// Tool Cupboard decay cost · per hour, day and full wipe
Pick your building grade and block count below — the calculator instantly shows how many resources your Tool Cupboard burns per hour, per day and across a full week of forced wipe. Use it to size your TC stockpile, pick the most decay-efficient grade for your wipe length, or just confirm whether your raid base is going to drain you dry.
Building grade
Quick presets · pick base size
…or enter a custom block count
Per hour
14
stone
Per 24 hours
336
stone
Per week (full wipe)
2,352
stone
// Decay rate breakdown
Per block per hour0.40
Per block per 24 hours9.6
TC capacity1k stack × 4 slots = 4,000
Days at full TC~12
// Approximation — these values use the standard community-cited per-block decay rates. Facepunch tweaks numbers between updates, so always verify against your actual Tool Cupboard for precise targets.
How Tool Cupboard upkeep works in Rust
Every Rust base has a Tool Cupboard (TC) at its core. The TC has 24 inventory slots that you stock with building materials — wood, stone, metal fragments and high-quality metal — and the game silently burns these resources to prevent your base from decaying. Stop fuelling the TC and your walls start losing health on a per-block basis until they crumble.
The cost depends on two things: how many building blocks your base contains (foundations, walls, ceilings, doorways, stairs etc) and the grade of those blocks. A wood-grade 1×1 starter costs almost nothing per day; a sheet-metal 3×3 with bunkers costs hundreds of metal fragments per day. The calculator above estimates the daily and weekly burn so you can stockpile accordingly before going to sleep, going on a roam, or before a forced wipe deadline.
Decay rates by grade
Per-block per-hour upkeep cost (community-cited values; verify in your TC for current patch):
🪵 Wood — ~0.21 wood per block per hour. Effectively free; even a big base burns <500 wood per day.
🪨 Stone — ~0.40 stone per block per hour. The standard mid-wipe grade. A 35-block 2×2 burns ~14 stone/hour or ~336 per 24h.
⚙️ Sheet Metal — ~0.31 metal frags per block per hour. Costlier in absolute terms because metal frags are scarcer than stone.
🛡️ Armoured — ~0.21 high-quality metal per block per hour. HQM is the rarest material in Rust — armoured bases drain HQM stockpiles fast.
Note: the first 16 blocks of any base have a slightly different cost curve (Facepunch's "small base discount") and decay only kicks in fully after the TC has been placed for ~24 hours. For practical purposes the calculator above gives the steady-state upkeep cost — what you'll see on the TC display after the first day.
Common mistakes
Mixing grades in the same base. If even one wall is sheet metal in an otherwise stone base, you have to keep metal frags in the TC too. Pick a grade and commit unless you're deliberately leaving twig-armour decoy walls.
Stocking only the highest-tier resource. The TC consumes resources by grade — putting HQM in for a stone base does nothing. The TC needs the SPECIFIC material that matches your blocks.
Forgetting to refill before a roam. A 2-day offline with an empty TC on a stone base loses ~20 stone walls to decay. Always top up the TC before a long offline.
Building too big for your farm rate. A 120-block clan base on sheet metal grade burns ~900 metal frags per day. If your hemp/recycler grind doesn't sustain that, downgrade or downsize.
Not checking decay timers post-raid. Open walls (broken in a raid) still count for upkeep until you tear them down. Walk the perimeter after defending a raid and clear destroyed sections.
Tips to minimise decay
Match grade to wipe length. Stone is fine for a weekly wipe; sheet metal for fortnightly; armoured only for monthly servers where the HQM cost gets amortised over more days.
Use compact base designs. A well-honeycombed 2×2 with 35 blocks costs the same as a sprawling 2×1 with 35 — but the 2×2 is harder to raid. See the base designs hub for size-by-size builds with TC-friendly footprints.
Stockpile 7+ days of TC. Refilling to a week's worth means even a long offline weekend doesn't lose blocks.
Place a second TC for outpost / raid bases. Each TC has its own upkeep — cheaper than rebuilding a decoy that decayed.
Don't twig your starter base for upkeep savings. Twig has zero upkeep but also zero raid resistance. Upgrade to wood at minimum the moment you have a TC.
What about force-wipes and BPs?
The Tool Cupboard upkeep system is independent of force wipes — even a fully-stocked TC will lose all of its contents (and your base will reset) on the first Thursday of each month when servers force-wipe. The calculator above shows weekly costs assuming a normal 7-day wipe; for monthly servers you'd multiply the weekly figure by ~4 to estimate the full pre-wipe burn.