Author: Mike6FO

My FPS Keeps Dropping, What Can I Do?

**Disclaimer** The information below is provided without any guarantee or warranty. Making changes to your system is done at your own risk. HNC Rust takes no responsibility for any damage or misconfigurations that may occur to your system from following these directions. While these steps should be safe, if you don’t really know what you’re doing, you should stop now and ask a support rep from your computer’s manufacturer for assistance.

This is a work in progress and is by no way complete.

Client side FPS is very tricky and low FPS can be caused by a number of things. There isn’t one “catch all” reason you could be experiencing sudden low FPS, but here are a few things you can check.

  • First off, make sure you have the FPS counter turned on. We recommend setting it to Advance + Ping in settings. This is located under Options -> User Interface -> FPS Counter. This will show you your in-game FPS in the bottom left of the screen.
    FPS Counter
  • If you have 16GB or less of memory and only onboard video, Rust may be a struggle to play. Onboard video shares your main memory and is often not the best for gaming. Close all other programs possible while playing Rust to free up as much memory and CPU time as possible. This includes web browsers.
  • Make sure you have the latest video drivers installed. Often, you can find these under optional updates in Windows Update. For Windows 11, these are located in Settings -> Windows Update -> Advanced options -> Optional updates.
    Optional Updates
  • You can also go to your card’s chipset manufacturer’s website to download the latest drivers. You can find out what chipset your card has by running DXDiag. Just hit the Windows Start button and type dxdiag then click Open.
    DX Diag
  • Go to the display tab (you may have more than one) and note the name listed at the top. In the example below, this is an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. If you have multiple display tabs, check all to see if a different name is listed (This is especially true on Laptops!)
    dxdiag display tab
  • Grab updated drivers for any card listed. You can find drivers from the top 3 makers below:
    • AMD
    • Intel – Their site stinks, if you need help locating the right driver for your system, let us know on Discord and we will try to help you out. Be sure to provide your CPU model (shown on the System tab of DXDiag) as well as the video card model (shown on the Display tab of DxDiag).
    • Nvidia
  • It’s also possible, if the game seems to freeze for a moment, that your client could be doing a Garbage Collect. This is a normal procedure when your computer starts running low on memory and the game client needs to free up memory. See our other article on this here: Game appears to freeze for half a second.

New Event Arena Is Live

As mentioned in the April 2026 wipe day post, we’ve been working on updating the arena used for events. All tuna can and lantern lights have been removed and replaced with simple lights. In testing, this has shown an increase of anywhere from 15-30 FPS at night. So if you haven’t joined an event in awhile, you should give it a try. Just watch for the message of a new event opening in chat, then use /event to join.

April 2026 Force Wipe

April 2nd and pranks are over….well….hopefully! Cobalt nuked the island, destroying what everyone built. Now it’s time to start over on a new island.

This month, we changed the plugin backpack to act as a fridge. So now meats and produce will show as cold when stored in there now (hat tip to Hislop09 for the suggestion).

We’re also looking at updating the event arena to do away with the tuna can lamps and lanterns, replacing them with simple lights. In testing, phase one saw a roughly 10 FPS increase on the client side. Phase 2 saw an additional 10 FPS increase. This should help players who are on older or onboard video have a smoother gameplay in the arena at night. While there will still be an FPS hit from the lights, it should be a lot less of a hit than with the lanterns and tuna lights. The new arena doesn’t have the same ominous orange glow, but we fill FPS is more important than looks. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite ready for deployment at wipe time so the old arena is still in place for now. Once the new arena is ready (provided there are no issues) we will get it deployed.

Facepunch made a big change to Launch Site this month involving terrain. If you’ve ever flown near the pit and noticed what looked like dirt slide away as you got closer or saw animals/NPCs walking on air over the pit, this is what was fixed finally. Basically, the terrain that was there but hidden has been fully removed now. Players “shouldn’t” notice any difference, but should be aware of the change and report any issues on our Discord.

March 29th 2026 Updates

Added new Boat Commands UI. This UI (shown below) will appear when you are mounted on the steering wheel of a built boat. This will allow you to start/stop engines, deploy sails, reverse engines and sails (SEE IMPORTANT NOTE BELOW!!) and deploy the anchor. Use your mouse to click the buttons (best to open inventory view to get access to the mouse cursor).

Some notes:
* Wait a second between clicks. Clicking too fast may not register the clicks correctly.
* On Sails and Anchor, the button doesn’t change colors until AFTER the sails or anchor has been fully deployed/retracted.
*Sails can ONLY be reversed when they are closed. So if you need to reverse direction on sails: Close them, wait for indicator to go out, THEN click reverse. You should hear a larger ‘clunk’ when the sails reverse direction and can then re-deploy them. Failure to follow this direction can result in your sails getting out of sync with the reverse indicator. Engines do not require you to stop them before reversing.

March 10 2026 Updates

  • Updated to latest server version
  • Chest Stacks updated to fix issue when applying a skin to a box in a stack, all boxes above selected box would also receive the skin. HOWEVER, this update only fixes new stacks. Stacks already placed will still have the bug. Two options for already placed stacks:
    • Rebuild the stack to correct the bug.
    • Apply skins starting at the bottom of a stack working your way up.

Running MTR To Detect Network Issues

If you are experiencing network issues (high ping or lost packets) to our server, you may be asked by a team member to submit an MTR for review. If so, just follow these steps to collect and send the data via a Discord ticket.

First, you will need to download an MTR program. The easiest is LnLMTR available for free on Steam. WinMTR is also available from Sourceforge here.

We will cover using LnLMTR as it’s the one available in Steam.

After you install and launch LnLMTR, you will see a screen like below:

In the top left box where it says “Enter a website or IP address…” Enter our server address which is server.hncrust.com then click the Trace button just to the right. This will start the trace:

Let the test run for a few minutes then click Stop.

Click the Copy button at the bottom right and paste it (right click and choose paste or just hit Ctrl+V) to a ticket in #admin-help on our Discord. DO NOT SEND IN #GENERAL!!!

March 2026 Wipe

March wipe is here! Here are the changes we have for this month:

  • Player boats should now hold health for 3 days before wiping (same as your main base, but don’t forget to give it a whack with a hammer once in awhile).
  • The Deep Sea will now only remain closed for 30 minutes at a time, then it will reopen for 3 hours.
  • Player boats can now have electricity and other items deployed on them.
  • The Deep Sea will now spawn on random sides of the map each time.
  • Players can now swim into the Deep Sea as well as use smaller boats such as the rowboat or kayak.