What the Industrial System Is
The Industrial system (from the Industrial Update) is Rust's base-automation framework: a set of components that MOVE, SORT, SMELT, and CRAFT items around your base without you touching a box. Its two core jobs are moving items for storage and moving them through automated crafting.
There are 7 industrial components plus the Electric Furnace. Once set up, you can dump raw resources at a drop box and have them auto-sorted into the right containers, auto-smelted in electric furnaces, and auto-crafted into finished items -- a huge quality-of-life upgrade for an established base. It's an advanced system, but the pieces are simple once you see how they connect.
The Core Pieces
Three components form the backbone of almost every setup:
- Storage Adaptor: the foundation. Place one on a container (Large Box, TC, furnace, locker, drop box, vending machine, etc.) to give it an industrial INPUT and OUTPUT port. It needs NO power. One quirk: a locker has multiple partitions, so it takes THREE adaptors to access all of them.
- Industrial Conveyor: the brain -- nothing moves without a powered one (it draws 1 rW). Turn it on and it pulls items from the containers on its inputs and pushes them to the containers on its outputs.
- Pipe Tool: connects everything with pipes (10 colours for organising your runs). Pipes can pass through deployables like doors, but NOT through solid walls or a vending machine.
Filtering & Routing
By default a Conveyor moves any item it finds, but its filter is where the power is -- each conveyor filter holds up to 12 items or whole categories (resources, components, clothing, etc.). With quantity controls:
- Minimum: keep transferring until the INPUT drops to this count (leave some behind).
- Maximum: keep transferring until the OUTPUT reaches this count (cap a box).
- Buffer: only move in chunks of this size -- pairs with Max to stop overfilling Industrial Crafters.
To branch and merge pipes (both need NO power): - Industrial Splitter: splits one pipe into THREE, distributing items roughly equally (respecting downstream filters first). - Industrial Combiner: merges THREE pipes into one -- great for pulling three boxes into a single container with one conveyor.
Auto-Crafting
The Industrial Crafter automates crafting. Attach it to a Workbench (any tier), drop a blueprint into its blueprint slot, supply the materials and 1 rW of power, turn it on, and it crafts that item continuously. It has built-in industrial slots -- no adaptor needed -- so a conveyor feeds materials in and pulls finished items out, and there's a blueprint in/out slot to swap recipes via pipe.
The rules: - It can't craft anything above the attached workbench's tier, and crafting takes the same time it would by hand. - You can place up to TWO crafters on one workbench. - Even items you already know (Low Grade Fuel, wooden spears, etc.) can be automated -- the Research Table lets you 'blueprint' simple known items for just 10 scrap so they can go in a crafter.
Auto-Smelting & Auto-Sorting
Two of the most popular builds:
- Auto-smelter: the Electric Furnace runs on 3 power instead of wood (so it makes NO charcoal -- keep one wood furnace for gunpowder, per the Smelting & Refining guide), and it accepts industrial pipes. Conveyor ore IN from a box, conveyor refined metal OUT to another -- hands-free smelting.
- Auto-sorter: put a Drop Box at your base entrance, pipe its output to a conveyor, and use filters to route each resource type to its own container -- wood to the wood box, metal ore to the furnace feed, components to the component box. Dump your whole inventory at the door and walk away sorted.
Chain crafters and furnaces together and you can take a drop box of raw ore all the way to finished, stored items automatically.
Limits & Tips
The system has hard limits to keep servers sane -- design around them:
- A conveyor only 'sees' the first 16 containers on each side of its network.
- It moves up to 60 items per stack per server tick; bigger stacks move over several ticks (conveyors attempt a move every ~5 seconds by default).
- Splitter math: if you split into a number of adaptors that doesn't divide evenly into 60, each pulls less per stack -- (60 ÷ adaptors) rounded down -- so favour splits that divide 60 cleanly.
Practical tips: remember which components need power (Conveyor 1 rW, Industrial Crafter 1 rW, Electric Furnace 3 rW) versus those that don't (Storage Adaptor, Splitter, Combiner); colour-code your pipes with the Pipe Tool; and start small -- get one auto-sorter working before wiring a whole automated factory.