Bandit Camp is the swamp trading post where Rust briefly stops trying to kill you. It is one of only a handful of safe zones on the map, and it is the only one with a working casino, a helicopter dealership, and a black market that will sell you a rifle for scrap. For a game built on paranoia, it is a strange little island of peace, and almost every wipe runs through it.
This guide covers all of it: where Bandit Camp is, what the safe zone actually protects you from, every facility inside it, every vendor price worth knowing, the real odds on the gambling wheel, and how it stacks up against Outpost. Numbers are current for 2026.
- What It Is
- Where to Find It
- Safe Zone Rules
- What’s Inside
- Vendors & Prices
- Air Wolf
- The Wheel
- vs Outpost
- Pro Tips
- FAQ
What Is Bandit Camp in Rust?
Bandit Camp is a monument, which is Rust’s word for a fixed point of interest that spawns on every procedurally generated map. Most monuments are there to shoot you, irradiate you, or both. This one is the exception. It is a shanty town of wooden walkways and stilted huts built out over a swamp, run by armed NPC bandits who enforce a strict no fighting policy on everyone who walks in.
Functionally it is a trading hub. You bring scrap, you leave with guns, seeds, vehicle parts, a helicopter, or nothing at all if you got greedy at the wheel. There is no radiation, no keycard puzzle, and no loot to farm off the ground. Bandit Camp is not a monument you run, it is a monument you shop at.
It matters most in the middle of a wipe. Early on you have nothing to spend. Late on you can craft everything yourself. In between, Bandit Camp is where a pile of scrap turns into an LR-300 and a way to fly it somewhere useful.
Where Is Bandit Camp and How Do You Find It?
Bandit Camp spawns in or beside the swamp biome, which makes it one of the easier monuments to spot from a distance. Look for a cluster of tall wooden shacks and walkways sitting in shallow green water, usually with a hot air balloon or two drifting nearby. If you can see boardwalks over marsh, you have found it.
The fastest way to locate it is to open your map. Monuments are labelled, so Bandit Camp will be named on the map once you have it on screen. If you are new to a wipe and want to plan around it, note the grid reference before you leave your base, because the swamp all looks identical at night and running in circles in waist deep water is a great way to meet someone with a bow.
Bandit Camp Safe Zone Rules
The safe zone is enforced by NPC sentry turrets mounted around the camp, and they are not decorative. Here is exactly what the rules are and what breaking them costs you.
Holster your weapon. Walk in with a gun or a lethal tool out and you get a short countdown, a few seconds, to put it away. Ignore the warning and the turrets open up. Sprinting in with a rifle drawn because you were being chased is one of the most common ways new players die at a safe zone.
You cannot damage other players inside. No bullets, no melee, no bleeding someone out on the walkway. This works both ways, which is the entire point.
Attack in or near camp and you go hostile. Deal damage inside the zone or in the immediate area outside it and the camp flags you as hostile for roughly five minutes. While the timer runs, the sentries will shoot you on sight whenever you come into range, and getting hit resets the clock. The turrets do not chase you, so the fix is simply to leave and wait it out.
No sleeping. Sleepers left lying inside a safe zone get killed off after about twenty minutes. Logging out at Bandit Camp to save a walk is not the free storage locker it looks like.
Everything Inside Bandit Camp
Bandit Camp punches above its weight for a monument with no loot crates. Here is the full facility list.
| Facility | Count | What It’s For |
|---|---|---|
| Recycler | 2 | Break components into raw materials without the Outpost queue |
| Workbench | 1 (Level 1) | Craft anything needing a T1 bench, no bench of your own required |
| Research Table | 1 | Turn an item plus scrap into a permanent blueprint |
| Repair Bench | 1 | Repair guns and tools, and remove or apply attachments |
| Drone Marketplace | 1 | Order from any shop or player vending machine on the map |
| Vending Machines | 8 | The NPC shops, covered below |
| Air Wolf | 1 | Helicopters and a hot air balloon for scrap |
| Gambling Wheel | 1 | The casino, upstairs in the big building |
| Small Oil Refinery | None | Go to Outpost for this one |
The two recyclers are the underrated draw here. Outpost recyclers are a traffic jam on a busy server and a well known ambush point on the way out. Bandit Camp does the same job with a fraction of the foot traffic, and it is worth the extra run for that alone.
