The cheapest insurance in Rust costs ten cloth
The Small Stash is a deployable you can bury in the ground. The game describes it as “a hidden, buried stash to keep your items safe.”
| Stat | Value |
|---|---|
| Recipe | 10 Cloth |
| Workbench | None |
| Craft time | 15 s by hand, 7 s at WB1, 3 s at WB2/3 |
| Blueprint | Known from spawn |
| Slots | 6 |
| Health | 150 HP, cannot be repaired |
| Lock | None |
| Pick up | No — once placed, it stays placed |
| Recycles into | 6 cloth (4 at a safe zone recycler) |
Ten cloth is one hemp plant. There is no workbench requirement and no blueprint to find. It is the cheapest thing in the game that can survive a raid.
What it is not: it cannot be locked, it cannot be repaired, and it cannot be picked back up once you place it. Its only protection is that nobody knows it exists.
How to place, hide and reveal one
- Place it on fairly flat, natural ground. You need building rights there, so you cannot drop one inside someone else’s Tool Cupboard range.
- Fill it — hold E and drag in up to 6 stacks.
- Hide it — hold E and pick Hide. It sinks into the ground and disappears completely, including from you.
- Reveal it — come back, stand within about 2 metres, and look at the exact spot for a few seconds. It rises back out and opens.
There is no owner check on that reveal. Any player who stands on your stash and looks down digs it up, straight into their inventory. The spot is the entire security model.
The four places worth burying one
A good stash spot is somewhere nobody has a reason to stand, but that you can find again in the dark.
What works:
- Behind trees just off a road. Players run along roads, not through the trees 30 metres away.
- Against the back of a big boulder. Easy to remember, and almost nobody walks around the far side of a rock.
- On the shoreline, next to driftwood or rocks. Beaches are packed on day one and empty for the rest of the wipe.
- Far from your base. Raiders sweep the yard of the base they just opened, not the field two grids over.
What does not:
- Open flat sand or grass, where the small mound gives it away.
- Anything near monuments, recyclers or road crossings — those are the places people actually stop and stand still.
And the boring, load-bearing rule: write the grid reference down or drop a marker on the map. The most common way to lose a stash is not a raider finding it. It is you forgetting where you put it.
The five ways raiders find them
Hidden is not the same as safe. All five of these work on a stash you buried perfectly:
- Someone looks at it. The reveal works for anyone, as above. All they have to do is stand in the right place and look down.
- Hammer swings. Swinging a hammer at the ground makes a different thud over a buried stash, and players sweep suspected spots this way.
- A foundation on top. Placing a building block over a hidden stash breaks it, and the loot drops on the ground in a bag. This is how stashes hidden inside a compound get destroyed when someone builds over them.
- Splash damage. At only 150 HP, an explosion from a raid or an MLRS rocket near your walls can break a stash buried beside them.
- Being watched. If anyone sees you crouching in a bush, they will check that bush the moment you leave.
That fifth one is the one you control. Go in the dark, and alone. A stash is only as hidden as the moment you placed it.
If you want it gone
You almost never need to destroy a stash. Once it is revealed it has no lock, so you just open it and take the contents.
If you do want it destroyed, 150 HP is nothing:
| Tool | Amount / time |
|---|---|
| Molotov | 1 |
| Satchel Charge | 1 |
| C4 | 1 |
| Jackhammer | ~4 s |
| Chainsaw | ~6 s |
| Hatchet | ~11 s |
| Pickaxe | ~16 s |
| F1 Grenade | 2 |
| Beancan Grenade | 3 |
| Explosive 5.56 | 15 |
Breaking one drops everything inside in a loot bag.
The reason most stashes never get buried
Every satchel charge in the game costs one Small Stash.
The satchel recipe is 4 beancan grenades + 1 rope + 1 Small Stash at a Workbench 1, for 480 sulfur per satchel. Ten satchels need ten stashes, which is 100 cloth — which is also ten stacks of hemp you are not turning into sewing kits.
So the item that is supposed to be your backup plan is also an ingredient in the cheapest raid explosive in the game, and most of them end up inside satchels.
Practical note if you are the one crafting: make the stashes first, while you farm the rope and the gun powder, so the craft queue never stalls on a missing ingredient.
How to actually use them
- Bury a respawn kit. A gun, ammo, meds and a sleeping bag in one stash next to a bag gets you back into the fight immediately after a raid, instead of naked on a beach.
- Spread it out. Three stashes in three places beat one stash holding everything.
- Never hide one in your compound. Building over it, splash damage and raiders sweeping your yard all break it.
- Check them every couple of days. An unopened stash decays away. Sources put the timer at about 3 real-life days, and there is no upkeep to pay, so nothing will remind you.
- Do not bother late in a wipe. Everything in a stash is gone at the monthly force wipe anyway.
Stash versus boxes
| Container | Cost | Slots |
|---|---|---|
| Small Stash | 10 cloth | 6 |
| Wood Storage Box | 100 wood | 18 |
| Locker | 100 frags, 50 wood | 42 |
| Large Wood Box | 250 wood, 50 frags | 48 |
Boxes are for the loot room. The stash is for the backup plan: the kit you respawn to, or the components you keep off-site so one bad night does not reset your progress.
The short version
Ten cloth, six slots, buried behind a rock two grids from your base. Write down the grid. Go alone, in the dark. Then check it every couple of days, because it will rot away in three.