I've spent a genuinely embarrassing number of hours getting our loot tables right, so I figured I'd actually write down what I learned instead of letting that time go to waste. If you're a player trying to judge whether a server's loot is well-tuned (or an admin trying to build one), this is the real breakdown.
More items per crate is not the goal
This was the biggest mistake I made early on. My first instinct was to just cram every crate full of good stuff — more guns, more components, more everything. It felt generous. In practice it made every crate feel identical and pointless, because there was no sense of escalation between a wooden barrel and an elite crate. If you can find a top-tier gun in a basic crate, finding one in an elite crate stops meaning anything.
Good loot tiering means each container type has a distinct identity: barrels give you basic components and nothing else, low-tier crates are resource-focused, mid-tier crates start introducing real weapons at a genuinely uncommon rate, and top-tier containers are where the good stuff actually lives — and even there, it shouldn't be guaranteed every single time. Rarity is what makes finding something feel good.
Learnable blueprints in loot are usually a mistake
A lot of loot table configs have a setting that lets items spawn as "learnable" blueprints instead of the physical item — meaning instead of finding a gun, you find the recipe for it. This sounds like a neutral feature but in practice it means players can permanently unlock endgame items from what should be an early-game container, which breaks progression pacing badly. Unless you're deliberately building blueprint fragments into your progression system as their own separate mechanic, I'd turn this off entirely rather than leave it on a default setting.
Junk items are worse than empty inventory space
Purely cosmetic clothing with zero armor value, decorative deployables, anything that exists just to take up an inventory slot without giving the player anything useful — cut it. It sounds like a small thing, but when a player opens three crates in a row and gets a party hat, a picture frame, and a bandana, that's actively worse than finding nothing, because it wastes their time sorting through junk. Every item in a container should either be directly useful or, at minimum, sellable/tradeable for something that is.
Rare items should actually stay rare
If you're running a loot system with probability-based groups (rather than flat guaranteed lists), watch out for the same rare item stacking multiple times in one container — that's usually a sign your pool locking or duplicate-prevention isn't configured correctly, and it undermines the entire point of making something rare in the first place. A player should never open one elite crate and walk away with three of the server's best guns at once.
2x doesn't mean "double the loot," it means double the pace
The actual point of a 2x multiplier is to speed up the early grind, not to inflate the amount of stuff in every container. We apply our multiplier mainly to stackable resources, ammo, components, and medical items — the things that make up the tedious grind — while keeping unique items like weapons and blueprints at their normal, meaningful rarity. That's the distinction that keeps a 2x server feeling like a faster version of Rust rather than a completely different, loot-flooded game.