Rust Decay Calculator 2026: TC Upkeep, Time-to-Decay, Per-Tier Costs

Rust’s Tool Cupboard upkeep system is the difference between a base that survives the week and a base you respawn next to. Most groups understand the basics: TC empty, base decays. But the actual numbers, how much stone per day, how many minutes of farming to keep a 6×6 alive, when you should switch from stone to metal, are widely guessed and rarely calculated. This calculator is the calculation.

How TC upkeep actually works

The Tool Cupboard pulls building materials from its inventory at a steady rate per 24 hours. Each piece of your base, foundations, walls, doorways, windows, roofs, stairs, has its own per-piece daily cost. Pieces drain from the TC as long as the inventory has the right material in it. Once the TC runs empty for a given material, those pieces start taking decay damage and eventually destruct.

Two things to know up front:

• Foundations cost more than walls per piece. A stone foundation costs 8 stone/day, a stone wall costs 5 stone/day. A naive count of “wall surface area” undercounts your real upkeep.
• Distance from TC matters. Pieces near the TC drain at base rate. Pieces farther away can drain at up to 4x the base rate. The calculator above assumes the standard configuration; sprawl-style bases pay more than the numbers suggest.

Per-tier upkeep at a glance

The biggest sticker-shock for new players is comparing tiers. Here’s the per-piece daily cost across the four real combat tiers:

• Wood: Foundations 5 wood, Walls 3 wood. Cheap to feed but soaks 1 satchel charge to break.
• Stone: Foundations 8 stone, Walls 5 stone. The standard solo/duo tier. Requires real raid effort to break (1 explosive ammo door, 4-6 rockets per wall section).
• Sheet metal: Foundations 16 metal frags, Walls 10 metal frags. Roughly 2x stone upkeep but significantly tougher to raid.
• Armored (HQM): Foundations 3 HQM, Walls 2 HQM. Drains HQM (your scarcest resource), but 1 wall takes 4-5 rockets to break. Worth it for high-value loot.

Real upkeep examples

Concrete base sizes and what they cost in the calculator’s defaults:

Solo 2×2 stone base: 4 foundations + 8 walls + 1 doorway + 4 roofs = roughly 80-100 stone/day. A single boulder in the desert biome yields ~100 stone, so 1 boulder per day keeps the base alive.

Duo bunker (sheet metal): 6 foundations + 14 walls + 2 doorways + 1 window + 6 roofs = roughly 350-400 metal frags/day. A single metal ore node gives ~50 frags after smelting, so 7-8 nodes per day. Realistic for an active duo.

Small clan base (HQM exterior): 16 foundations + 40 walls + 6 doorways + 4 windows + 16 roofs = roughly 230-280 HQM/day. HQM is hard to farm; 1 ore node gives ~5 HQM, so 50+ nodes per day. This is why clans burn workhours on HQM trips.

When to upgrade tier

The decision tree most groups follow:

1. Twig/wood: only as construction stage. Never your final tier. Wood walls die to a hatchet.
2. Stone: default solo/duo tier. Sheet metal isn’t worth the upkeep cost for a base that nobody serious is raiding.
3. Sheet metal: when you have items worth raiding for (medium-value loot, working farm, high tier workbench). Sheet metal walls force the raider to commit explosive ammo.
4. Armored (HQM): when you’re a target. Clan bases, end-of-wipe stockpile bases, anything with M249s and rockets stored. The upkeep cost is real but raider cost is higher.

If your TC empties

Decay damage starts almost immediately when material runs out. Time-to-destruction by tier (in default server config):

• Twig: ~1 hour (intentional anti-griefing).
• Wood: 3 days.
• Stone: 5 days.
• Sheet metal: 8 days.
• Armored: 12 days.

The calculator above flags the weakest tier in your base, since that’s the one that fails first. A mostly-armored base with one stone wall on the back fails when that one stone wall decays in 5 days. Mixed-tier bases inherit the weakest tier’s timer for the affected pieces.

Server-side overrides

Vanilla Rust uses the rates above. Modded and community servers often tune them:

• 2x decay servers: halve the time-to-decay numbers. Good for fast-wipe scrim servers.
• No-decay servers: you keep your base forever as long as TC has any material. Good for build-experiment or roleplay servers.
• 0.5x upkeep: daily cost halved. Common on beginner-friendly community servers.

If you run a custom server, the relevant config keys are decay.scale and decay.upkeep_period_minutes. Both are exposed in our panel for our managed Rust servers.

Strategies to lower your upkeep

Three patterns that actually save resources:

Compact base layouts. A 2×2 base with 8 wall pieces costs less than a sprawling 4×4 with 32 walls. The biggest single decision is how dense your build is.

Decoy walls and bunkers. A small inner armored core with a sacrificial outer stone shell halves your HQM cost compared to a fully-armored exterior. Raiders waste boom on the stone shell; the core stays cheap.

Don’t overbuild for storage. A second TC plus an extension to hold loot doubles your upkeep. Storage in a single compact base is cheaper than a base with annexed storage rooms.

Hosting a Rust server

Most Rust groups eventually rent a private server when their public-server experience gets too messy. Our managed Rust hosting handles oxide / Carbon plugin install, scheduled wipes, ddos protection, and panel-based config (decay rate, upkeep multiplier, BP wipes, etc) so you don’t need to touch a config file. Pricing scales with map size and player slots.

For raid math (the offensive side of base management), our companion Rust Raid Calculator covers the sulfur, explosive ammo, and time costs to break each wall tier. It pairs naturally with this one: raiders use the raid calc, defenders use the decay calc.

Bottom line

Decide your tier based on what you’re protecting, not what you can afford to farm. Stone is fine for solo loot. Sheet metal is right for serious base content. Armored is for when you’re a target and the upkeep cost is worth the raider cost. The calculator gives you the daily numbers; the strategy is yours.