Rust Minicopter Guide 2026: Cost, Controls, Fuel & Decay

The Rust Minicopter is the cheapest way to stop walking, and it is the single fastest way to hand 750 scrap to a stranger. Both of those things are true on the same evening for most players.

Nothing changes a wipe faster than a mini. A monument run that took twelve minutes on foot takes ninety seconds. Farming a corner of the map you would never risk on foot becomes routine. And then you land badly, or you leave it outside for one night, or you park it at Outpost while you buy a shirt, and it is gone.

This guide covers what a minicopter costs, exactly where to buy one, how the controls really work, how far a tank of fuel actually gets you, and the decay and theft rules that quietly destroy more minis than gunfire ever will.

• What It Is
• Cost
• Where to Buy
• Full Stats
• How to Fly
• Driving on the Ground
• Fuel & Range
• Decay & Storage
• Repairing
• How You Lose It
• SAMs & Turrets
• Mini vs Scrap vs Attack
• Practice Servers
• Console Edition
• Spawn Commands
• Myths & Mistakes
• Pro Tips
• FAQ

What Is the Minicopter in Rust?

The Minicopter is a two seat player flown helicopter, welded together out of scrap and held up by an engine that sounds like a lawnmower having a bad day. It is the entry level aircraft in Rust and the one that changes the game most.

It is not a weapon platform. The pilot cannot look around freely and cannot shoot while flying, which surprises a lot of new players. What the mini gives you is reach. Monuments on the far side of the map become viable. Oil rig runs stop needing a boat. Raiding a base three grids away stops being a forty minute round trip with a bag full of explosives.

It also makes you visible, loud and predictable, which is the trade. Everyone on that half of the map hears you coming, and a helicopter overhead is the universal signal that someone has scrap worth taking.

Minicopters do not spawn in the world any more. They used to appear along roads on early maps, and plenty of stale guides still say so. On a modern vanilla server the minicopter.population variable sits at 0, which means the only place to get one is the vendor. If you have found one lying by a road, you were on a modded server or someone parked it there.

How Much Does a Minicopter Cost in Rust?

A Minicopter costs 750 scrap, and it arrives with 100 low grade fuel already in the tank.

That 750 is the base price, not a fixed price. Since the dynamic vendor pricing system landed in July 2024, every NPC vendor in the game moves its prices with supply and demand. Popular items climb, ignored items get quietly discounted, and Air Wolf is not exempt. Early in a wipe when everybody wants to fly, expect to pay more than 750. Late in a wipe on a dead server, expect less.

So budget 750 and check the terminal before you commit. Walking to Bandit Camp with exactly 750 scrap and finding the price at 810 is a genuinely annoying way to lose an afternoon.

Where to Buy a Minicopter: The Air Wolf Vendor

Every minicopter in the game comes from one place: the Air Wolf shop inside Bandit Camp. There is no second vendor, no Outpost option, and no crafting recipe.

Air Wolf sits on the ground floor of its own building on the edge of the Bandit Camp compound, with the landing pad directly outside. Bandit Camp is a safe zone, so nobody can shoot you while you are buying, and that safety ends the moment you lift off the pad.

1. Get to Bandit Camp with your scrap on you. Scrap in a box at home is not scrap at the terminal.
2. Walk into the Air Wolf building and open the terminal. It is the vending style screen on the ground floor.
3. Buy the Minicopter. It spawns on the pad outside, not in your hands.
4. Get in and go. You have a five minute window where the pad is reserved for you and nobody else can buy.

Rust Minicopter Stats

Here is the whole vehicle in one table. These are vanilla values, pulled from the game’s own entity data rather than from other guides.

How to Fly a Minicopter in Rust

Flying a mini is not hard. It is just not what you expect, because W does not mean forward. W means spin the rotors faster, which means go up.

The first flight, step by step

1. Level your view before you touch anything. The mini takes off in the direction it is pointed, and it is pointed wherever the terrain says. On a slope, that is into the hill.
2. Hold W until the rotors are up to speed and you feel it get light. Do not tilt yet.
3. Climb higher than you think you need. Trees, cliffs and rocks are what actually kill new pilots, not other players. Get above the treeline.
4. Ease the mouse forward. A small tilt is a lot of speed. If you are losing altitude, ease off the tilt and add W.
5. Line up your landing early with A and D. Level out, then tap S in short bursts to sink.
6. Touch down flat. A hard landing does real damage and a sloped landing means it rolls off while you are looting.

Driving a Minicopter on the Ground

Hold L CTRL and use W A S D, and the mini drives on its wheels like a very bad car.

This sounds like a novelty and it is not. Ground driving is how you park a mini inside a base without clipping the rotors on a doorframe, how you creep a heli into a garage, and how you move it the last twenty metres when landing precisely would risk the tail. It is also almost silent compared to flying, which matters if you are stashing it near a contested monument.

