Map markers, pings, and sleeping bag strategy

The map is your second brain and your sleeping bag is your second life. Mastering both is the difference between a 4-minute respawn at your raid target and a 20-minute jog up the beach in a torn hoodie. This guide covers everything from G-key basics to bag-burying for covert re-entry.

1. Map basics

Press G to open the in-game map. The map is procedurally generated per server seed and is populated with monuments, roads, rivers, and biome boundaries as soon as you spawn — Rust does not require map "discovery" like older survival games.

The map uses a grid coordinate system (A1 in the top-left through to Z26-ish on a 4500-size map). Players call out grids in voice — "got a Bolty in H14" — so memorising the rough monument-to-grid mapping for your wipe is a real skill. Grid scale: each cell is roughly 146.3 metres on a side regardless of world size.

The companion Rust+ app (covered in section 10) shows the same map live on your phone, including team positions and any vending machines you've marked.

2. Custom map markers

Right-click anywhere on the map to drop a marker. Since the Make Your Mark update, every player can place multiple markers, each with a custom name and colour, to flag monuments, roam routes, stash spots, recyclers, and known enemy bases.

If you are the team leader, every marker you place appears on every teammate's map automatically. Non-leaders see their own markers locally. This is why most clans assign one player as the "navigator" leader — they pin recyclers, raid targets, and bag locations for the whole squad. Markers persist across deaths but reset when you leave the server.

3. Pings

The ping system (introduced alongside markers, expanded since) lets you flag a 3D world location for teammates without typing.

• Default bind: Mouse 3 (middle-click) opens the radial; tap once for a generic ping, double-tap for a red "hostile" ping. Many players rebind to Z for accessibility.
• Voice line: Your character shouts a contextual callout ("over here!", "enemy!", "look at this!") so teammates can hear urgency even when chat is muted.
• Ping cooldown: ~3 seconds between pings to prevent spam.
• What teammates see: A coloured icon at the pinged location, visible through walls at long range, plus a compass-edge indicator. Pings fade after ~30 seconds.
• Ping vs marker: Pings are short-lived, 3D, and visible in the world. Markers are persistent and only on the map. Use pings for "shoot that guy right now"; use markers for "remember this recycler".

Long-range pings also work through Binoculars, PTZ CCTV cameras, and Drones — point at the target, ping, and your spotter call is broadcast.

4. Group locator

Teammates appear as green dots on your map by default the moment you accept a team invite. The dots update live (server-side, no LoS check). At close range — roughly under 30 metres — a small health bar and name tag also float above their head so you can triage in a firefight.

Hardcore mode disables the entire map and team-marker system, including the green dots. In hardcore you navigate by sun, monuments, and pre-arranged voice callouts only — a deliberately brutal design choice. Some community servers also strip teammate dots via plugins for "vanilla-plus" realism.

5. Sleeping bag basics

Crafting a sleeping bag requires 30 Cloth. Once thrown on a valid surface, it becomes your respawn anchor.

Beds (crafted from 100 Wood + 1 Sewing Kit, deployable indoors) are the upgraded version:

Beds win for base-defence respawns. Bags win for everywhere else because of footprint and disposability.

6. Beach respawn

If every bag you own is on cooldown — or you have no bags placed at all — the respawn screen forces you onto a random beach on the island's coastline. The selection is weighted to spread fresh spawns across all beach zones to avoid spawn-camping concentration.

Some community servers add a "fresh spawn protection" window — typically 10 minutes — during which you cannot be damaged by other players, or you cannot pick up loot from kills, or you glow visibly. Vanilla Facepunch servers do not have this by default; the protection is a modded feature on PvE/low-pop servers and some PvP newbie servers.

Always check your bag's cooldown timer on the respawn screen before clicking — a greyed-out bag with "3:42" left burns those 3:42 of real time if you click it.

7. Bag strategy

The single biggest skill-gap in Rust is bag placement. Solo and clan, the meta is the same: never have one bag, never have all your bags in one spot.

