The economics of a turret are completely lopsided
To place an Auto Turret, a builder spends:
- 25 High Quality Metal
- 1 Targeting Computer
- 1 CCTV Camera
- A gun and a magazine to put in it
Crafted at a Workbench Level 2, on a 45-second craft.
To remove that turret, you can spend seven molotov cocktails — 350 low grade fuel and about 24 seconds, and zero sulfur.
That asymmetry is the whole story. A turret is the most expensive defensive block in the game to build and one of the cheapest to delete, because it has 1,000 HP and almost no explosive resistance. Every hour of HQM farming behind it comes apart for the price of a few grenades.
The counterintuitive part is that most raiders get this backwards: they shoot the most expensive thing they own at it.
Every way to kill a turret, cheapest first
| Method | Damage per hit | Quantity | Sulfur cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Molotov Cocktail | ~147 | 7 | 0 |
| Cannonball | 160 | 7 | 105 |
| Incendiary Rocket | ~1,713 | 1 | 300 |
| High Velocity Rocket | 345 | 3 | 600 |
| F1 Grenade | 107.5 | 10 | 600 |
| Satchel Charge | 550 | 2 | 960 |
| Mortar Shell | 197.5 | 6 | 1,800 |
| Beancan Grenade | 65 | 16 | 1,920 |
| C4 | 1,100 | 1 | 2,200 |
| Explosive 5.56 | 9.008 | 112 | 2,800 |
| Rocket (standard) | 312.5 | 4 | 5,600 |
| 40mm HE Grenade | 62.5 | 16 | — |
| MLRS Rocket | 462.5 | 3 | — |
Read the top and bottom of that table together, because that is the lesson:
Seven molotovs, zero sulfur. The absolute floor. Molotovs craft at 50 low grade fuel each, so seven is 350 LGF and no sulfur at all, and it takes about 24 seconds. This is the answer nobody uses because it sounds silly. Metal doors take no fire damage whatsoever — the Auto Turret very much does.
Three HV rockets, 600 sulfur. If you are already carrying a launcher, this is the answer. HV rockets craft from 1 metal pipe and 100 gun powder at a Workbench 2, which works out to 200 sulfur each, and they hit for 345.
Four standard rockets, 5,600 sulfur. The worst possible answer, and it is what most players do by default because they have rockets. A plain rocket does 312.5 to a turret, which is less than an HV does, so you need four of them and you pay 5,600 sulfur. That is a 9x cost difference for a worse result. If you are shooting rockets at turrets, shoot HVs.
Shooting it with a gun is a losing trade. Explosive 5.56 sits at just 9.008 damage per round, so it takes 112 rounds and 2,800 sulfur — worse than a single C4, and the turret is shooting back the entire time.
Two satchels, and why nobody does it
Two satchel charges destroy a turret for 960 sulfur. That is less than half the price of one C4 and about a sixth the price of rocket-raiding it, and satchels only need a Workbench 1 plus some hemp, which means they exist on day one of a wipe when rockets and C4 do not.
This is the most underrated number in Rust raiding. If a base has external turrets poking out, satchel them first, before you touch the walls.
Sources disagree on this figure. beancan.gg, rustly and whenisforcewiperust’s satchel guide all say two; rustly’s own quick-answer section elsewhere on the same page says four, and one guide lists four as well. Plan for two and carry four.
The same split appears with C4: the raid tables say one C4 (2,200 sulfur) while the summary text on two separate sites says two C4. At 1,100 damage per charge and 1,000 HP, one is what the arithmetic implies — but carry two, because splash placement on a turret pod is not reliable.
The incendiary rocket: one on paper, two or three in the field
The raid charts are unanimous that one incendiary rocket kills a turret, and the damage figure backs it: ~1,713 against 1,000 HP, at 300 sulfur and 75 low grade.
In practice, players who actually do this report otherwise. Fire spread in Rust is random, where the turret sits relative to the impact changes everything, and incendiary rockets drop hard over distance. The field report is two or three to finish the job, not one.