It is slow and it does not climb hills well. Use it for the last stretch, not for travel.

Minicopter Fuel and Flight Time

The minicopter runs on low grade fuel and burns 30 a minute. That number is worth memorising because it turns every trip into simple arithmetic.

To refuel, look at the red fuel tank behind the pilot seat and press E. It opens like any container, and you can do it in flight from the pilot seat, which is genuinely useful on a long run.

Low grade comes from crude oil at a refinery at three low grade per crude, or from animal fat and cloth in a mixing table. Filling a tank from empty is roughly 167 crude oil, so a couple of quarry runs or one good oil rig trip. If you are flying regularly, low grade becomes a bigger tax on your wipe than the 750 scrap ever was.

Minicopter Decay: Park It Indoors or Lose It

This is the rule that costs players the most scrap, because it kills your mini while you are asleep.

Decay begins after roughly ten minutes of nobody being mounted. From there:

• Outside: 480 minutes. Eight hours from full health to destroyed. Leave it on your roof overnight and it will not be there in the morning.
• Under a roof: 2,880 minutes. Forty eight hours. Six times the lifespan for the cost of a few building blocks.

The important detail is that “indoors” only means something overhead. You do not need walls, a door or a foundation on all sides. A roof tile or floor tile above the minicopter is enough to flip it from the 8 hour timer to the 48 hour timer. A 3×3 with a ceiling and one wall left open works perfectly.

That said, an open shelter protects it from decay and from nothing else. If you want to keep the thing, build it a real garage.

How to Repair a Minicopter

Hold a hammer, carry metal fragments, and hit the minicopter.

A full repair from zero to 750 HP costs 250 metal fragments across 15 swings, which takes about seven and a half seconds. That is less than a sheet metal door, and it is nothing next to the 750 scrap you paid, so there is no reason to fly a damaged mini.

Two things to know. First, you cannot repair immediately after taking damage, so if you have just been shot at you need to break contact and wait before the hammer does anything. Second, decay damage repairs exactly like combat damage, so a mini you rescued from a night outside is fully fixable as long as it has not hit zero.

How You Actually Lose a Minicopter

Ask any player how their last mini died and the answer is almost never “it was shot down”. Here is the real list.

SAM Sites, Turrets and Getting Shot Down

Once you are in the air you are a large slow target that announces itself from three grids away. Two things will actually take you down.

SAM sites have a range of about 150 metres, roughly one grid square, and they will happily lock a minicopter. The saving grace is that a SAM does not shoot downwards: it will not target anything below its own height. Flying low past a base with a SAM on the roof is survivable. Flying over it is not. Launch Site and any serious player compound are the two places this catches people.

Auto turrets and players with rifles do the rest. A minicopter has 750 HP but the pilot does not, and you are sitting in an open frame with no armour between you and the ground. Most minis are lost because the pilot died, not because the aircraft did.

Minicopter vs Scrap Transport vs Attack Helicopter

Air Wolf sells four aircraft. Here is what the extra scrap buys.

All four burn the same 30 low grade a minute out of the same 500 capacity tank, so the flight time is identical across the lineup at roughly 16 and a half minutes. The scrap transport is the one people misjudge: it has more health and far more room, but it is a much bigger target and costs three times as much to repair.

For almost everyone, the answer is the minicopter. It is the cheapest, it repairs for pocket change, and losing one does not end your wipe. If you want something that carries a team and their gear across water instead, our Rust boat building guide covers the surface alternatives.

Where to Practice Flying a Minicopter

Learning to fly on a live vanilla server means every mistake costs 750 scrap and a walk home. There is a much cheaper way, and experienced players all did it.

Open the community server browser and search for “minicopter training”, “heli training” or “mini practice”. There is a whole category of servers built for exactly this: free vehicles on demand, unlimited or disabled fuel, PVE rules so nobody shoots you down, and custom maps with rings, courses and obstacle runs to fly through. You spawn a mini, you crash it into a mountain, you spawn another one.

Two hours on one of those servers is worth more than a week of nervous flying on your main. Learn the throttle feel, learn what a survivable descent rate looks like, and learn to land on a two by two roof before you try it with your wipe’s scrap in the seat. Our Rust servers page is a good starting point for finding a community server that suits you.

The Minicopter on Rust Console Edition

Console players get the same minicopter, the same Air Wolf vendor at Bandit Camp and the same 750 scrap base price. The mechanics are identical: 750 HP, two seats, low grade fuel, no lock, same decay timers.

What changes is the input. The stick that replaces W and S is your throttle and the other stick is your tilt, which means the same mental model applies: one input controls height, the other controls direction. Console players tend to find the mini easier to learn than PC players do, because analogue sticks give finer throttle control than a keyboard key that is either on or off.

