One barrel of Diesel Fuel runs the Giant Excavator for 2 minutes and produces 2,000 sulfur ore, or 100 high quality metal ore, depending on which resource the control room is set to. Only one resource is produced per run.
That makes the excavator the fastest bulk resource source in Rust by a wide margin — a single barrel of sulfur ore is worth more than an hour of hand-mining nodes — and also the loudest. Running it announces the site to the whole server, so the real cost is the fight, not the diesel.
Diesel is found in locked crates and at the excavator itself. Barrels can be queued, so output scales linearly: two barrels give exactly twice the output over 4 minutes.
Working out a specific case? Giant Excavator calculator →
Each row is the total output for one 2-minute run with that resource selected. Output scales linearly with the number of barrels burned.
| Resource | 1 barrel | 2 barrels | 5 barrels | Run time (1 barrel) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| High Quality Metal Ore | 100 | 200 | 500 | 2 min |
| Sulfur Ore | 2,000 | 4,000 | 10,000 | 2 min |
| Stones | 10,000 | 20,000 | 50,000 | 2 min |
| Metal Fragments | 5,000 | 10,000 | 25,000 | 2 min |
2,000 sulfur ore per barrel of Diesel Fuel, over a 2-minute run. That is by far the fastest way to gather sulfur in Rust, which is why the excavator is contested on most servers.
2 minutes. Barrels can be loaded consecutively, so output and run time both scale linearly with how much diesel you bring.
100 high quality metal ore per barrel — much lower than the other resources in absolute terms, but HQM ore is correspondingly scarcer and slower to gather by hand.
No. The control room selects a single resource for the run, and the excavator produces only that one. Getting a mix means separate runs, each costing its own diesel.
Diesel Fuel comes from locked crates, elite crates and the loot rooms at the excavator itself. It cannot be crafted, so excavator time is limited by how much diesel the server's loot has produced.
Yields and run length come from the RustTools excavator data set. Values are read from the RustTools game data set, the same data the calculators run on. Data on this page was last verified against Rust in August 2026. Facepunch balance patches can change these values — see the changelog for what has been re-checked. RustTools is an unofficial fan project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Facepunch Studios.