A standard wipe-day loadout:

• 1 bag in main base (the obvious one)
• 1 bag at your nearest monument (Outpost / Mining Outpost / a recycler town)
• 1 bag near your current raid target (placed 100-150 m out so the 50 m cluster rule doesn't cascade-lock during a re-spawn raid)
• 1 hidden "stash bag" for re-entry after a death
• 1 floating bag to move around during the wipe

Bag stash technique: drop a bag deep in a cave, under a rock formation, or in dense forest — somewhere a roamer would never look. After a bad death, you respawn there with nothing but spawn rocks and torches, sneak home, and reclaim. Caves are especially good because the dark and the verticality hide bags from sweep-checking.

Placement rules to remember:

• Bags require a roughly horizontal surface.
• Bags cannot overlap each other within ~3 m.
• Bags cannot be placed on building parts owned by other players (your TC privilege rules apply).
• Bags inside an enemy's building privilege zone (their TC range) will be destroyed when they sweep with a hammer.

8. Bag-burying

A favourite tactic of veteran raiders: place a bag, then bury it with terrain, rocks, or a single foundation, so it's invisible from above. Done correctly in a cave, hillside, or under a base's external foundation pillar, you get a permanent covert spawn at your raid target.

The bag still has to satisfy the surface check at placement time, but once placed you can clip terrain on top of it on many servers. Buried bags are how 2-man duos hit 20-TC compound raids — they spawn, plant satchels, die, spawn again, repeat. The whole raid happens from inside the target's footprint.

9. Pro tips

• Never put your only bag in your main base. If you get TC-raided, every bag inside the privilege bubble is wiped — you respawn beach-side with no map context for your own base location.
• Rotate bags every wipe day. Day 1 placements are predictable to experienced PvPers; move them by day 3.
• Use beach protection windows on servers that have them — you can sometimes punch through a horde of fresh spawns to reach a critical recycler.
• Check the bag location on the map before clicking respawn. A bag flashing "ready" near a known enemy base might be a death warp. Pick the boring safe one.
• Pin your own bag locations as map markers with a colour that means "mine". Then if a teammate asks "where do I respawn?", they read the map.
• Bag near, not in. A bag 150 m outside your base wall lets you spawn during a raid-defence without being inside the raid's TC bubble.

10. Rust+ companion app integration

The official Rust+ mobile app (iOS + Android, free) is a remote command centre for your base.

• Live map with full server geography, monuments, and team green dots.
• Smart Alarms wired to in-game electronics: get a push notification the instant a door opens, a turret fires, or a pressure plate triggers. Custom message per alarm.
• Team chat: messages typed in the app appear in in-game team chat and vice versa.
• Storage Monitors attached to your TC let you read upkeep remaining and resource levels without logging in.
• Vending machine search: find recyclers selling specific items across the whole map.
• Modded servers sometimes expose extra Rust+ panels: bag locations, kit timers, raidable base alerts, etc. Vanilla does not show your bag positions in the app.

Pair the app on first launch via the in-game pairing menu (Esc → Rust+). The phone keeps polling even while Rust is closed, so smart alarms work 24/7 as long as the server is up.

11. Sources

1. Corrosion Hour — RUST Map Markers Guide
2. Corrosion Hour — How do Sleeping Bags Work in RUST
3. Corrosion Hour — The RUST Map Guide
4. Corrosion Hour — The RUST Hardcore Tips & Tricks Guide
5. Rust Wiki (Fandom) — Sleeping Bag
6. RustLabs — Bed
7. Facepunch — Make Your Mark patch notes
8. Facepunch — Rust+ Companion official page

Want more detail? Teamwork & Trust · Survival Mechanics

Reading the respawn screen like a clock

The respawn screen is a decision, not a button. Every bag you own is listed with a live cooldown timer, and the screen also offers the random beach option. The mistake that costs raids is clicking a bag that still shows a number — if a bag reads "2:47", choosing it does not skip the wait, it makes you sit through those 2 minutes 47 seconds on the death screen. During an active raid that delay can lose you the loot room.

The correct read: scan every bag, find the one that is either ready now or has the shortest remaining timer relative to where you need to be, and weigh it against a beach spawn. A beach spawn is instant but dumps you naked and potentially far from anything; a bag spawn costs the cooldown but puts you exactly where you want with whatever the bag's location implies. On a raid, a fresh bag 100–150 m from the target almost always beats waiting on a closer bag that is mid-cooldown.