Console edition runs behind PC on updates, so if a monument or a vendor price in this guide does not match what you see, that is why. Everything covered here has been in console for a long time.

Minicopter Spawn Commands

If you run your own server, or you are on a server where you have admin, you can spawn a minicopter directly instead of paying for one.

These need admin or owner authorisation on the server, and the spawn command has to be run in game rather than through RCON. If you want minis to appear along roads the way they did in 2019, raise minicopter.population above zero. For everything else you can type into that console, see our Rust console commands guide and the companion best settings guide.

Minicopter Myths and Mistakes

Myth: minicopters spawn along roads. They did, years ago. On a modern vanilla server the population variable is zero and Air Wolf is the only source.

Myth: you can craft one. There is no blueprint, no workbench recipe and no tech tree node. Scrap and a vendor, or nothing.

Myth: you can lock it. No code lock, no key lock, no ownership. This is the single most misunderstood thing about the vehicle.

Myth: it costs exactly 750 scrap. That is the base price. Dynamic vendor pricing has moved NPC prices with demand since July 2024.

Myth: W is forward. W is up. The mouse is forward. Every crashed first flight starts with this.

Myth: parking it in your base compound protects it. Only a roof matters. A mini sitting inside high external walls with open sky above it is on the eight hour timer.

Mistake: flying off with the vendor’s 100 fuel. That is three minutes and twenty seconds. Bring low grade with you or refuel before you leave the safe zone.

Mistake: leaving it on the Air Wolf pad. The next customer’s purchase deletes it.

Mistake: holding S to land. It cuts the rotors. Tap it.

Mistake: flying solo into a fight. The pilot cannot shoot. Your only move is to leave.

Pro Tips for Flying a Minicopter

• Build the garage before you buy the mini. A ground floor room with a garage door turns an eight hour asset into a forty eight hour one, and stops it being stolen while you sleep.
• Fly high, not fast. Altitude is your reaction time. Trees and rocks kill more minis than rifles do, and a SAM cannot hit what is below it.
• Learn one flat landing spot near each monument you farm. Landing in the same known good spot every time removes the most dangerous 20 seconds of any run.
• Never take a passenger you do not trust. They can shoot, you cannot, and they are sitting behind you.
• Take the fuel out when you park. An empty tank makes your mini much less attractive to whoever finds it, and low grade in your box is safer than low grade in a container anyone can open.
• Repair before every trip. 250 fragments is nothing. Taking off at 400 HP is how a survivable crash becomes a fatal one.
• Do not fly to a raid with the explosives on board. If you go down, you lose the mini and the raid. Cache the boom, then fly.
• Practice on a training server first. Two free hours there beats one expensive evening on your main.

Rust Minicopter FAQ

Final Thoughts

The minicopter is the best 750 scrap you will ever spend and the easiest 750 scrap you will ever lose, and the difference between those two outcomes has almost nothing to do with how well you fly.

It comes down to three habits. Build it a roof before you buy it, because eight hours is not long enough to protect anything. Never let it out of your sight, because there is no lock and there never has been. And do half your fuel out, half your fuel home, because a mini that runs dry over the wrong grid is not yours any more.

Get those right and the minicopter stops being a fragile 750 scrap gamble and becomes the thing that makes the rest of the map yours. Get them wrong and you will buy three of them this wipe.

Sources

• Minicopter health, seats, fuel capacity, 30 per minute burn rate, 16m 39s flight time, decay timers and 250 fragment repair: RustHelp, Minicopter
• Air Wolf vendor prices for all four aircraft and the 100 low grade included with each: RustHelp, Airwolf Vendor
• Air Wolf shop location, the five minute purchase window and the pad clearing every vehicle on a new purchase: Corrosion Hour, RUST Air Wolf Shop
• Flight controls, ground driving, refuelling at the tank and landing technique: Corrosion Hour, How to Fly Minicopters in RUST
• Minicopter cost, decay figures and the absence of any lock feature: Corrosion Hour, RUST Minicopter Guide
• Spawn command and the minicopter.population, outsidedecayminutes and insidedecayminutes variables: Corrosion Hour, RUST Minicopter Command and Variables
• Dynamic vendor pricing applying to all NPC vendors from 4 July 2024: Corrosion Hour, The RUST Dynamic Vendor Pricing System
• Scrap Transport Helicopter stats: RustHelp, Scrap Transport Helicopter. Attack Helicopter stats: RustHelp, Attack Helicopter
• SAM site range and the fact they do not target aircraft below their own height: Corrosion Hour, SAM Site
• Original minicopter release, world spawns and fuel consumption at launch: Rustafied, Minicopter is here
• The game itself: Facepunch Studios