BEAMS.GG Vanilla Trio Rust Server, US Central

04 / Performance

Built for the PC you actually have.

The server side is done and documented above. This is the client side. Everything here was checked against the live Rust build in August 2026, because most of what is written about Rust FPS online is describing a settings menu that no longer exists.

Read this one first. Turn your mouse polling rate down to 500Hz. The June 2026 Unity 6 update changed how Rust processes mouse input. Facepunch’s own words: “High polling rate mice (1000Hz+) are now causing significant CPU overhead issues and frame drops.” Change it in Logitech G HUB, SteelSeries GG, Razer Synapse, whatever you use. As of the August 2026 update there is still no fix on Facepunch’s end. For a lot of people this is worth more frames than every graphics setting combined, and almost nobody knows about it.

Most Rust FPS guides you will find are out of date

Facepunch has been rebuilding the graphics options since early 2025. These settings no longer exist. If a guide tells you to change one of them, it was written for an older game and you should not trust the rest of it either.

Setting people still recommend	Status	Replaced by
graphics.quality	Removed Mar 2025	Nothing. There is no master quality preset any more.
graphics.shaderlod	Removed Aug 2026	Nothing. “Shader Level 350” advice is dead.
graphics.shadowquality	Removed Feb 2026	graphicssettings.shadowqualitypreset
graphics.shadowdistance	Removed Mar 2025	graphicssettings.shadowdistance
graphics.shadowcascades	Removed Mar 2025	graphicssettings.numshadowcascades
grass.on	Never existed	You cannot turn grass off. Facepunch blocks it on purpose.
gfx.ssaa / gfx.bloom / gfx.shafts	Never existed	effects.*
-high / -malloc=system / -maxMem	Not real	Source engine flags. Rust is Unity. They do nothing.

Measure before you change anything

Find out what is actually limiting you

perf 2

Shows FPS and frametime. Rust is CPU limited for most people at 1080p, which means dropping your resolution or render scale buys you a blurry game and nothing else. If your GPU is sitting at 50 percent while one CPU core is pinned, that is your answer.

client.benchmark

Built in benchmark. Run it from the main menu, not while connected. Almost nobody knows this exists.

fps.startlogging
fps.stoplogging

Writes frametimes to a file so you can A/B test a setting honestly instead of guessing from feel.

The stutter key

Rust accumulates memory over a session. This clears it without a restart. Paste it in the F1 console once, then press P whenever it starts hitching mid wipe.

input.bind p gc.collect;gc.unload;\
     effects.clearallgibs;decal.clear

gc.unload is the one most guides miss. It frees VRAM as well as RAM, which is what you actually want after three hours on a full server.

Save your settings so they survive a restart:

global.writecfg

Settings, by tier

Set these in the console, then run global.writecfg. If you change a preset in the menu afterwards it will overwrite individual values, so do the menu first and the console second.

Setting	Potato 1050 Ti, 4 core, 8–12GB	Mid 3060 / 6600, 16GB	High, wants frames 4070+, 32GB
Shadows — the biggest single lever
graphicssettings.shadowqualitypreset	0	1	1–2
graphicssettings.numshadowcascades	1	2	2
graphicssettings.shadowdistance	50	80–120	150
graphicssettings.shadowmapresolution	0	1	2
graphics.shadowmode	1	2	2
graphics.contactshadows	false	false	false
graphics.impostorshadows	false	false	false
World
graphics.volumetric_clouds on by default	0	0	0–1
graphics.drawdistance	1200	1500–1800	2000
graphics.lodbias	0.7	1.0	1.0
mesh.quality	50	100	150
tree.quality	50	100	150
tree.meshes	30	70	100
terrain.quality	50	100	100
grass.quality	25	50	100
grass.distance	50	75	100
grass.displacement keep on	true	true	true
decor.quality	0	50	100
particle.quality	0	25	50
water.quality	0	0–1	1
water.reflections	0	0	0–1
graphics.waves	false	true	true
graphics.parallax	0	0	0
Effects — turn nearly all of it off
effects.maxgibs raid killer	0	0	0
effects.ao	false	false	false
effects.bloom / lensdirt / motionblur / shafts	false	false	false
graphics.dof	false	false	false
effects.creationeffects	false	false	false
effects.otherplayerslightflares	false	false	false
effects.sharpen keep on	true	true	true
effects.antialiasing	1 FXAA	2 SMAA	3 TSSAA
graphics.af basically free	4	8	8–16
Latency and upscaling
graphics.reflexmode	2	2	2
graphics.dlss RTX only	-1	3	3
graphics.vsync	0	0	0
fps.limit	60	144	165–240
culling.toggle keep on	true	true	true
graphicssettings.particleraycastbudget	64	256	1024
graphicssettings.pixellightcount	2	4	8
shadowcaching.enabled new, test it	try	try	try

The traps

Settings that look harmless and cost the most frames.