The 50-metre cluster rule in practice

Spawning on any bag puts every bag within roughly 50 metres of it onto cooldown simultaneously. This is the single rule that breaks raid-train respawns for inexperienced groups. If you place three bags in a tight cluster behind your raid target so "we always have a spawn", the first death burns the cooldown on all three at once and your next two deaths have nothing ready. The fix is spacing: place raid-train bags more than 50 m apart so each one is an independent spawn on its own timer. Three bags spaced 60–80 m apart around a target give you three genuine, staggered re-entries instead of one shared one.

Bag decay, ownership, and why bags vanish

A sleeping bag placed in the open is not permanent. Outside of building privilege it slowly decays and will eventually disappear on its own, which is why a "stash bag" you placed two wipes' worth of sessions ago may simply be gone when you need it. Bags placed inside your own tool-cupboard range are protected by that cupboard's upkeep and last as long as the base does. The planning consequence: treat field and stash bags as consumable. Re-place them on long sessions, and never rely on a single un-cupboarded bag as your only lifeline.

• Hammer ownership: you can pick a bag back up or reassign it with the Hammer if it is yours. You can also rename bags — a renamed bag ("RAID", "HOME", "CAVE") is far faster to pick on a stressful respawn screen than three identical "Sleeping Bag" entries.
• Enemy privilege: a bag you sneak into an enemy's tool-cupboard range can be destroyed by them with a single hammer hit during a sweep. Hidden re-entry bags belong just outside hostile TC zones, not inside them.
• Surface rules: bags need a roughly flat surface, cannot overlap within a few metres of each other, and cannot be placed on building blocks owned by other players.

A disciplined custom-marker workflow

The map caps you at a handful of custom markers (five by default), so every marker should earn its slot. Treat the marker list as a rotating worklist rather than a permanent atlas:

1. Home marker — your base. This one is permanent; never spend it on anything else.
2. Active objective — the monument or recycler you are farming this session. Move it as you move.
3. Raid / scout target — placed only while a raid is live, deleted after.
4. Hazard / intel marker — a base that shot at you, a contested monument, a downed teammate's death spot.
5. Floating slot — kept free for whatever the next 20 minutes needs.

If you are the team leader, your markers broadcast to the whole team automatically while non-leaders see only their own. This is why organized groups appoint one navigator: that player carries leadership, pins the shared objectives, and the rest of the team simply follows the leader's marks. When the navigator dies and respawns, the markers persist — they only clear when that player leaves the server entirely.

Pings and the recon loop

Pings are the fast, lightweight alternative to placing a full marker, and they are tied to recon tools — they fire when you are actively looking through Binoculars, a PTZ CCTV camera, or a Drone. A ping drops a temporary marker on the map and compass for both you and your team for about 10 seconds, with a short cooldown of a few seconds between pings to stop spam.

The meta use is a spotter loop: one player sits on a base roof or in a CCTV chair with binoculars and pings every enemy they see, while the rotating teammates read those pings off their compass without ever having to look at the map. Because pings expire in seconds they always represent current information — a ping is "an enemy is there right now", whereas a custom marker is "something was here". Use pings for live combat callouts and markers for persistent objectives; mixing the two up clutters the map and gets people killed.

Rust+ companion app as a base-management layer

The Rust+ mobile companion app is not just a chat tool — paired with in-game Smart Switches, Smart Alarms, and Storage Monitors, it turns your phone into a remote panel for the base. A Smart Alarm wired to a door or window sensor sends a push notification to your phone the instant someone triggers it, so an offline raid alert reaches you even when you are not at the PC. Storage Monitors let you check a box's contents remotely, and Smart Switches let you toggle base electrics — turning on turrets or lights — from the app.

The app also shows the live server map with your team's positions and any markers, lets you read team chat, and shows the day/night cycle and active events like Cargo Ship or a called Patrol Helicopter. For a solo, the alarm-to-phone pipeline is the single highest-value setup: it converts "I logged in to a raided base with no warning" into "I got a notification and could decide whether to rush home or call for help". Wire at least one Smart Alarm to your main loot room and pair it before you ever log off for the night.