At a glance: a tool cupboard costs 1000 wood to craft, and with no upkeep left your base fully decays in 1 hour (twig), 3 hours (wood), 5 hours (stone), 8 hours (metal) or 12 hours (armoured). A destroyed cupboard burns up to 24 hours of upkeep to delay decay.
If you have ever logged back in to find your base gone, the reason is almost never raiders. It is upkeep. This page explains exactly what your tool cupboard does, what it does not do, and the one setting that makes it more likely to be destroyed.
What a tool cupboard actually does
A tool cupboard — always called a TC — does two separate jobs, and players lose bases by confusing them.
- It stops decay, by paying a fraction of what the base cost to build. This is called upkeep.
- It grants building privilege, which stops other players building inside its radius.
The second job gets all the attention. The first one is what keeps your base standing. The wiki is blunt about it: without a tool cupboard holding resources, “your base will start decaying straight away”.
Crafting one costs 1000 wood, and the wiki’s guidance is that every base needs one. It also recommends putting a lock on it — but as you will see below, the lock has a real downside.
For the fundamentals of getting a first base up, see the beginner guide and the base building guide.
Upkeep: the bill you pay every 24 hours
Press E on the cupboard to open its inventory. It shows two things you should read every time you log in:
- the cost per 24 hours of keeping the base from decaying
- how long the base is currently protected for
That protection timer is the single most important number on your screen. Once it hits zero, decay begins.
What goes into the cost is narrower than most players assume. Only the materials in the structure count — walls, foundations, ceilings, roofs, doors and window pieces. Deployables inside the base do not. The wiki names sleeping bags specifically: they add nothing to upkeep.
This gives you a useful piece of arithmetic. A base built entirely from stone with sheet metal doors only ever costs stone and metal fragments to maintain. You can fill it with boxes, furnaces, workbenches and beds and the bill does not move.
How long you have once upkeep runs out
The wiki lists the full decay window for each building tier. These are the times to complete destruction once there is no upkeep left for that material:
| Building tier | Resource that must be in the TC | Time to fully decay |
|---|---|---|
| Twig | Wood | 1 hour |
| Wood | Wood | 3 hours |
| Stone | Stone | 5 hours |
| Metal | Metal fragments | 8 hours |
| Armoured | High quality metal | 12 hours |
Two details in that table catch people out.
The timer is per material, not per base. If your base is mixed metal and stone and you run out of stone, only the stone parts lose health. The wiki states it directly: “only the stone parts of your base will lose health and decay”. A stone-walled metal-core base will therefore lose its shell first while the core sits intact.
Decay eats from the outside in. The wiki’s description is the best one going: “Bases are like onions, they have layers.” The outermost parts exposed to the environment begin decaying first, and decay works inward until the core goes.
That shape matters practically: honeycombing is not just raid defence, it is decay defence. Outer layers buy you hours.
The privilege radius comes from your foundations, not the cupboard
This is the most common misread of the mechanic. Players assume the cupboard projects a circle from wherever it is placed. It does not.
Per the wiki: “The foundations of the building that your tool cupboard is connected to will project the TC’s radius.” The radius is projected by the foundations, and the wiki emphasises it with an exclamation mark — the radius comes from the foundations, not from the point of the tool cupboard.
The consequences:
- Moving the cupboard to a different spot inside the same building changes nothing.
- Removing or destroying foundations shrinks your privilege, because you have removed the thing casting it.
- Two disconnected buildings do not share privilege. The wiki is unambiguous: “All separate buildings require a tool cupboard.” Either connect them with foundations or give the second one its own cupboard.
You can find the exact boundary by walking around your base and watching the green BUILDING PRIVILEGE indicator in the bottom right, above your health bar. Where it disappears is where your privilege ends.
The twig and ladder loophole
Building privilege is not a wall. It has a documented hole in it.
Unauthorised players can still place twig floors (using a building plan) and wooden ladders on your base. When they do, the building outline shows orange and reads BUILDING BLOCKED in red — but the placement still goes through.
Anything else turns the outline red and the player is notified privately in chat that it is blocked.
So a TC stops someone building a raid tower next to you. It does not stop someone putting a ladder on your wall. If your base design relies on privilege alone to prevent access, it has a hole in it — pair it with the design advice in the base building guide and the offensive perspective in the raiding guide.
Grief protection: what happens when the cupboard is destroyed
When your cupboard is destroyed while it still holds resources, those resources are not simply handed to the raider. The wiki describes a deliberate mechanic: the cupboard “will eat up to 24 hours worth of upkeep on being destroyed to prevent the base from decaying until 24 hours later from this point.”
That is a 24-hour grace period bought with your own stockpile. It exists so you do not instantly lose the base after a raid — provided the raiders do not take it over with their own doors.
It is also, per the wiki, “another good way to prevent raiders from getting all your loot”. From the raider’s side, every hour of upkeep consumed is loot they did not get.
Why locking your cupboard backfires
Here is the counter-intuitive part, and it is stated plainly on the official wiki:
“Your tool cupboard is more likely to be broken and consume upkeep if it is locked!”
Read that carefully. Locking the cupboard keeps strangers from authorising to it — a real benefit. But it also signals that you have something worth protecting from the inside, and the wiki’s note is that a locked cupboard is the one that gets smashed.
And smashing it is not cost-free for the attacker in the way you might hope. It triggers the grief protection above, burning up to 24 hours of your upkeep. The wiki even points at the screenshot evidence: “Note how the tool cupboard has fewer resources after being broken due to 24 hours of upkeep being consumed.”
The practical reading is not “never lock your TC”. It is:
- Lock it, but keep upkeep high. Grief protection can only spend what is there. An empty locked cupboard gives you 24 hours of nothing.
- Treat the lock as a target marker. Anything worth locking is worth hiding — see the base building guide for placement.
- On a low-population server, an unlocked cupboard with deep upkeep may outlast a locked one with a shallow stockpile.
High external walls and external cupboards
High external walls are the cheapest defence in the game, and the wiki gives them two special rules:
- They do not decay as long as they sit inside the radius of a building that has a tool cupboard.
- They do not add to upkeep.
That combination is close to free protection. The wiki recommends building external tool cupboards — small structures containing nothing but a cupboard — purely to cast privilege over your walls.
There is a second reason to do it that has nothing to do with decay. External cupboards stop opponents erecting structures just outside your radius, which is otherwise the standard way to jump a high external wall. If your wall line has ever been scaled by a tower you could not block, this is the fix.
For monument layouts where this matters most, cross-reference the monuments guide.
A working checklist
Before you log off:
- Press E on the cupboard and check the protection timer, not just the resource count.
- Top up the material your base is actually made of. A mixed base drains two resources; running dry on one decays only those parts, so the shell can vanish while the core looks fine.
- Check every detached structure. A separate building with no cupboard is on its own 1-to-12-hour clock regardless of how rich your main TC is.
- Confirm your foundations are intact. Privilege is cast by them. Losing a foundation silently shrinks your radius.
- Decide deliberately about the lock, and stock upkeep to match.
If you are still at the stage of choosing where to build, start with the beginner guide and the survival guide. To understand what attackers do to cupboards and why they prioritise them, read the raiding guide.
A note on version drift
Decay times and upkeep rates are the numbers Facepunch tunes most often across Rust’s monthly updates. Every figure on this page was read from the official Rust wiki in October 2026. The structural rules — privilege cast by foundations, per-material decay, grief protection consuming up to 24 hours — have been stable for years, but if a specific hour count looks wrong after a patch, trust the in-game cupboard readout over this page.