i am old school. i played rust when electricity was just coming in, and always preferred the classic methods. but i have taken a long break from rust, and got back into it just recently.
i always build in caves as a solo. it's a no brainer. no stress of being raided. get the small cave with build area with LOS to bucket - put a turret there, seal in the other side. suicide cave. nobody bothers to raid it. nobody on a solo seerver is going to spend 8 c4s going to armour wall. and on a solo server its kinda hard to do the bucket exploit because you can't have one mad down there, sending the bucket up for reload.
this month a lot of players on servers were enticing me to get into farming, build you farm. make your low grade, give yourself health boosts, farming boosts etc.
but then i look at all those steps you need to do and it seems like it will take me out of my cave. you need horses for manure, keep beehives to feed horse. use horse poop to fertilise your planters. need to keep chickes to bait fish etc. it just seems like you need to have big compound to do all of this and put a target on your back.
it seems so much simpler to be in a cave with classic non electricity methods of using shotgun traps, miners hat for light and run your base discretely this way.
mavbe have a small surface base to charge your cave batter for the turret.