Rust Industrial — Visual GuideReal wiki component icons + four working automation circuits with detailed step-by-step build walkthroughs and item-flow explanations. Last updated May 18, 2026.

The single most-placed piece in any industrial setup. You snap a Storage Adapter onto the side of any container — wooden box, large wood box, fridge, drop box, even some monument-style containers — and that container becomes accessible to pipes. Without an adapter, a box is just a box; with an adapter, it's a node in your network.

Each adapter has one face that points outward (where the pipe connects) and locks onto the container side it's placed against. One adapter per container side, but you can put adapters on multiple sides of the same box if you need it to feed multiple destinations.

The brain of every network. A conveyor has an input pipe port on one side and an output pipe port on the other, and 12 filter slots inside its UI. Every 5 seconds (server default), it scans the containers connected to its input side and tries to move up to 32 items per stack through to whatever containers are on its output side — but only if those items match its filter.

The filter is the magic. You drag items or entire item categories (Components, Weapons, Ammunition, Resources, Food, Tool, etc.) into the 12 slots. Items matching pass through; everything else gets ignored. Empty filter means "let everything pass."

Conveyors are how you sort. Want components in one box and weapons in another? Two conveyors, two different filters, two output destinations. Want a furnace to only accept ore? One conveyor with an ore filter between the ore box and the furnace.

Pick any recipe you've researched (gunpowder, 5.56 ammo, syringes, bandages, anything you can craft manually), drop it into the crafter's recipe slot, and it crafts continuously as long as the ingredients are being piped in via its IN port. Finished items pop out the OUT port for another conveyor to grab.

One crafter = one recipe. Want gunpowder AND 5.56 in the same network? Two crafters in series — the first makes gunpowder, a buffer box stores it, the second pulls gunpowder + frags from a combined input and makes 5.56.

The crafter has built-in pipe ports — you don't need a Storage Adapter on it. It also doesn't count separately against the 16-adapter limit (only the boxes on either side of it do).

You'll use this any time multiple sources need to feed the same destination. The classic example is the recycler — it has 6 output slots, and you don't want 6 separate output boxes. Run 3 combiners (each combining 2 outputs into 1), then one final combiner merges those into a single pipe leading to your "scrap and parts" box.

The other big use: when an industrial crafter needs two ingredient streams (say, gunpowder from your gunpowder buffer + metal frags from your supply box), a combiner merges both pipes into the crafter's single input port.

No power, no setup, no UI. Just a passive routing piece.

The combiner's mirror image. One input, three equal outputs. Useful when you want one stream of items distributed evenly to multiple destinations — for example, splitting one conveyor's ore output across 3 parallel electric furnaces so they all smelt at the same time.

Use sparingly. Most networks prefer dedicated conveyors per branch (one conveyor per destination, with its own filter) because that gives you per-destination control. The splitter is for cases where you genuinely want the same item type fanned out equally.

A drop box is mounted into a wall frame (like a window). People on the outside of the wall can put items in; only the owner standing inside can take items out. This is what makes it the perfect entry point for an auto-sort network — your teammates can deposit loot from outside the loot room without ever entering it.

Put a Storage Adapter on its inside-facing side and pipe that adapter into your sort conveyors. Anything dropped in immediately gets distributed.

The smelter of choice for any automated base. Unlike the wood-fueled small furnace, the electric furnace runs on 60 rW of electricity and refuses to burn wood (wood placed in it just sits in the slot). It also can't be extinguished by a sprinkler — meaning it lives happily next to your greenhouse.

Has built-in pipe ports on its input and output faces. Pipe in raw ore, pipe out smelted metal/sulfur/HQM. Stack multiple electric furnaces fed by one splitter for parallel smelting.

Found at most monuments and can also be crafted at Workbench 3. The recycler is self-powered — no rW needed. Put items in the input, hit the on switch (or pipe-feed and it auto-runs), and it spits scrap + raw components out across 6 output slots.

For automation: place a Storage Adapter on the input face and pipe items into it; on the output side, use 3 combiners to merge the 6 output slots down into one pipe leading to a "scrap and parts" box. Or combine output slots directly using built-in pipe ports if your version supports it.

Workbenches are for manual crafting and item research — they're not the same as the Industrial Crafter. Use a workbench when you want to research an item to unlock it permanently, or when you're hand-crafting one-offs. Use an Industrial Crafter when you want a recipe produced continuously and automatically.

That said, workbenches can be pipe-connected via Storage Adapter. Some advanced setups feed scrap directly to a workbench so you can semi-automate research, or pull manually-crafted items out via a conveyor. For most builds, just place WB1 → WB2 → WB3 in a row in your crafting room and use them by hand.

The default storage container in any industrial network. 30 slots, accepts adapters on multiple sides. Cheap and easy. Most boxes in this guide's diagrams are large wood boxes — small wood boxes work the same way but only have 12 slots.

Not industrial per se, but every industrial network needs power, and the branch is how you distribute it. Set a branch to "5 rW out" and 5 rW peels off the main line into your conveyor while the rest passes through to other loads.

Always prefer a branch over an Electrical Splitter for power distribution. Splitters waste rW (each output gets 1/3 of the input even if a load only needs a fraction); branches deliver exactly what you set.