Bandit Camp Vendors and Prices
Eight NPC vending machines sit around the camp. NPC shops never run out of stock, so unlike a player vending machine you will never turn up to an empty slot. Prices are in scrap.
Black Market
The headline shop, and the reason mid wipe players make the trip. This is the only vendor in Rust that will hand you a military grade rifle over the counter.
| Item | Scrap | Worth It? |
|---|---|---|
| LR-300 Assault Rifle Top Pick | 500 | Yes. Low recoil, no blueprint needed, instantly competitive |
| M39 Rifle | 400 | Solid semi auto if the LR is out of budget |
| Variable Zoom Scope | 300 | Expensive, but it is a pain to research otherwise |
| Night Vision Goggles | 250 | Situational. Genuinely strong on dark nights |
| M92 Pistol | 250 | Good sidearm, high damage per shot |
| Spas-12 Shotgun | 250 | Close quarters and door defence |
| F1 Grenade | 8 | Cheap. Buy a stack for clearing rooms |
The LR-300 is the reason this shop exists. It needs no blueprint and no Tier 3 bench, which means 500 scrap skips the entire research grind and puts a proper rifle in your hands the same afternoon. If you want to see how it stacks up against everything else you could be holding, our full Rust weapons guide ranks every gun in the game.
Scrap 4 Sale
This one runs the other direction. You hand over raw materials and walk away with scrap, which makes it the fastest way to turn a bloated inventory into buying power. It also sells the keycards you need for monument puzzles.
| Trade | Rate |
|---|---|
| Crude oil to scrap | 6 crude oil for 1 scrap |
| Metal fragments to scrap | 20 fragments for 1 scrap |
| High quality metal to scrap | 1 HQM for 2 scrap |
| Green keycard | 15 scrap |
| Blue keycard | 40 scrap |
| Red keycard | 80 scrap |
Buying keycards here instead of farming them is a genuinely good use of scrap. Eighty scrap for a red card is nothing next to the time it takes to run a fuse and card chain just to reach the room you actually wanted.
Food Market, Produce Exchange and the Rest
The remaining shops are quality of life, and they are cheap enough to be worth a look every time you pass through.
| Shop | Sells | Notable Price |
|---|---|---|
| Food Market | Food, seeds, consumables | Mixing table, 175 scrap |
| Produce Exchange | Crops and raw resources | 80 cloth for 10 scrap |
| Farming | Composters, planter boxes, sprinklers | Roughly 15 to 30 scrap each |
| Building Supplies | Storage and electrical | Drop box 40, wind turbine 500 |
| Vehicle Parts | Engine components | Pistons 40, crankshaft 65 |
That 80 cloth for 10 scrap line is the sleeper deal of the whole camp. Cloth is a constant early and mid wipe bottleneck for beds, bandages and clothing, and buying it beats running hemp fields.
Air Wolf: Buying a Helicopter With Scrap
Air Wolf is the vehicle vendor, and it is unique to Bandit Camp. Outpost does not have one. Buy a helicopter and it spawns on the pad for you to fly away.
| Vehicle | Scrap | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Hot Air Balloon | 150 | Cheapest way to fly. Slow and at the mercy of the wind |
| Minicopter Best Value | 750 | Two seats. Comes with 100 low grade fuel |
| Scrap Transport Helicopter | 1,250 | Six seats. Comes with 100 low grade fuel. Team transport |
| Attack Helicopter | 2,250 | Armed and armoured, and priced like it |
The minicopter at 750 scrap is the purchase that changes a wipe. It turns a fifteen minute run into a ninety second flight, and it makes every far corner of the map worth visiting. Just remember that a parked helicopter is a flare telling everyone nearby exactly where you are.
The Bandit Camp Gambling Wheel: Real Odds
Upstairs in the largest building is the wheel, and it is the only gambling in vanilla Rust. You sit at a terminal, put scrap on one of five multipliers, and the wheel spins on a timer. Land your number and you get paid, miss and the house keeps it.