Volumetric clouds. On by default since September 2025. It is a full screen effect that runs whether or not you are looking at the sky. Almost no guide mentions it because it did not exist when they were written.
Max gibs at 1000. Fine until a raid starts, then you are simulating a thousand pieces of debris in the exact moment that decides the fight.
Draw distance at 2500. Players and entities are networked by the server, not by this setting. Cranking it does not let you see people further away.
Particle raycast budget at 1024. That is a CPU cost, and Rust is CPU bound.
Water quality and reflections. They cost frames even when the water is off in the distance.

The false economies

Settings people crush for no reason, at real cost to what they can see.

Anisotropic filtering. Effectively free on any GPU from the last ten years. At 1 your ground textures smear at exactly the angle you are trying to spot a prone player. Set 4 to 8.
Sharpen. One post pass. Leave it on. It is free distant target clarity.
Occlusion culling. The advice to disable it is from 2018. Leave it on.
Grass displacement. Cheap, and it shows you trails where players have walked. Keep it.
Render scale, if you are CPU bound. Check perf 2 before you blur your game for nothing.
Anti aliasing off. Distant players shimmer and dissolve into the terrain. SMAA is the competitive sweet spot.

Steam launch options

Two of them work. Everything else you have been told to paste in here is a Source engine flag that Rust silently ignores.

-window-mode exclusive -nolog

That is the whole list. -high does nothing; use system.cpu_priority abovenormal in the F1 console instead. -maxMem, -malloc=system, -cpuCount and -force-vulkan are not Unity arguments and have never affected Rust.

Outside the game

Windows and drivers

Mouse polling rate: 500Hz
XMP / EXPO in BIOS: Enabled
Resizable BAR: On
Windows Game Mode: On
Power plan: High performance
NVIDIA power management: Prefer max performance
NVIDIA low latency mode: Off, use in game Reflex
NVIDIA shader cache: 10GB+
Overlays and Game Bar: Off

Rust has DLSS, DLAA and Reflex. It does not have FSR, XeSS, or frame generation. If you are on AMD or Intel your only in game lever is render scale.

If you are going to upgrade one thing

Rust is CPU and memory bound long before it is GPU bound. In order:

RAM to 16GB, in two sticks. Steam lists 12GB minimum and 16GB recommended. Under 16 you page to disk, and that is what those two second freezes actually are. Single channel costs you badly.
Any SSD. Steam now says SSD required. Rust streams assets during play, so a mechanical drive stutters mid fight, not just on load.
Turn on XMP. Free. Most people never do it.
CPU, if you are older than Zen 2 or 8th gen Intel. Single thread speed and cache. Facepunch ships X3D aware core pinning on by default, which tells you what they optimise for.
GPU last. Buying a faster card to fix Rust stutter is the classic wasted upgrade.

Video guides worth your time

We do not embed these, so nothing here loads a tracker. They open on YouTube.

Best RUST Settings 2026 — Boost FPS, Reduce Lag Kysen · July 2026 · most current NEW BEST Rust Settings for PVP in 2026 STELIC · June 2026 · focused on Unity 6 stutter Complete Rust Optimization Guide 2026 STELIC · April 2026 · full menu walkthrough

Worth saying plainly: none of these are properly benchmarked. They are creator walkthroughs with eyeballed numbers, which is the best that currently exists for Rust. That is exactly why fps.startlogging matters. Measure your own machine.

Do not install ReShade. Facepunch banned it in January 2025. Any guide still recommending it for sharpening or a visibility filter is telling you to get banned. The same goes for external frame generation injectors. EAC is running.

05 / Store

You cannot buy an advantage here.

No kits. No items. No resources. No gather bonuses. No skins. That is not a policy we are grudgingly following, it is the entire reason this server exists. If you could pay to win here it would be a different server and you would not want to play on it.

What there is to buy

Priority QueueSkip the queue for one wipe. Nothing else changes.

$9/wipe

Name ColourYour name in chat, in a colour. One wipe.

$5/wipe

BothPriority queue and name colour, one wipe.

$12/wipe

That is the whole list and it is not going to grow. Both reset at wipe, which means nobody accumulates a permanent edge and nobody is locked into a subscription they forgot about.

Not open yet. The store opens after the first wipe. We would rather run a server people want to support than sell access to one that has not proven itself.

Why the list is so short

Rust’s community server rules are specific about this. Facepunch allows exactly two kinds of paid perk on a server listed the way we are: skipping the queue, and a coloured name. Selling items, kits, resources, or anything that touches gameplay is prohibited, and servers get delisted at the IP level for it with no appeal.

Plenty of servers sell that stuff anyway and move to the Modded tab, or gamble that nobody reports them. We are not doing either.

So the short list is not restraint. It is the rulebook, and we would rather tell you that than pretend we invented a principle.

