How to clip Rust, the survival game.

The survival game, not the language.

Search for how to clip Rust and half the results are about the programming language, so here is the disambiguation up front. This page is about Rust the multiplayer survival game by Facepunch: the naked beach spawn, the 2x2 that grows into a compound, the monthly force wipe on the first Thursday, the raid that starts at three in the morning while half the team is asleep.

CutBench is a Windows desktop app that watches a recording of that and cuts out the parts worth posting. You record with whatever you already use, whether that is OBS, ShadowPlay, Game Bar or Medal. You point CutBench at the file. It ranks the moments, renders 9:16 vertical Rust clips with burned-in captions, and writes a title, hook and hashtags for each one. Nothing is uploaded to a server on the way, because the whole thing runs on the NVIDIA GPU already sitting in your machine. If you want the wider picture first, the CutBench overview covers the pipeline for every game.

Six hours of Rust is mostly not clippable.

This is the part most clip tools get wrong about the game. A Rust session is not a match with a scoreboard at the end. It is a long, uneven stretch of survival with a handful of spikes buried in it, and the spikes do not announce themselves.

• Farm and travel. Sulfur runs, node loops, road running, boat trips. Often the single largest block of a session and almost never a clip on its own.
• Build and upkeep. Placing walls, upgrading to stone and metal, sorting boxes, feeding the tool cupboard. Useful for a base tour, not for a short.
• Contact. A shot from the treeline, a bow at a node, someone door-camping your airlock. Ten seconds of real tension inside twenty minutes of nothing.
• The raid window. Rockets, C4, satchels, a counter push, loot out or wipe out. The densest and loudest stretch of any wipe.
• Wipe day. The first hours after force wipe, when everyone is naked, everyone is desperate, and the ratio of chaos to downtime is the best it will be all month.

Roughly speaking, an evening of Rust gives you four or five moments that a viewer would actually watch, and they are scattered across hours of footage you do not want to scrub through. That scrubbing is the job CutBench takes off your hands.

It knows what a Rust payoff looks like.

Generic clip tools cut on volume spikes, but a loud moment isn't always a good one. CutBench's ranking is fine-tuned on Rust footage. It reads the picture as well as the sound, so it lands on the online raid that pops, the roam that turns, and the fight you actually won, not just the loudest 10 seconds. Concretely, these are the signals it weighs on a Rust session:

• Raid audio. Explosions and sustained detonations are the strongest single marker of a raid window, so a breach reads very differently to the scorer than a stray grenade.
• Gunfire shape. Not just that shots happened, but the shape of them: a single crack from a bolt action reads differently to a sustained automatic burst, and both are weighed against how the exchange ends rather than how long it lasted.
• The Rust HUD. The wounded panel, the death screen and Rust footage is something it was tuned on, which is how a down-and-revived beat gets recognised as a story rather than noise.
• The death screen. Recognised from the picture, not from reading text. Seeing who stopped moving is what separates a clutch from a whiff in the ranking.
• Voice. Your callouts and your reaction, kept on your own machine, so the caption on the clip matches what was actually said in the moment.
• Payoff before volume. The ranking does not stop at the loud part. It checks whether the loud part turns into a clutch, a throw, a reversal or a punchline, and demotes the ones that go nowhere.

The same stack runs on ARC Raiders with its own tuning, and on every other game with a strong generic profile: the same engine, with nothing game-specific switched on.

Rust wipe day, posted by Friday.

Rust wipe day lands on the first Thursday of the month, when force wipe hits, and it is the single best day of the Rust calendar to record, because the density of real moments per recorded hour is at its peak. Here is the whole loop, from hitting record to a clip that is live.

Repeat it the following Thursday and the one after. There is no per-clip credit meter, no monthly export cap and no quota to plan around, so a heavy wipe month costs exactly the same as a quiet one.

What it does with a six-hour farm.

Honest answer: it throws most of it away, and that is the feature. Dead air goes out first. A six-hour stretch of sulfur runs, upkeep and base building produces very few candidates, and the ones it does produce are the contacts inside it, the moment the node run turns into a fight, or the moment a naked chases you across the road.

That is a different job to a highlight tool for a game with rounds and a scoreboard. Rust does not tell you when something interesting happened, so the tool has to work it out from what is on screen and what is in the audio. The practical result is that you can hand it the whole session, farming and all, instead of pre-trimming to the bits you half remember. Handing it more footage does not cost you more money; it costs you GPU time you were not using anyway.

One more consequence worth knowing: because everything happens after the fact, there is no capture overlay running while you play, so your in-game frame rate is untouched during the wipe itself.

The Rust clips worth posting.

• Online raids. The breach, the counter, the loot, all ranked by how it actually plays out, not just the boom.
• PvP kills & clutches. Reads the wounded and death screens to catch the turnaround, not only the spray.
• Roams that pop. The chance encounter that becomes a fight, trimmed to a real beginning and end.
• Close calls. Down-but-not-out, revived, and back in it: the payoff the clip needs.
• Trap base payoffs. When the trap actually fires and the audio and HUD both move, it reads as a resolved moment.
• Wipe day chaos. The first-hours scramble, where the density of real beats per hour is the highest all month.
• Every other game too. A strong generic profile runs on anything that isn't Rust or ARC Raiders.

The honest list of what it gets wrong.

No tool reads Rust perfectly, and a page that claims otherwise is selling you something. These are the real limits, so you can decide before you spend anything.

• Silent kills rank low. A bow shot from a bush, a quiet trap kill with no explosion and no reaction, or a door camp that ends in one hit gives the scorer very little to work with. Loud is not required, but silent is genuinely hard.
• It does not build a narrative. A betrayal that develops across two hours, or a rivalry that pays off next session, is a story you assemble. CutBench ranks moments, it does not write arcs across a wipe.
• Text-only drama is invisible. Anything that happens in chat, in a sign, or in a written note is not what the ranking is built around. If the story is in text rather than in audio and on the HUD, expect it to be missed.
• Base tours and building are not moments. A clean bunker or a two-hour build is content, but it is not a spike, so it will not surface as a top-ranked clip.
• Heavily modified HUDs cost you a signal. If you hide or replace the Rust HUD, one of the inputs the ranking leans on is gone, and quality drops accordingly.
• Hardware is a hard gate. Windows 10 or 11 with an NVIDIA GPU only. AMD and Intel Arc are not supported, and there is no macOS or Linux build. Processing time is real time you spend, not a queue on someone else's servers.

The fair test is the free Demo. It runs the exact same ranking on your own Rust footage and puts a small watermark on the exports, so you can see how it handles your wipe before deciding whether the full version is worth it.

Local, one-time, no timeline.

• Nothing uploads. Your Rust sessions stay on your drive: no cloud, no account.
• One-time license. Buy once on Steam, clip forever. No subscription.
• No caps. Process a full wipe of footage as often as you want.
• 100% offline. After install, it runs entirely on your NVIDIA GPU.
• No overlay while you play. Everything happens after the session, so nothing is hooked into the game during the raid.

How to clip Rust, answered.