Jackhammer Rust: Gather Rates, Price & Refills

Updated for 2026

The Jackhammer in Rust is the fastest mining tool in the game, and it is the one tool you cannot build your way to. There is no recipe. There is no tech tree node. You either buy one or you get lucky in a crate, and once you are holding it, an ore node stops being a job and becomes a button press.

Here is the thing almost every jackhammer guide on the internet gets wrong: it does not use low grade fuel. Not a drop. That myth has been copied between sites for years and it puts people off a tool that is genuinely free to run. This guide covers what the jackhammer actually costs, exactly how much ore it pulls per node, how it stacks up against a pickaxe and a salvaged icepick, why raiders carry one for the Bradley wreck, and how to keep it alive forever with a workbench.

• What it is
• Stats
• Does it need fuel
• How to get one
• Scrap price
• Gather rates
• vs Pickaxe and Icepick
• When the icepick wins
• Mining wrecks
• Refilling it
• How long it lasts
• Recycling it
• As a weapon
• Farming route
• Mistakes to avoid
• FAQ

What is the jackhammer in Rust?

The Jackhammer, or Pneumatic Jackhammer if you want its full name, is a tier three gathering tool built for one job: destroying ore nodes. Facepunch describes it as a device whose “sheer power requires no aiming as all weak spots will be instantly destroyed.” That single sentence is the whole item.

Every other mining tool in Rust asks you to find the sweet spot, the little glowing mark that moves around the node after each hit. Land it and you gather faster. Miss it and you waste swings. The jackhammer deletes that mechanic. It smashes the entire node at once and hands you the full yield, which means a brand new player with a jackhammer farms exactly as efficiently as a veteran who has been hitting sweet spots for three thousand hours.

It arrived in The Team Update in July 2018, the same patch that gave Rust its team system and the watchtower. Facepunch introduced it as the counterpart to the Chainsaw: the chainsaw eats trees, the jackhammer eats rocks. Neither can be crafted, and both are treated as luxury tools you find rather than build.

Rust jackhammer stats

Every number below comes off the Facepunch wiki item page and was cross checked against RustClash and RustHelp.

Does the jackhammer need fuel in Rust?

No. The jackhammer uses no fuel whatsoever. It has no fuel slot, it does not burn low grade fuel, and you never have to feed it anything.

This is worth stating loudly because it is the single most repeated piece of misinformation about the item. Search “jackhammer rust” and you will find guides telling you it “costs fuel” and “requires a Tier 2 workbench.” Both claims are false, and they seem to come from people confusing it with the chainsaw, which genuinely does hold 50 low grade fuel and genuinely does need revving.

What the jackhammer does consume is its own condition bar, and that bar is topped up for free. Stand anywhere in range of a workbench, click the jackhammer in your inventory, and hit Refill. That is the entire maintenance loop. No materials, no cooldown, no cost.

How to get a jackhammer in Rust

Because you cannot craft it, there are exactly two routes: pay scrap at a vendor, or gamble on loot. Vendors are the reliable one.

If you only remember one line: go to Outpost with 150 scrap and buy one. Everything else is a bonus. The supply drop number looks tempting at 26%, but supply drops are rare enough that you should never plan around them.

How much scrap is a jackhammer at Outpost?

The base price is 150 scrap, but do not treat that as a fixed number. Facepunch shipped dynamic vendor pricing in 2024, which moves NPC shop prices with supply and demand across the wipe. RustClash prints the jackhammer’s Outpost band as 75 to 300 scrap, which is exactly half to double the base.

In practice that means early wipe, when nobody has bought one yet, you will often pay close to 150 or less. Late wipe on a busy server, after everyone has cycled through jackhammers, expect it to drift up. If it looks expensive, check the other safe zone vendors or wait for the Travelling Vendor.

Getting the scrap together is the easy part. A couple of recycler runs through roadside barrels will cover it, and 150 scrap is cheap next to what the tool saves you over a wipe.

