Rusty Tools
Ammunition is the thing Rust players craft most often and understand least well, for two reasons that compound. The recipes are quoted in gun powder rather than in the sulfur you actually mined, and almost every ammo type comes out in batches, so the number you give the crafting queue is not the number of rounds you get. I hit both of these building the bind maker, which is why it does the yield arithmetic for you. This page is the cost side.
Everything below is per round, with gun powder expanded to its 20 sulfur and 30 charcoal per ten. Metal fragments are listed separately because they are cheap and you will have them; sulfur is the number to farm to.
Every ammo type, cheapest to dearest
| Ammo | Per craft | Sulfur / round | Frags / round | Recipe (one craft) | WB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Paintball | 20 | 0 | 0 | 10 cloth, 2 yellow berry | 0 |
 Nailgun Nails | 5 | 0 | 1.6 | 8 metal fragments | 0 |
 Pistol Bullet | 4 | 2.5 | 2.5 | 5 gun powder, 10 frags | 1 |
| 5.56 Rifle Ammo | 3 | 3.3 | 3.3 | 5 gun powder, 10 frags | 2 |
 HV Pistol Ammo | 4 | 5 | 2.5 | 10 gun powder, 10 frags | 2 |
 Handmade Shell | 2 | 5 | 0 | 5 stones, 5 gun powder | 0 |
 HV 5.56 Rifle Ammo | 3 | 6.7 | 3.3 | 10 gun powder, 10 frags | 3 |
 Incendiary Pistol Bullet | 3 | 8.3 | 3.3 | 5 sulfur, 10 gun powder, 10 frags | 2 |
 12 Gauge Buckshot | 2 | 10 | 2.5 | 10 gun powder, 5 frags | 2 |
 12 Gauge Slug | 2 | 10 | 2.5 | 10 gun powder, 5 frags | 2 |
 SAM Ammo | 6 | 10 | 0 | 30 gun powder, 1 metal pipe | 2 |
 Incendiary 5.56 | 2 | 12.5 | 5 | 5 sulfur, 10 gun powder, 10 frags | 3 |
 12 Gauge Incendiary Shell | 2 | 20 | 2.5 | 20 sulfur, 10 gun powder, 5 frags | 2 |
 Explosive 5.56 | 2 | 25 | 5 | 10 sulfur, 20 gun powder, 10 frags | 3 |
 Fragmentation Mortar Shell | 3 | 100 | 0 | 150 gun powder, 1 metal pipe | 2 |
 Homing Missile | 2 | 100 | 0 | 100 gun powder, 1 tech trash, 2 metal pipe | 2 |
 High Velocity Rocket | 1 | 200 | 0 | 100 gun powder, 1 metal pipe | 2 |
| Mortar Shell | 2 | 300 | 0 | 300 gun powder, 1 metal pipe | 2 |
 Incendiary Rocket | 1 | 300 | 0 | 75 low grade, 150 gun powder, 2 metal pipe | 2 |
 Rocket | 1 | 1,400 | 100 | 10 explosives, 150 gun powder, 2 metal pipe | 3 |
Five things the table says that the recipes do not
HV ammo costs exactly double, for the same metal
HV pistol and HV 5.56 both take ten gun powder per craft where the standard round takes five, and produce the same number of rounds. That is a clean 2× on sulfur — 5 against 2.5 for pistol, 6.7 against 3.3 for rifle — for a flatter trajectory and more range. On a server where you are mostly fighting inside compounds it is a bad trade; at long range on the road it is the whole point. Either way, know that a stack of HV is two stacks of normal in sulfur.
Buckshot is three 5.56 rounds
A shotgun shell is 10 sulfur to a rifle round's 3.3. Nobody chooses buckshot for its cost, but if you are queueing 64 shells before a fight, that is 640 sulfur, which is the same as 192 rifle rounds. Handmade shells at 5 sulfur are the budget option and the only gun powder ammo you can make with no workbench at all.
Explosive 5.56 is a raid tool, priced like one
At 25 sulfur a round it is 7.5 times normal 5.56, and a 128 stack is 3,200 sulfur — more than two rockets. If you are using it to open a door, compare it against the explosives table first.
The two free ammos
Nails are 8 metal fragments for five, and paintballs are cloth and berries. Neither uses sulfur at all. If you have ever wondered why the nailgun is a competent early-wipe weapon, this is why: its ammo comes out of the pile of fragments you already have.
Frag mortar shells are the best value heavy ordnance
Three shells per craft from 150 gun powder makes each shell 100 sulfur, the same as a homing missile and half a HV rocket. That is unusual value for something that lands from out of sight.
Worked examples: what a full stack costs
These are the numbers you want on a bind, and they are where the craft yield catches people. The queue counts crafts, so a stack of 128 is not 128 crafts.
| Stack | Crafts to queue | Gun powder | Frags | = charcoal | = sulfur |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 128 × Pistol Bullet | 32 | 160 | 320 | 480 | 320 |
| 128 × 5.56 | 43 (makes 129) | 215 | 430 | 660 | 440 |
| 64 × Buckshot | 32 | 320 | 160 | 960 | 640 |
| 128 × HV 5.56 | 43 (makes 129) | 430 | 430 | 1,290 | 860 |
| 128 × Explosive 5.56 | 64 | 1,280 + 640 sulfur | 640 | 3,840 | 3,200 |
The charcoal column rounds up to whole gun powder crafts, which is what the game does: 215 gun powder is 22 crafts, not 21.5, so the 5.56 stack really costs 660 charcoal and 440 sulfur even though the per-round figure suggests 429 and 427. On a single stack it is rounding noise. On a raid's worth it is a stack of sulfur.
Binding an ammo run
The line for a stack of 5.56 is bind numpad3 craft.add -1211166256 43. Note
the 43, not 128. If you would rather not remember item IDs and yields, the
bind maker takes “128 rifle ammo” and
writes the 43 itself. The loadout guide has an ammo run
and a medic run as ready-made lines.
How the numbers were produced
The recipe for each ammo type comes from the same dataset the bind maker ships with, originally compiled from Corrosion Hour's item database. Gun powder is expanded at its own recipe, 30 charcoal and 20 sulfur for 10, and the result is divided by the craft yield to get a per-round figure. Every item in the table links to its own page with the full recipe and the cost of a complete stack.
Gun Powder in detail