One of the most important basic resources in Rust is cloth. It is used to make a lot of vital items such as bandages, low grade fuel, clothes, beds, and more.
Unfortunately, many new players might wander around the wilderness for days and only get 2 to 3 pieces of cloth by accident.
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Cloth can be very hard to gather as you also need to have some luck while looking around for it. You can’t just find it in a specific location or at every corner, as you would wood or stone.
To get cloth in Rust, you will either need to find and loot hemp and cacti, grow and farm hemp, kill animals and skin them, or recycle items that are made out of cloth.
Table of Contents
How to Get Cloth in Rust
There are quite a few ways to get cloth in Rust. These are the best ones:
- Harvest Wild Hemp or Cacti
- Hunt Animals
- Grow Hemp in Planters
- Recycle Items
Harvesting Wild Plants
The most common method in the early game to get cloth in Rust is to harvest wild hemp or cacti. In the temperate biome, where most players spend their time, you can usually find small hemp plants close to rivers and trees.
Unfortunately, hemp is relatively small and can easily be lost among all the grass. Once you see one or two, you might spot them easier. If you’ve never seen how hemp looks, check out the image at the top of the article.
Since hemp can be hard to spot and find, it might sometimes be better to head over to the desert to harvest cacti. A cactus will give you around 5 to 15 cloth, and you just need to use a stone hatchet to loot it. The smaller cacti will give you 5 cloth, while the large ones will give you 15.
You can also try to loot them using a stone, but you will most likely get injured, and there is also a chance that you won’t get anything. One problem with cacti is that you can easily hurt yourself while harvesting them.
You will also get cactus flesh from hitting cacti, which is a really good source of hydration and food in the desert. Unfortunately, you can’t grow a farm of cacti.
Hunting Animals
Most animals in Rust will give you cloth if you skin them after you’ve killed them. The larger the animal, the higher the amount of cloth it will give you.
One of the best animals to hunt for cloth is the boar, as it is easy to kill and it will give you at least 5 cloth even if you use a stone to skin it.
However, if you are afraid of danger, you would be happy to know that horses also yield quite a lot of cloth. In fact, they are the 4th best source of cloth when it comes to animals. Even with a stone, you would get 13 cloth from them.
But, we would recommend that you get the horses to produce fertilizer for you rather than kill them for cloth, as that would be a waste. Horses can be incredibly profitable in Rust if you can feed them well.
The bear is the best source of cloth in Rust, as it can give you 50 cloth if you skin it using a hatchet or bone knife.
A reason many Rust players always miss out on a lot of cloth is that they don’t use the right weapons to skin the animals. This is why we would recommend you make a bone knife as early as possible since it is as good as a combat knife when it comes to skinning animals.
For hunting most of the animals in Rust, a wooden spear should be enough. However, if you see a bear and don’t have a long-range weapon, run.
Growing Hemp
Hemp is the best source of cloth in Rust since you can raise it to give you 70 cloth per plant. However, this will require some effort to learn about farming.
In general, even just a simple planter that you leave outside would be a better source of cloth than scavenging and hunting for it. Getting cloth becomes a very simple task if you can just grow it at home.
To grow hemp, you just need to loot one or two hemp plants in the wild to get their seeds. Now, you just need to craft a planter (tarp and 100 wood) and place the seeds inside.
If you leave the planter outside, preferably somewhere where other players can’t steal your crops, they will get everything they need and will grow in no time.
Recycling Items
The last viable way to get cloth in Rust is to recycle items that you don’t need. All clothes will give you cloth if you recycle them.
If you spend some time scavenging, there is no way you won’t find random clothes that you don’t need anymore. Tarp also gives you a lot of cloth when recycled (50 cloth).
There are a lot of items that can give you cloth, and all you need to do is bring them to a recycler to get the raw materials.
In the past, there was a strategy that players used to actually buy cloth for scrap. There is no shop that will sell you cloth. However, the Output Outfitters vendor in the Outpost will sell you Tactical Gloves for 40 scrap.
You can then recycle this piece of clothing and get 10 leather and 5 sewing kits. If you then recycle the sewing kits, you will get 10 cloth per kit, giving you 50 cloth in total. In the past, you would get 10ft of rope instead of the 10 leather pieces, giving you another 150 cloth, but this was patched out.
Still, if you think that 40 scrap for 50 cloth and 10 leather is worth it, then head over to the Outpost and buy all 10 Tactical Gloves in stock to get 500 cloth.
That’s everything you need to know about how to get cloth in Rust!
Have any input or suggestions for this guide? Let us know in the comment section below.