Rust jackhammer gather rates: what one node gives you

This is where people get confused, so let us be precise. The jackhammer does not give you more ore than a pickaxe. A node in Rust holds a fixed amount of resource, and any tier three tool will empty it completely. What you are paying for is the clock.

Those raw ores are not the finished product, of course. Metal ore and sulfur ore both need to go through a furnace before they are worth anything, and 1 sulfur ore smelts into 1 sulfur. Stone is the only one you can use straight out of the ground.

Jackhammer vs pickaxe vs salvaged icepick

Four tools in Rust will break an ore node. Here is how long each one takes to fully clear a sulfur or metal node, and what it costs the tool to do it.

Read that top to bottom and the jump is obvious. Going from a stone pickaxe to a regular pickaxe roughly halves your time. Going from a pickaxe to a salvaged icepick halves it again. Going from an icepick to a jackhammer cuts it by another factor of six or seven.

In real terms, a sulfur field that takes you fifteen minutes with a pickaxe takes about a minute and a half with a jackhammer. On a wipe day, when every sulfur node on the map has three people racing for it, that difference decides who gets the gunpowder and who gets the third place consolation prize.

When the salvaged icepick is still the better pick

An honest guide has to say this: the jackhammer is not strictly better than everything. The salvaged icepick burns 1% of its condition per node against the jackhammer’s 2%, so per unit of durability, the icepick gets you twice as many nodes.

That matters when you are a long way from base with no workbench nearby. An icepick can be crafted, repaired with common materials and replaced whenever you want. A jackhammer that runs dry in the middle of nowhere is a paperweight until you walk it back to a bench.

The pro move is carrying both. Jackhammer for anything time sensitive or dangerous, icepick for the grind when you are safe and nobody is watching.

The real reason raiders carry one: wrecks and debris

Ore nodes are the obvious use. The killer use is everything else a mining tool can hit.

When you kill a Bradley APC, the burnt out hull becomes minable after a few minutes and pays out a large pile of charcoal, metal fragments and high quality metal. Same deal with a downed Patrol Helicopter. The catch is that you are standing still, in the open, at a monument, next to something that just made a lot of noise. Every second counts.

A Bradley wreck goes from a five minute commitment down to a 35 second grab. That is the whole argument. Five minutes of standing on a Launch Site road with your back to the world is how groups lose the loot they just spent 3 C4 earning. Thirty five seconds is survivable.

How to refill a jackhammer at a workbench

This is the part new players miss entirely, and it is why they think the tool is disposable. Refilling is free, unlimited and takes about two seconds.

1. Stand inside the working range of any workbench. Level 1, 2 or 3 all work. You do not need a tier three bench.
2. Open your inventory and click the jackhammer, either in your belt or your main inventory.
3. A small menu appears above the Drop button. Click Refill.
4. The condition bar tops back up. It costs no materials and no scrap.

That is genuinely it. If you have a level 1 workbench in your base, and you should, your jackhammer never needs to cost you another resource for the rest of the wipe. The habit worth building is refilling on the way out the door every single time, the same way you top up your ammo.

How long does a jackhammer last?

At roughly 2% condition per ore node, a full jackhammer is worth about 50 nodes before it needs a top up. That is a lot of farming. Fifty sulfur nodes is 15,000 sulfur ore, which is far more than most solo players pull in a session.

Because refills are free, that number is really just “how far can you get from a workbench before you have to walk back.” Plan a loop that passes your base, or a friendly base, and the condition bar stops being a constraint at all.

There is one older piece of advice still floating around that you can safely ignore. Players used to “tap mine,” clicking rather than holding, to squeeze more nodes out of a jackhammer. A later update made holding left click always connect properly, so tap mining is no longer necessary. Hold the trigger and move on.

Recycling a jackhammer

When a jackhammer is finally finished, do not drop it. It recycles into a genuinely useful pile.

