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Getting Started

Life is GTA built inside Rust. Forget chopping wood and walling off a base — you pick a career, chase money, and decide how clean (or dirty) you want to earn it. Here's how to find your feet in your first session.

What Life Is

On Life, the whole game is the economy. Instead of surviving the wilderness, you're climbing a city — building wealth, reputation, and a name for yourself.

You can play it completely straight: take a job, earn a steady wage, buy a property, run a business. Or you can play it dirty: grow drugs, rob stores, raid rivals, and outrun the cops. Most players do a bit of both. Crime pays more — if you don't get caught.

$1,500
Starting bank balance
6
Careers to choose from
1
Police force you can earn into
The golden ruleYou don't build bases here. You buy property, you earn money, and you protect what's yours. Everything flows from cash.

Your First Hour

A simple path to get rolling without dying broke:

  1. Open your phoneFirst, type /phones in chat and follow the steps — it hands you a console command to paste in, which binds your phone/laptop to a single key so it's always one button away. Once it's open, press T to free your mouse cursor so you can click around. The phone is a home screen of apps that runs almost everything: jobs, property, the market, your stats.
  2. Pick a jobOpen the Jobs Department app on your phone (or press USE on the Jobs Department NPC in person) and choose a career. Delivery and Taxi are gentle starters; Miner and Lumberjack feed the crafting economy later.
  3. Do the work, then hand it inComplete the task out in the world, then return to a jobs department to hand it in. Your pay lands in your bank, not your pocket.
  4. Stock upVisit a Medical Store for food and bandages, and an Equipment Store for basic gear. Carry a little cash for shops.
  5. Bank your cashFind an ATM and deposit. Standard ATM deposits are capped at $20,000 every 6 hours. Money in the bank can't be lost when you die — cash in your pockets can.
Read this firstYou start with passive mode on, so nobody can hurt you while you learn the ropes. Use that time to figure out the map and make your first money.

Cash vs. Bank

Life runs on two separate kinds of money, and mixing them up is the most common rookie mistake:

  • Carried cash — the physical notes in your inventory. You spend it at shops, hand it to other players, and earn it from selling and robbery. It drops when you die, just like any item.
  • Bank balance — a safe number you can't lose on death. It pays for vehicles, property, and most job wages.

Move money between the two at any ATM. Standard cash deposits are capped at $20,000 every 6 hours, while bank transfers are capped at $7,500 every 6 hours. There's more to it — dirty money, laundering, transfers — on the Money & Banking page.

Staying Alive

Survival is lighter than vanilla Rust, but it still matters. Your hunger and thirst tick down a touch faster than normal, so keep supplies on you.

  • Food & medicine are sold at the Medical Store (and at Equipment Stores and Gang Hideouts).
  • Drinking water is not sold anywhere. Grab a water jug, build catchers/a pump on your property, or drink from natural sources.
  • If you're killed, you respawn — so set a spawn point early at a property or sleeping bag (see Property).
Don't expect a water vendorNew players waste time looking for a shop that sells drinking water. There isn't one — you supply your own.

Passive Mode

Passive mode puts you in a PvE state: you can't be attacked, and you can't attack, loot, rob, or raid — and you can't take part in any illegal activity. It's your safety net while you're new.

  • It's on automatically for new players and switches off at level 3 — after that you can't turn it back on (there's also a total-playtime cap).
  • Toggle it from the button in the bottom-right of your inventory — open your inventory and press it. The on/off indicator shows in the bottom-left (green = on, red = off). There's a 5-second arming delay.
  • After you switch it off, there's a 15-minute combat cooldown before you could turn it back on, and you can't enable it while wanted.
  • Walking into a PvP / KOS zone while passive starts a short 10–15 second kill timer — leave, or you'll die anyway.

Your Phone

Your phone (open it with /phone or /menu) is the control panel for the whole gamemode — a home screen of apps. Open the one you need:

  • The Jobs Department & Contacts apps — pick a career, claim level rewards, and post or take tasks.
  • The Real Estate app — buy and manage property.
  • The Quests app (your Lazarus Pass), plus Skills & Schematics — your progression.
  • The Market, Market Prices & Crates Shop apps — trade and cash in points.
  • The Stats, Wanted, Gangs & Vehicle Store apps — all on tap.
Third-person viewThird-person is a key-bind, not a chat command. Open your F1 console and bind thirdperson.toggleview to a key of your choice. Heads-up: it switches off the moment you enter a combat or KOS zone.

Where To Go Next

You've got the basics. Pick a direction and go deeper:

Money & Banking
Cash, the ATM, and laundering dirty money.
Jobs & Earning
The six careers and what each one pays.
Shops & Vendors
Where to buy and sell everything.
Property
Buy a home, set a spawn, run a business.