PlayRust Guide - Game Crashes and Fixes

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Game Crashes and Fixes

Unfortunately, in it’s current state Rust is far from perfect. It has a few issues, and occasionally some conflicts will cause the game to crash or freeze. At this point in time there isn’t that much available information on why certain crashes may happen, and because of this it’s down to you to figure out what exactly is causing your crashes.

My Game Didn’t Use to Have Issues, But Now it Does

If your Rust has suddenly started playing up, it’s likely a change to your system or your hardware that has caused the problems. To identify what has caused your game to crash, you’ll need to think about what changes you have made to your PC since the crashes have started happening.

It could be something as simple as a new issue with the latest patch, or it could be something to do with something on your end. If you’ve recently downloaded a new patch for Rust, check the FacePunch forums and other websites to see if other people have had similar problems.

If nobody else has had problems, or there hasn’t been a patch, it’s most likely to be due to some kind of hardware or software change. If you updated your hardware, make sure that you’ve downloaded all the latest drivers, and check online to see if there’s any conflicts between Rust and the new hardware.

If you haven’t changed hardware, it’s likely to be down to software changes. Make sure your firewall or antivirus isn’t having any problems with Rust, and also make sure that you are online on Steam and you have proper access to other online games.

My Game Has Always Had Issues

If your game has had issues ever since you bought it, it’s probably down to a lack of capable software or hardware. Rust uses Unity, which is a pretty robust 3D game engine. Because of this, it’s rare that your hardware will have problems with it, unless it’s faulty or extremely old. As long as you’re running Windows XP or higher, and have a GPU better than integrated graphics you should be fine.



Dual Video Card Laptops

Some laptops, such as the Lenovo Y580 have dual drivers for the integrated graphics card. In the case of the Y580, the graphics drivers are GTX 660M and Intel HD graphics 4000.  Sometimes the laptop will not use the GTX drivers properly, and instead revert to the Intel Graphics drivers.  There are a a few causes for this. 


1. In your NVIDIA Control Panel, under Manage 3D settings, the game rust or the default may be set to the Intel Graphics drivers.  Changing this setting and restarting your computer should fix the problem.

2. The Graphics card requires more power than your laptop battery can provide on it's own, and will revert to the Intel Graphics Drivers when battery power is the only power available.  It will not automatically revert back after plugging into the wall. In order to fix this, you have to plug in the power and restart your laptop. Removing the power cable at any time during gaming will instantly cause the computer to downgrade the drivers to the Intel drivers until plugged in and restarted again.


FPS Boosts

If you’re simply having issues with frame rate in Rust, there are a few tweaks that can be applied. To do these tweaks, you’ll need to enter the game and then press F1 once in-game. Pressing F1 will open up the debug console, and with this you’ll be able to turn off things that you can’t from the main menu. First, if you’d like to monitor your FPS, enter ‘global.fpslog 5’ - this will make your FPS appear on screen every 5 seconds. The rate that the FPS is shown can be adjusted by changing the number 5 to whatever number you’d like.

Here are a few useful commands that players have reported to improve Frame rate on older builds-

‘render.level 0’ - this reduces the render level.
‘render.distance 0.1’ - this reduces render distance by half. (default is 0.2)
‘gfx.ssaa false’ - this disables super sampling anti aliasing.
‘gfx.shafts false’ - this gets rid of sun rays.
‘grass.on false’ - this gets rid of grass, this is probably the biggest FPS booster.


Can your computer run Rust?

For an answer to this question, you can either post your specs here in a comment, or visit the Rust forum topic on this question at "Will it run?"

Over time Rust will improve, so if you are still having problems, unfortunately the best thing you can do is sit tight and wait for a fix to be patched to the game. You can read more about making the most out of Rust in our guide here.

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