The obvious lesson: never recycle a working jackhammer. You paid roughly 150 scrap and you get 36 back. But a dead one that you were about to throw away is still 36 scrap and 3 metal blades, and blades are annoying enough to find that this is worth the walk to a recycler.

Note the gap between the safe zone recycler and a normal monument one. That 40% versus 60% split applies to everything you recycle, not just tools, and it is the reason experienced players haul components out of Outpost rather than recycling them there.

Can you use the jackhammer as a weapon?

You can, and Facepunch’s own description cheerfully notes it “works well on human flesh.” Whether you should is another matter.

The jackhammer does 15 damage per hit at 400 hits per minute, which works out to roughly 100 damage per second with a x2 headshot multiplier. On paper that is a solid melee number. In practice it has a 2 metre range and a 1 second draw time, so you are committing to a hug with someone who probably has a gun. Against a naked, it is fine. Against anything else, pull out an actual weapon.

The more interesting question is raiding. The jackhammer will chew through the soft side of a stone wall, which players have used for years to remodel their own bases without wasting resources on a hammer downgrade. It is also a known trick for getting through enemy floors if you have somehow ended up inside their building privilege.

Getting the most out of one jackhammer

A jackhammer changes how you plan a farm run rather than just speeding one up. A few things worth building into your routine:

• Refill before you leave, always. It is free. There is no reason to ever walk out on a half bar.
• Take it to sulfur first. Sulfur is the resource that decides whether you raid this wipe, and sulfur fields are the most contested ground on the map. Speed is worth the most exactly where the risk is highest.
• Run a tea with it. Buffs are on a timer, so the faster you clear nodes, the more of that timer you convert into ore.
• Bring it to every Bradley and heli. If your group kills a Bradley without a jackhammer in the party, you are leaving several minutes of exposure on the table for no reason.
• Do not take it into a fight you expect to lose. It is a 150 scrap item on a stack of 1 that despawns in 40 minutes. Dying with it in your belt is how you fund someone else’s wipe.
• Consider a second one. If jackhammers are cheap on your server, two in a group is better than one, because heli and Bradley wrecks can be split between two people and finished in half the time.

For sustained resource output the jackhammer is a complement to, not a replacement for, static production. A sulfur quarry or the Giant Excavator will out produce any hand tool over a long wipe, but they need diesel and they tie you to one spot. The jackhammer is the mobile half of that equation.

Five mistakes people make with the jackhammer

1. Believing it needs fuel. It does not. People carry low grade around for it, or avoid the tool entirely, over a myth.
2. Repairing instead of refilling. Repair bench costs materials and permanently reduces max condition. The workbench refill is free. Most players never find the Refill button.
3. Recycling a working one for scrap. You get 36 back on a 150 scrap item. Only recycle it when it is truly dead.
4. Taking a nearly empty one to a heli wreck. A scrap transport helicopter eats two thirds of a full bar. Half a bar will not finish the job.
5. Assuming it gathers more ore. It does not gather more, it gathers faster. If you are farming somewhere completely safe with no buff running, a salvaged icepick is more durability efficient.

---

Rust jackhammer FAQ

Can you craft a jackhammer in Rust?

No. The jackhammer has no crafting recipe, no workbench requirement and no tech tree node. It cannot be researched in a research table either. The only ways to get one are buying it from a vendor or finding it in loot.

Does the jackhammer need fuel in Rust?

No. The jackhammer uses no fuel at all. It has no fuel slot and does not consume low grade fuel. It runs purely on its own condition bar, which you refill for free at any workbench. Guides that say it needs fuel are confusing it with the chainsaw.

How much is a jackhammer at Outpost?

The base price is around 150 scrap from the Tools and Stuff vending machine at Outpost. Because Rust uses dynamic vendor pricing, the actual price moves across the wipe, roughly between 75 and 300 scrap.

How do you refill a jackhammer in Rust?

Stand near any workbench, level 1, 2 or 3. Open your inventory, click the jackhammer, and select Refill from the menu that appears above the Drop button. It costs no materials and can be done as often as you like.