Where the money goes

Hosting, the domain, and eventually a second admin so there is someone awake when you are. That is the cost base. It is not a business, it is a server that needs to not lose money.

If it ever makes more than it costs, that goes into better hardware, which you will notice, because that is the only thing on this server that money can actually improve.

Refunds and delivery

Purchases are per wipe and delivered by hand at low volume, which means it may take a few minutes rather than being instant. If it has not landed within a couple of hours, open a ticket and we will sort it.

If you buy something and the server has a bad wipe, ask for a refund. You will get one. Chargebacks cost us a lot more than refunds do, so there is no reason for either of us to go that route.

06 / Rules

Nine rules. We enforce all of them.

Short enough that you will actually read them, and every one is something we can act on. Cheating, ban evasion, exploiting and impersonating staff are permanent on the first offence. Everything else gets a warning first.

The whole thing in six lines, if that is all you want:

Max group 3. Anywhere, any time.
No cheating. Permanent, first offense.
No exploits. Report them instead.
No slurs. No advertising other servers.
Don't block monuments, roads, or rivers.
Everything else is Rust. Play it.

Max group is 3. Enforced in the team UI and on cupboards, doors and turrets. Teaming means roaming, raiding or fighting alongside anyone outside your three, sharing a base or loot or comms with another group, or rotating a fourth person in and out. It does not mean meeting someone and not shooting them. First time you get broken up and warned. After that everyone involved is banned, not just the extra body.
No cheating. Scripts, macros, aim assist, ESP, wallhacks, any third party overlay reading game memory. Permanent, first offence, not appealable. Includes buying or borrowing an account that is cheating. If it is your Steam account it is your ban.
No ban evasion. A new account to get around a ban means both accounts are banned and the original never expires.
Report exploits, do not use them. Terrain glitching, floating bases, clipping loot out of a base, duping. Report it and it stays quiet. Use it and you lose the account and everything you built with it. If you are not sure whether something is an exploit, it is. Ask first.
Do not block the map. No walling off monument entrances, roads, rivers or rail tunnels. Building near a monument is fine. Building on top of one so nobody can run it is not. First time it comes down, second time so do you.
Chat. Trash talk is fine. Slurs are not. Neither are real life threats, doxxing, advertising another server, spamming so nobody else can use chat, or scam links. Sexual content involving minors is an instant permanent ban and a report to Steam.
Do not impersonate staff. Staff never DM you first, never ask for your Steam credentials, and never sell anything. Anyone doing those things is not staff.
One account per person. No alts for extra base slots, extra team slots, or scouting while your main is offline. Family share is fine. Two people on one PC is fine. Two accounts run by one person is not.
Appeals. One per ban, in Discord, with your Steam64 ID and what happened. Cheating bans are not appealed. Everything else gets read. Arguing in chat instead of appealing closes your appeal.

What is allowed

This list matters as much as the one above. These are the things we have decided not to police, so you do not have to wonder.

Raiding anyone, any time. Offline, online, first day, last day.
Door camping and spawn camping. Not fun. Not against the rules.
Betraying your own team and taking their loot.
Trash talk. Stay off the slur list and say what you want.
Griefing a base. Honeycombing someone in, twig spam, blocking their door.
Roof camping monuments. Oil, Launch, heli.
Taking someone’s loot even if you did not kill them.
Playing solo against trios. Nobody gets a handicap.

What happens when you break one

Rule	First	Second	Third
Group over 3	Broken up, warned	Ban, all of them	n/a
Cheating	Permanent	n/a	n/a
Ban evasion	Permanent, both	n/a	n/a
Exploiting	Ban, base removed	n/a	n/a
Blocking the map	Removed, warned	Removed, ban	n/a
Slurs	Warning	Kick	Ban
Advertising	Kick	Ban	n/a
Chat spam	Warning	Kick	Ban
Impersonating staff	Permanent	n/a	n/a
Alt accounts	Warned, alt banned	Both banned	n/a

We do not issue timed bans, because we would have to remember to lift them and we would eventually forget. A ban here is either a warning that did not work or it is permanent.

Rule 1 is the whole product. People pick a trio server because they are tired of being rolled by fifteen man zergs, and the only thing that keeps them is believing it is actually enforced. So there are no exceptions. Not for friends, not for anyone who bought something, not for a streamer who brings thirty people. One exception and the rule is gone.

What happened	Where it goes	Response
Cheater	Press F7 in game, then file a report. F7 notifies us and EAC.	Same day
Teaming past trio	Report form, with clips. Names alone are not enough.	Same day
Scam or trade dispute	Report form, with screenshots of the agreement	2 days
Store or purchase issue	Store ticket in Discord	3 days
Ban appeal	Appeal form, one per ban. Cheating bans are not appealed.	7 days
Staff misconduct	Admin conduct form. Staff cannot see it.	3 days
Anything else	General ticket in Discord	Same day

One server. Run properly.