient on doors if you already carry a rifle |
How much does it cost to raid a door?[1]
A sheet metal door takes 1 C4, or 63 rounds of explosive 5.56 at 1,575 sulfur, which is the cheaper of the two. A garage door takes 2 C4 at 4,400 sulfur and has no soft side, so you pay the same price from either direction.
Doors are usually the cheapest way in, which is exactly why an airlock and a well-placed door matter so much to a defender.
Explosive ammo beats C4 on sheet metal doors by roughly 600 sulfur. It is louder and slower, so the choice depends on whether you are worried about being interrupted.
How much does it cost to raid a wall?[1]
A stone wall takes 2 C4 at 4,400 sulfur, or 4 rockets at 5,600 sulfur, from the hard side. Walls are deliberately more expensive than doors, which is why honeycomb works: it forces raiders through walls rather than letting them path through openings.
Every wall has a soft side and a hard side. The soft side, the one facing into the room, takes noticeably less damage to break. This is why base design puts the soft side inward wherever possible.
It also explains why a raider who gets inside your first layer suddenly moves much faster. Once they are in, every subsequent wall is being hit from its soft side.
Why is mixing explosives cheaper?
Because each explosive has a different sulfur-to-damage ratio against different materials. A garage door costs 3,750 sulfur with explosive ammo alone, but roughly 2,400 sulfur using 1 rocket plus 40 explosive rounds. Finishing a nearly-broken object with the cheap option avoids wasting a full charge.
The rule of thumb is to open with the expensive, reliable explosive and finish with the cheap one. Spending a whole C4 on a wall that had a sliver of health left is the most common way to overpay for a raid.
On a modded server with boosted gather this matters less in time, but it still matters in what you can carry. Inventory space, not sulfur, is often the real limit on how far into a base you get.
How much sulfur do I need to farm for a raid?[1]
A full sulfur node yields 200 to 400 sulfur. Budget one node per satchel and roughly six to eight nodes per C4. For a modest door raid, 2,000 to 3,000 sulfur is enough; a serious raid into a honeycombed base starts around 10,000.
Gunpowder is the intermediate step: the standard recipe turns 30 charcoal and 20 sulfur into 10 gunpowder. Because charcoal comes from burning wood, a sulfur farm is really a sulfur and wood farm, and running short of charcoal is a common bottleneck.
A rough working ratio is 250 charcoal for every 500 sulfur mined. Get that wrong and you end up with a box of sulfur you cannot turn into anything.
References
- Item, raid and durability tablesRustLabs, 2026