Here is the part most players never look up: the wheel has 25 segments, and they are not evenly shared out.
| Bet | Colour | Segments | Win Chance |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1x | Yellow | 12 of 25 | 48% |
| 3x | Green | 6 of 25 | 24% |
| 5x | Blue | 4 of 25 | 16% |
| 10x | Purple | 2 of 25 | 8% |
| 20x | Red | 1 of 25 | 4% |
The pattern is the one every casino uses. The bigger the multiplier, the fewer slots carry it, and the payouts are set so the house keeps an edge on every single bet. There is no clever seat, no lucky terminal, and no betting pattern that changes those segment counts. Anyone selling you a wheel strategy is selling you the gambler’s fallacy with extra steps.
Bandit Camp vs Outpost: Which One Do You Need?
These are the two big safe zones and players constantly mix them up. They overlap on the basics and split on the extras.
| Feature | Bandit Camp | Outpost |
|---|---|---|
| Safe zone, no PvP | Yes | Yes |
| Recyclers | 2 | 2 |
| Workbench | Level 1 | Level 1 |
| Research table | Yes | Yes |
| Repair bench | Yes | Yes |
| Small oil refinery | No | Yes |
| Gambling wheel | Yes | No |
| Air Wolf helicopters | Yes | No |
| Foot traffic | Lower | Higher |
Short version: go to Outpost if you need to refine crude oil or you are already close to it. Go to Bandit Camp if you want a helicopter, an LR-300, a quiet recycler, or a bad decision at the wheel.
How to Actually Use Bandit Camp
- Recycle here, not at Outpost. Same two machines, far fewer people watching the door. This is the most underrated reason to make the trip.
- Buy keycards, don’t farm them. Fifteen scrap for a green card saves a whole detour. Red at 80 scrap is still cheap for what it unlocks.
- Cloth from the Produce Exchange. 80 cloth for 10 scrap beats an afternoon in a hemp field.
- The minicopter is the best 750 scrap in the game. Mobility compounds. Everything else you buy gets easier once you can fly.
- Never carry your whole bank in. Bring what you plan to spend. Anything extra is just a bigger prize for whoever is watching the exit.
- Split up on the way out. If you are with a team, spread the purchases across everyone so one unlucky death does not undo the whole trip.
- Know what your scrap is really worth. Before you drop 2,000 at the wheel, price out what that same scrap buys in explosives with our Rust raid calculator. It reframes gambling losses very quickly.
- Spend on the base, not just the loadout. A rifle dies with you, walls do not. If your loot room is still stone, read up on stone wall raid costs and the soft side and on the garage door before your next shopping trip.
- Time your shopping around the wipe. Scrap is worthless on day one and abundant by day three. Mid wipe is when the trip earns its keep.
Bandit Camp vs bandit.camp: Not the Same Thing
Worth clearing up, because it confuses a lot of searches. Bandit Camp is the in-game monument covered in this guide. Its wheel uses scrap, an in-game resource with no cash value, and it is built and maintained by Facepunch as part of Rust itself.
Sites with names like bandit.camp are separate third party skin gambling websites. They are not made by Facepunch, they are not part of the game, and they deal in real money or tradeable skins. This guide is about the monument only. If you go looking for the other thing, understand that you are leaving the game and its protections behind, and that skin gambling sites carry real financial and account risk.
Planning your next wipe run? Every monument route starts with knowing when the map resets. Check the live force wipe countdown before you commit to a base plan.
Force Wipe CountdownBandit Camp FAQ
What is Bandit Camp in Rust?
Was Bandit Camp removed from Rust?
Where is Bandit Camp in Rust?
Is there a recycler at Bandit Camp?
Does Bandit Camp have a Tier 2 workbench?
Does Bandit Camp have a refinery?
Is there a research table at Bandit Camp?
How does the Bandit Camp gambling wheel work?
How long can you sleep at Bandit Camp?
What happens if you shoot someone at Bandit Camp?
How much is a minicopter at Bandit Camp?
Can you buy guns at Bandit Camp?
Final Thoughts
Bandit Camp is the closest thing Rust has to a town square. No radiation, no puzzle, no loot to fight over, just a swamp full of shops and a wheel designed to take your scrap. Learn the vendor prices, use the quiet recyclers, buy the minicopter, and treat the casino like the entertainment expense it is.
And remember the one rule the turrets will not enforce for you: the safe zone ends at the perimeter. Everything you just bought is only yours if you make it home with it.