Sulfur, gunpowder and raid economy

Sulfur is the heartbeat of every Rust wipe. It is the input to every bullet that matters and every wall that falls. This page consolidates the 2026 numbers for sulfur farming, gunpowder mixing, ammo crafting, the explosives chain, and the raid cost ladder so you can plan a wipe without guessing.

1. Sulfur sources

Sulfur enters your inventory through three pipelines: ore nodes, the Sulfur Quarry, and loot (barrels, crates, recycling).

Nodes always crack into a final "bonus" hit, which is why jackhammer total per node is closer to 600+ than 200. Always finish a node — leaving it half-mined wastes the bonus tier.[^1][^2][^5]

2. Gunpowder mixing table

The base recipe is 20 sulfur + 30 charcoal -> 10 gunpowder at a Tier 1 workbench (2 sec).[^3]

The Mixing Table is the smart play. It runs the same recipe but supports a 1.5x output multiplier when paired with active production-boosting tea or recipe efficiency. Pure recipe efficiencies stack the output to 15 GP per cycle versus the workbench's flat 10.

The Outpost mixing table is the fastest safe-zone GP factory — bring scrap, queue, recycle skulls, repeat.[^3][^7]

3. Charcoal supply

Charcoal is the dollar-store half of every GP cycle, but it bottlenecks more often than sulfur.

A 5-slot large furnace can clear ~20k wood per session. Pair wood-tea with hatchet farming to keep up with sulfur intake.[^3]

4. Gunpowder downstream: ammo

GP plus metal fragments makes nearly every bullet in the game. Memorize per-shot GP cost:

A loaded AK mag (30 rounds) is roughly 50 GP / 100 sulfur / 150 charcoal / 100 frag. Plan farms around full kits, not bullets.[^4][^6][^8]

5. Explosives chain

The explosives item itself is the gate to every late-wipe raid tool.

Explosives recipe: 50 GP + 10 sulfur + 10 metal fragments + 3 LGF -> 1 Explosives (Tier 3 workbench).

Downstream products from Explosives:

Cook beancans behind cover — they have a 20% dud chance and a 10% chance to blow up in your hands on the throw. Rope from cloth (50 cloth -> 1 rope at workbench).[^4][^7]

6. Raid cost ladder (per wall, soft side)

This is the canonical "what does it cost to punch this wall" table, normalized to sulfur:

Doors are cheaper than the wall they sit in — always check the door first. Sheet metal walls are softer than stone walls to explosives (because of how HP/explosive resistance scales), so a "metal" base is often cheaper to raid than a "stone" one. HQM walls cannot be satcheled.[^5][^9]

7. Sulfur farming routes & efficiency

Snow biome nodes spawn denser than desert/forest — the standard tournament-tier farm is jackhammer + Pure Ore Tea + snow biome node loop.[^1][^2][^5]

8. Sulfur Tea (Ore Tea)

Tea is brewed at the Mixing Table from berries + sulfur ore + a few extras. There is no separate "sulfur tea" — Ore Tea boosts sulfur, metal, and stone node yields equally.

Stack Pure Ore Tea with a jackhammer before your big sulfur run — that single buff turns a 6k/hr farm into a 9k/hr farm.[^7]

9. Pro tips

• Never raid with less than 1.5x explosives. Account for misclicks, dud beancans, splash absorption from external walls, and the inevitable "wrong wall." A 4-rocket stone wall on paper is a 6-rocket stone wall in practice.
• Mixing Table is fastest in a safe zone if you have scrap. Outpost mixing table queue + recycling skulls/components gives you GP with zero raid risk to your base.
• Auto-craft GP via Industrial Crafter. Pipe sulfur and charcoal in, pipe GP out to a sorter that splits feeds for ammo and explosives crafters. See Industrial Crafters.
• Furnace > Campfire for charcoal at any scale beyond fresh-spawn — the slot count matters more than the speed.
• Smelt sulfur ore as you mine it. Carrying 30k ore home is a death sentence; carrying 30k smelted sulfur is also a death sentence, but at least it's half the weight after you've burned the byproduct.
• The shotgun trap is GP-free defense. Handmade shells cost only stone + GP, not frags. Fill traps before bed.
• Explosive 5.56 is the solo raid king. A semi-rifle plus 100 explo rounds breaks a sheet-metal door for ~1,500 sulfur with no Tier 3 needed.

10. Sources

[^1]: How to Find Sulfur in RUST - Corrosion Hour [^2]: Sulfur Quarry in Rust: Complete Guide - tradeit.gg [^3]: Gun Powder - Rust Wiki / Fandom [^4]: 5.56 Rifle Ammo - Rust Wiki / Fandom [^5]: Rust Raid Calculator - rusttips.com [^6]: Handmade Shell - Rust Wiki / Fandom [^7]: RUST Mixing Table and Tea Guide - Corrosion Hour [^8]: Explosives - Rust Wiki / Fandom [^9]: Rust Raid Cost Guide - Steam Community

Want more? Raiding · Industrial Crafters

11. The full craft chain — every conversion step

To budget a raid properly you must be able to trace a single piece of sulfur from the ground all the way to a wall breach. Rust's explosive economy is a chain of fixed conversions, and the bottleneck is almost never the explosive itself — it is the charcoal and workbench time hiding inside the gunpowder step.