Both are true statements about different things. Treat one as the theoretical minimum and pack three. If you want it dead right now from outside the perimeter, HV rockets are the reliable choice — they fly flatter, so they land on a small pod at range where an incendiary will sail past.
Chainlink fences: the asymmetry that wastes stacks of arrows
This one catches everyone once.
| Fence between you and the turret | Can the turret hit you? | Can you shoot it? |
|---|---|---|
| No fence | Yes | Yes |
| Single chainlink layer | Yes | Blocked |
| Double chainlink layer | Yes | Blocked |
The turret fires through any number of fence layers without any trouble at all. Your arrows do not.
Check the enclosure before you commit to a method. There is nothing quite like emptying a stack of arrows into a fence collider.
Primitive methods, for the genuinely sulfur-poor
You do not need explosives at all, if you have patience and the right target.
| Method | Quantity / time | Sulfur |
|---|---|---|
| Compound bow, fully charged, plain arrows | ~100 arrows | 0 |
| Fire arrows (hunting bow) | 46-58 arrows | 0 |
| Wooden Spears, thrown or poked | 3 | 0 |
| Salvaged Hammer | ~34 s of continuous striking | 0 |
The compound bow is the broke solo’s answer: wood, stone and cloth, dead silent, and nobody at the base even knows you are there. Find a ridge or throw up a twig tower outside the turret’s engagement range, make sure you can see the turret model but it cannot see you, and hold the draw until the charge bar is completely full — half-charged shots are wasted effort. It takes a few minutes of uninterrupted shooting per turret.
The fire arrow count is another point where guides split: 46 against 58. Take 60.
The three spears and the 34-second hammer are for the builder who plopped a turret down on open ground with no fence, no garage door and no overlapping coverage. It happens more often than it should.
The shield trick: make it shoot itself empty
If your goal is not just to destroy the turret but to walk away with the gun inside it, drain its ammo first. A dead turret drops its weapon; an emptied one lets you take it and the turret’s other components.
- Equip a Metal Shield.
- Put a single-handed weapon — a pistol or a one-handed melee tool — in the hotbar next to it.
- Walk into the turret’s line of sight and let it unload into the shield.
- Before the shield’s durability is gone, step back behind cover or out of range.
- Swap to the single-handed weapon and back to the shield. That swap resets the shield’s active defensive durability.
- Repeat until the turret goes click… click… click… with nothing left.
- Walk up, smash it with a cheap tool, take the high-tier firearm inside.
This works because the turret aggressively prioritises you and burns its whole magazine doing it. A Python-loaded turret fires about 12 rapid shots before it cycles, so the rhythm is predictable once you have watched it once.
It is a genuine skill-over-resources play, and it turns the most expensive defensive item in the game into a loot crate.
The 180-degree arc, and the 30-metre range
Everything above assumes you can get an angle. The turret’s limits are what make those angles possible:
- 180° field of view. It cannot see behind itself. Approach from the back and you are invisible to it.
- 30 m engagement range. Anything you do outside 30 m is safe from it.
- 10 rW power draw. One large solar panel at peak output runs one; a single large battery can run ten.
And on vanilla, only 12 turrets can be active within 40 m of each other. The convars are sentry.maxinterference (12) and sentry.interferenceradius (40). A thirteenth powers up, glows blue, and acquires nothing at all.
That is a real weakness in a compound: if you can count more than twelve turrets clustered in view, some of them are decorative. Modded and community servers routinely change or remove these limits, so check your server before you design a base around twelve.
What to do after it’s dead
A destroyed turret is a signal. The explosion or the fire draws attention, and a turret that goes quiet tells the owner exactly where you are.
- Move immediately after the kill. Do not stand there admiring it.
- External turrets first, always. Strip the outside coverage before you touch walls, because a turret you left alive will kill you during the raid itself.
- Fire, then loot on the way out. Grab the gun on the retreat, not on the way in.
- Repair bench it. A turret you capture intact is worth its weight — 25 HQM, a Targeting Computer and a CCTV Camera all come back out of a recycler at a monument.
The one-line version
External turrets die to two satchels or seven molotovs. If you are standing there with a rocket launcher, use HV rockets, and never use four standard ones.