Hey guys, over the last few months I've been testing different damage mechanics and compiled everything that I found in this post. This post will feature:

• Damage drop-off of all weapons / ammo types

• Fire Ammo

• Fire Arrows / Explosive Ammo

• The Spreadsheet

• Radiation Protection

• Open Topics

Damage Drop-Off

Damage drop-off in Rust is based on three components: The ammo used, the weapon used and the distance to the target. All ammo types have a certain minimum range up until which the damage is not reduced and a maximum range after which the damage is limited to a certain % value of the damage. The following table shows the base values for this:

Between the min and max range the damage drop-off is linear from 100% to the minimum damage of the ammo type. Each weapon can modify both the min and max range with a multiplier. For example, the Python (9mm) has a multiplier of 80% making it's min range 8 meters and max range 48 meters. The Crossbow (Arrows) on the other hand has a 150% multiplier to end up at min range 15 meters and max range 90 meters. Here are the damage graphs for these two weapons:

And here is a list of multipliers/ranges for all weapons:

All damage graphs can be found on this page: https://viddie.github.io/RustInfos/#/Damage-Drop. Beware tho, the site isn't finished and is lacking polish in many areas. I just couldn't be assed to finish it before I went on a break from Rust.

These values explain why certain weapons are worse than they seem on paper. For example: The Revolver has 35 base damage, why does it feel like a pea-shooter? Answer: It has extremely high damage drop. If you fire at someone just 24 meters away the Revolver only deals 80% of it's damage, meaning just 28 damage per shot (to the upper body). If your opponent has some basic armor it does take quite a few shots to kill then...

Fire Ammo

People already know that fire ammo (9mm / 5.56) is good against people with armor but I've never really seen anyone explain how exactly it works, so here we are.

Fire 9mm or 5.56 add 12% of the weapons damage additionally on top of the original damage of the weapon as fire damage. Fire damage ignores any and all armor, EXCEPT heavy armor to which just the fire damage is multiplied by 2. An example with the AK: 50 base damage + 12% = 50 base + 6 fire damage. Against someone in full metal armor on the upper body the damage would be: 50 * 0.45 + 6 = 28.5 damage.

The fire damage portion is susceptible to damage drop-off as well as the damage modifier of the body part (75% for legs, 200% [for all non-primitive weapons] for head). A few notable cut-offs for this:

• Below 26 meters the M249 can one-shot someone wearing a Coffee Can Helmet

• Bolt / L96 headshots on close range deal 99.2 damage to someone wearing a Facemask

• Below ~25 meters the AK can kill someone wearing the Heavy Plate Helmet in 3 shots

Fire Arrows / Explosive Ammo

Both fire arrows and explosive ammo deal bonus damage in an area around the location that was shot. The bonus damage ignores both range and body part modifiers.

Fire arrows deal a flat 20 bonus damage, regardless of the bow used. This damage is unaffected by armor, except heavy armor to which is deals some kind of extra damage (couldn't figure this one out tho...). The downside of fire arrows however is that the arrow itself (not the bonus damage) deals 20% reduced damage compared to regular Wooden Arrows. This makes fire arrows best be used with a Bow (50 base - 20% => 40 base +20 flat) and the Compound Bow yields the worst results (100 base - 20% => 80 base + 20 flat). Of course the usefulness depends on the armor of the target, so if your enemies have a lot of armor fire arrows always deal quite a lot more damage, especially if you are shooting on a range that would typically feature a lot of damage drop-off.

Explosive ammo is somewhat similar to fire arrows, except they have a smaller blast radius and only add 5 flat damage. They do however not reduce the base damage of the 5.56 weapon but the bonus damage IS reduced by the explosion protection of the target (a full metal kit only has 8%).

The Spreadsheet

For almost everything I've listed here I made a spreadsheet which shows exactly how much damage to all kinds of armor all weapons do. You can easily modify max HP of the target, distance to the target or use fire ammo/arrows and inspect the value changes in damage per hit, hits to kill, damage per second and fastest time to kill. Small excerpt here:

Here is a Google Spreadsheet link to the document where you can inspect the values for the maximum damage drop-off however to edit the values you will need to copy the spreadsheet using this link to your own Google account. Alternatively, here is a direct download link for the spreadsheet in Excel. Since I originally made this spreadsheet in Excel the import feature of Google f'ed up the graphs at the bottom but those were only used during my testing and are of no importance otherwise.

Radiation Protection

I also wanted to compile a list of the radiation protection needed for the various monuments so here is the list of that. I don't have fancy images for the radiation spots so you'll have to figure that one out on your own:

In my research for these values I stumbled upon very different results. For example, a few sources claim Airfield to be 12 rad protection instead of 10 and in my testing I noticed something weird: 10 rad protection is not equal to 10 rad protection. When you put on a Hoody and Pants (or any other 5% protection items) you have 10 rad protection and (at least in my tests) this was always enough for all locations needing 10 rad protection in the table above. However put on a Hide Vest (3%), Hide Pants (2%), Bandana (3%) and Boonie Hat (2%), you also get 10 rad protection but you do sometimes get radiation in those locations. Then I also noticed that when I do get radiation damage despite having 10 rad protection, unequipping and reequipping certain clothing items sometimes led to enough protection, even tho neither the radiation protection nor the used items changed, just the order that I equipped them in. I didn't however find a way to reproduce this (first getting radiation, unequipping and reequipping to no longer get radiation) issue and left it at that. IDK what is going on there, probably some kind of internal miscalculation or rounding error when equipping clothing.

Open Topics

These are all the questions I originally wanted to answer before making this post but couldn't due to taking a break from Rust:

• How do fire arrows impact heavy armor?

• What does the "range" stat in the weapon info screen ingame mean?

• How tf does radiation protection work?

• How do other sources of damage (fall damage, bleeding, freezing) exactly work?

Thanks for reading. If you have any opinions or any info on the open topics, let me know. Otherwise, have fun smashing your stone on nakeds' heads on the beach!

Edit: As someone suggested, I also tested HV ammo and the results are quite disappointing: HV Ammo doesn't change the damage drop-off behavior at all. Except for the higher velocity and increased cost, HV ammo is identical to regular 5.56 ammo. See AK 5.56 vs AK HV 5.56 and Bolt 5.56 vs Bolt HV 5.56