• Gunpowder — 20 sulfur + 30 charcoal craft into 10 gunpowder at a Tier 1 workbench. Every downstream explosive is really a request for gunpowder, which is really a request for charcoal.
• Explosives — 50 gunpowder + 10 sulfur + 10 metal fragments + 3 low grade fuel craft into 1 Explosives. This intermediate item exists only to feed C4.
• Timed Explosive Charge (C4) — 20 Explosives + 5 cloth + 2 tech trash. Tracing back, one C4 consumes roughly 2,000 gunpowder and a large pile of metal fragments and low grade fuel.
• Rocket — 150 gunpowder + 10 explosives + 200 metal fragments per rocket, fired from a launcher.
• Satchel Charge — 4 Bean Can Grenades + 1 small stash + 1 rope. Bean cans are 60 gunpowder + 20 metal fragments each, so a satchel is gunpowder-cheap but craft-step heavy.

The practical lesson: a raid's true cost is its total gunpowder demand. Convert any raid plan into gunpowder first, then into sulfur and charcoal, and you will never under-farm. A player who budgets in "number of C4" routinely arrives at the base short on charcoal because they forgot the 30-charcoal-per-10-gunpowder tax buried three layers down.

12. Charcoal — the hidden second bottleneck

Sulfur gets all the attention, but charcoal quietly limits more raids than players admit. Charcoal is a by-product of burning wood in any furnace, campfire or oven. Key efficiency facts:

• A standard campfire and furnace both yield charcoal as a side output while smelting — you are generating raid fuel for free every time you cook metal or sulfur ore.
• The Large Furnace burns far more wood at once, making it the correct tool when you are spinning up for a raid: load it with surplus wood purely to bank charcoal.
• Because gunpowder eats charcoal 1.5x faster than sulfur (30 vs 20 per batch), a base that smelts a lot of sulfur but little metal will run charcoal-dry first. Keep a dedicated charcoal furnace running on wood whenever raiding is on the agenda.

Rule of thumb: for every stack of sulfur you intend to turn into gunpowder, bank at least 1.5 stacks of charcoal. If you only ever smelt as you go, your raid window slips by an hour while a furnace chews through logs.

13. The Mixing Table — and why every raider builds one

The hand-craft gunpowder recipe is fine for ammo, but serious raiders use the Mixing Table. It converts the same inputs in large batched jobs rather than ten-at-a-time hand crafts, freeing you to farm, build or defend while the table works. The table also unlocks the path to tea brewing (covered in Section 8) from cloned berry clippings.

The strategic value is throughput: a single Mixing Table queued with thousands of sulfur and charcoal will produce a full raid's gunpowder unattended. A raid group should treat the Mixing Table as core infrastructure, built early and placed in a safe interior room — losing it mid-wipe means reverting to slow hand crafts and effectively halving your raid cadence.

14. Converting a raid plan into a farm target

Here is the workflow a meta player runs before every raid. Scout the base, count the walls and doors on the path to the loot, look up each one's explosive cost, sum it, then add a 20-30% safety margin for misses, duds and honeycomb you did not see. The table below shows finished sulfur cost for common single-element breaches so you can sum a route quickly.

Two principles fall out of this table. First, always raid the door, never the wall, when a door is on your path — a sheet metal door at 2,200 sulfur is a quarter the cost of the sheet metal wall beside it. Second, satchels dominate stone but collapse against sheet metal and armored tiers, where their poor damage-per-sulfur and dud rate make C4 and rockets the only sane choice. Knowing exactly where that crossover sits is the difference between a profitable raid and a sulfur loss.

15. Sulfur return on investment — is the raid worth it?

A raid is an investment: you spend sulfur to (hopefully) gain loot. The meta question is never "can I break in" but "will the loot exceed what I spent, including the kit I might lose." A disciplined raider applies three filters:

1. Cost-to-value ratio — a 2x2 stone base might cost ~3,000-5,000 sulfur to crack and typically holds a few hundred sulfur, some components and a kit. That is usually a loss on raw resources; you raid it for the kits, guns and the denial of a competitor, not for profit.
2. Loot decay — bases that have been offline a long time may have rotted boxes or already been raided. Scout for open doors and missing loot before committing explosives.
3. Risk premium — every raid is loud. Factor in the sulfur value of the kit and explosives you could lose to a third party drawn by the noise. Online raids on a populated server carry a much higher risk premium than a 4am offline.

The correct mindset: most raids do not pay for themselves in sulfur. They pay for themselves in eliminating a threat, capturing tools and components you cannot easily farm, and controlling the map. Raiding purely for sulfur profit only works at the top end — large bases, clan compounds, and unguarded loot rooms — where the stored wealth genuinely exceeds the explosive bill.

16. Sulfur economy across the wipe

Sulfur's value is not constant — it follows a clear curve over a wipe cycle, and timing your farming to that curve is a quiet meta edge.

• Early wipe (day 1) — almost nobody has explosives. A single satchel or even bean cans can crack the wood-door bases everyone is still living in. Sulfur spent now buys raids that would cost ten times as much later.
• Mid wipe — bases upgrade to stone and sheet metal, explosive demand spikes, and sulfur monuments and the Quarry become contested. This is the period to run efficient farm routes and bank gunpowder.
• Late wipe — armored bases and clan compounds dominate; raids cost tens of thousands of sulfur. Sulfur is now a strategic reserve, and most players shift to trading at Bandit Camp or buying components rather than raiding marginal targets.

The takeaway: farm aggressively early and convert sulfur straight into raids while breaches are cheap, then transition to banking gunpowder mid-wipe for the expensive late-game targets. Sulfur left sitting raw in a box is the most common form of wasted potential on any server.