How much does a jackhammer gather per node?

1,000 Stone from a stone node, 600 Metal Ore plus 2 High Quality Metal Ore from a metal node, and 300 Sulfur Ore from a sulfur node. That is the same total a pickaxe gets. The jackhammer just clears the node in one to three seconds instead of 12 to 27.

Is the jackhammer better than a salvaged icepick?

For speed, yes, by a factor of six or seven. For durability, no. The salvaged icepick costs about 1% condition per node against the jackhammer’s 2%, so it gets twice as many nodes per bar and it can be crafted and replaced. Use the jackhammer when time and risk matter, the icepick for safe grinding.

How many nodes can a jackhammer mine before it breaks?

About 50 ore nodes on a full condition bar, since each node costs roughly 2%. Because refills are free at any workbench, the practical limit is how far you are willing to walk back rather than a hard cap.

Do you need a workbench to use a jackhammer?

No. You can pick one up and use it immediately with no workbench and no blueprint. You only need a workbench to refill its condition, and any tier works, including a level 1.

What does a jackhammer recycle into?

At a standard monument recycler it gives 36 Scrap, 3 Metal Blades and a Metal Pipe at 60% chance. At a safe zone recycler such as Outpost it drops to 24 Scrap and 2 Metal Blades. Only recycle a jackhammer that is already dead.

Can you repair a jackhammer?

Yes, at a Repair Bench for 30 Metal Fragments and 1 High Quality Metal. Repairing permanently reduces the tool’s maximum condition, so the free workbench refill is always the better option and repairs should be a last resort.

Does the jackhammer cut down trees?

No. The jackhammer is an ore tool only. Trees are the chainsaw’s job, and the chainsaw is the item that actually burns low grade fuel. Facepunch introduced the two as a matching pair, one for wood and one for rock.

Is the jackhammer good for raiding in Rust?

Not really. It will break the soft side of a stone wall, which makes it handy for remodelling your own base, but it burns condition fast and higher tier walls resist melee heavily. For actual raids you want explosives, not a mining tool.

How much damage does a jackhammer do to players?

15 damage per hit at 400 hits per minute, which is roughly 100 damage per second, with a x2 headshot multiplier. Its 2 metre range and 1 second draw time make it a poor choice against anyone holding a real weapon.

What is the best way to get a jackhammer early in a wipe?

Run barrels and roadside crates into a recycler until you have around 150 scrap, then buy one at Outpost. Loot rolls are unreliable, at roughly 1% from a toolbox and 4% from a locked crate, so scrap is the dependable path.

Do you still need to tap mine with a jackhammer?

No. Players used to click repeatedly rather than hold, to save condition. A later update made holding left click always register properly on the node, so tap mining is no longer needed. Hold the trigger.

When was the jackhammer added to Rust?

In The Team Update in July 2018, the same patch that introduced the team system and the deployable watchtower. Facepunch added it as the ore gathering counterpart to the chainsaw.

---

The bottom line

The jackhammer is one of the best value purchases in Rust. Around 150 scrap buys you a tool that clears ore nodes ten times faster than a pickaxe, costs literally nothing to run, and turns a five minute Bradley wreck into a thirty five second stop. The only real catch is that you cannot make one, so you have to plan a trip to a vendor.

Get one early, refill it every time you pass a workbench, keep a salvaged icepick as your safe grinding backup, and stop believing the guides that tell you to bring low grade fuel.

Sources

• Facepunch Wiki, Jackhammer item page for shortname, item ID, craftability, gather damage, recycler output and repair costs.
• Facepunch, The Team Update devblog (July 2018) for the item’s introduction and the “no aiming, full node yield” behaviour.
• RustClash, Jackhammer for per node gather times, condition costs, wreck mining times, vendor price bands and loot chances.
• RustHelp, Jackhammer for vendor locations and loot drop chances.
• Corrosion Hour, RUST Jackhammer Guide for refill and repair behaviour and practical usage notes.
• Rust official site for update history.