The Furnace is an essential item in Rust. It's used to transform useless Ore into valuable metals, like Metal Fragments and High-Quality Metal, which are used for some of the most powerful armor and weapons in the game.

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Considering how important the Furnace is to progress in the world of Rust, it's not too hard to craft. You just need a pile of Wood, Stones, and a bunch of Low-Grade Fuel. This guide will cover everything you need to make a Furnace and how to use it once you've got one installed in your base.

Everything You Need To Craft A Furnace In Rust

wood stone and low grade fuel in rust

Here's a rundown of everything you need to build a furnace in Rust.

  • 200 Stone.
  • 100 Wood.
  • 50 Low-Grade Fuel.

Once the Furnace is crafted you move it to your Hotbar and then place it like you would any other crafted item. Wait for it to turn Blue, then you know it's good to go.

How To Get Low-Grade Fuel

low grade fuel with instructions on how to get it

Low-Grade Fuel is found all over the place in Rust. Typically, one of the easiest ways to find some Fuel in the early days is to hunt through Barrels located in Junk Piles that are commonly found along Rust's roads. In popular areas of the map, these are usually picked clean at the start of a server wipe, but they're worth checking nonetheless. Floating Junk Piles found out on the ocean are less likely to have been raided, and you can find Low-Grade Fuel there, too.

Crafting Low-Grade Fuel

Crafting Low-Grade Fuel is a more reliable way to hit the 50 you need to build the Furnace. Low-Grade Fuel is crafted with:

  • 3 Animal Fat
  • 1 Cloth

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Animal Fat is harvested from various animals in Rust, such as Bears, Deer, and Boars, but can also be collected from player corpses. Kind of gross, but this is a post-apocalyptic world after all. A Bone Knife or Hatchet are the best ways to get the most Animal Fat from corpses.

Cloth is another important crafting material that can be harvested from animals. It can also be collected from Hemp Fiber Plants. You only need one for each Low-Grade Fuel, so you should be able to get most of the Animal Fat and Cloth you need for a big stockpile of Fuel from a few short hunting trips.

  • You need 39 Animal Fat and 13 Cloth in total to make all the Low-Grade Fuel needed to craft a Furnace.

How To Use The Furnace In Rust

furnace instructions with furnace wood and metal ore

The Furnace is fuelled with Wood, of which two pieces can be placed inside at any time. Ore takes about 30 seconds to smelt into the upgraded version. The Furnace chews through wood pretty quickly, with 30 wood disappearing every minute. This means whatever your smelting plans were, you're going to need a lot of wood to get through a whole stack of Ore.

Here are some methods of getting the wood you need to smelt:

  • The most efficient method to get lots of wood is to craft the more powerful harvesting tools, like the Salvaged Axe or Chainsaw. These can produce up to 1,000 pieces of wood in a matter of seconds if you're grinding in the right place with large trees.
  • Another easy way to get lots of wood is to purchase it from the Outpost. You can exchange stone for wood. If you've already been mining other resources, you probably have loads of stone leftover anyway.

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Tips for operating the Furnace:

  • The Furnace will keep on chugging away even when there are no players nearby. Multiple players can access the Furnace at once.
  • A Furnace will smelt all slots at once, so you can stack multiple piles of Ore in there.
  • The Furnace will produce Charcoal from all the burned wood. This is useful for crafting Gunpowder, something you'll need in the late game to make sure no one is busting your base open.
  • You need to leave space in the Furnace for the byproduct (Charcoal) and the smelted material, otherwise, the Furnace will stop running. That's one slot for your stack of fuel (Wood), one slot for whatever refined Metal you're making, and one for Charcoal.

Efficient Smelting Is The Way Forwards

rust large furnace and instructions

There are two ways to make your smelting more efficient in Rust: figure out the amounts of Ore you should be smelting in the Furnace, or upgrade to the more powerful (and more efficient) Large Furnace. For example, in the standard furnace, 1000 Wood and 600 Metal Ore will produce 600 Metal Fragments and the byproduct of 750 Charcoal. You should prepare exactly these amounts of resources to speed up your smelting process.

In terms of the Large Furnace, here's what you need to know:

  • The Large Furnace requires 500 Stone, 600 Wood, and 75 Low-Grade Fuel to craft.
  • This thing is so big you can't put it inside a normal base unless you place a floor grill above it. Makes sense, the Large Furnace is chucking out a lot of smoke and heat. You could just stick it outside as well, and you can build walls around it once you've done so.
  • The Large Furnace uses less wood but does not smelt materials any quicker. It does have a massive 18 slots though, much more than the regular furnace.

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