The Short Answer
Renting a room in Rust's new Apartment Complex is the fastest way to get a secure foothold on a fresh wipe: talk to the receptionist in the lobby, pay the down payment for the tier you want (100 Scrap for a basement room up to 400 Scrap for a penthouse), and keep feeding Scrap into the slot by your door or you get evicted with everything inside seized. Clans are the group-organization layer above teams: craft a clan table, place it in your base, and manage members, roles, and a shared score through its UI. Both systems arrived in the July 2026 Common Ground update alongside raid windows, which limit raiding to a set daily block by default. For the full patch rundown, see our Common Ground update news post.
Renting an Apartment: Step by Step
- Find the Apartment Complex monument on the map and head to the lobby.
- Talk to the receptionist NPC to see available rooms and their price tier.
- Pay the down payment. Basement rooms cost 100 Scrap, mid-tier rooms cost 200 Scrap, and penthouse rooms cost 400 Scrap.
- Keep the lease funded. A slot next to your door needs Scrap deposited regularly. Run out and you are evicted, losing everything stored inside.
- Decorate and store as normal, treating the room like a compact base with built-in walls and a lock you do not have to build yourself.
Is an Apartment Safer Than a Base?
It removes the early-wipe grind of gathering wood and stone for walls, but it does not remove risk entirely. Apartment rooms can still be raided, so treat the down payment and upkeep like rent on a base you did not have to farm materials for, not a guaranteed-safe vault. Keep your most valuable loot on your person or in a secondary hidden stash if you are running a room as your only base.
Running a Rentable Shop
The complex's small marketplace lets players buy and operate a shop to sell to other residents. Opening one costs 100 Scrap upfront, plus 10 Scrap per real-world hour afterward as upkeep. This works best as a side income stream if you are already based near the complex, since foot traffic from other renters is built in. Price competitively against nearby shops and restock frequently. Idle shops with empty vending machines get ignored fast.
Setting Up a Clan
- Craft a clan table (check your crafting menu after the Common Ground update; the recipe uses standard mid-game components).
- Place it inside your base, ideally somewhere secure since it becomes a coordination hub.
- Open the clan UI to invite members, assign roles and permissions, and post announcements visible to the whole group.
- Track your score. The built-in score breakdown shows exactly what earned or cost your clan points, pulling from activities like:
- Destroying Bradley APC or the Patrol Helicopter
- Looting crates
- Running the Excavator
- Using keycards
Clans work best for groups larger than a standard team who want persistent structure across a wipe, roles for raiders versus builders versus scouts, and a shared log everyone can check instead of relying on voice chat memory.
Playing Around Raid Windows
The default raid window is 6 PM to 9 PM local server time. Outside that window, bases cannot be raided through normal means, which changes strategy in a few concrete ways:
- Build during the day without panic. You do not need to rush full base defense in your first hour if the server uses default raid windows, since nobody can touch your base until the window opens.
- Defend actively during the window. Raid windows concentrate all of a server's raiding into a predictable few hours, so online presence during that block matters far more than round-the-clock base camping.
- Check server rules before committing. Some servers disable raid windows entirely to keep the classic 24/7 raiding pace. Confirm which mode a server runs before you invest hours into a base there.
- Softcore servers add a 2x gather multiplier on top of raid windows, so if you are wipe-hopping between server types, expect Softcore to feel noticeably faster to gear up on.
For general wipe-day fundamentals, see our Rust beginner's survival guide, and for boat and Deep Sea content added in an earlier update, check the Rust Naval Update guide.
