Rust Overlay

An external overlay for Rust: a configurable aim dot, and a recycler calculator that reads your inventory straight off the screen.

Install · Usage guide · How it works · Building

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What it does

• Aim dot — a dot, cross or circle at the centre of the screen. Shape, size, thickness, colour, opacity, outline, and a manual offset for when your viewport is not where the screen's centre is.
• Recycler calculator — point it at your inventory, backpack or an open container, and it tells you what recycling the whole lot returns: which items, how much scrap, how long it takes. Efficiency (40 / 50 / 60 %) and cycle time (5 / 8 s) are set per zone.
• Crafting tree — from the item card Rust shows for the selected item: what it is crafted from, and every recipe it is an ingredient for, both navigable.

The rule this project is built on: no contact with the game

The overlay is a transparent always-on-top Windows window, plus screenshots taken through the operating system's own capture API. No DLL injection, no DirectX hooks, no reading the game's memory. Nothing is written to the game, and nothing attaches to RustClient.exe.

That is what keeps it on the right side of EasyAntiCheat, and Facepunch explicitly permits third-party crosshairs on exactly that condition. The rule is not negotiable: any optimisation that would require touching the game process is rejected on principle.

One practical consequence: Rust must not run in exclusive fullscreen, which owns the display surface and forbids anything being composited over it. In practice the game is already borderless-windowed even with "fullscreen" ticked; if the overlay never appears, force -window-mode borderless in the Steam launch options.

Use at your own risk. This is not affiliated with or endorsed by Facepunch Studios. Overlays are permitted, but you are responsible for what you run alongside the game.

Install

Alpha. It works, and it has been measured rather than guessed at, but it has been used by one person on one screen. Expect to recalibrate, and expect the odd item to be read wrong — the debug panel exists precisely so that costs you a click.

Grab the latest build from the Releases page:

• RustOverlay-x.y.z-setup.exe — installer, adds a Start-menu shortcut
• RustOverlay-x.y.z-portable.exe — single file, run it from anywhere

Windows will warn you that the binary is unsigned (code-signing certificates cost money and this project has none). Your antivirus may do the same — see Troubleshooting.

There is nothing else to install. The app finds Rust on its own to read item icons from your own game files.

First run, in one minute

1. Launch Rust, then launch the overlay. Nothing appears on screen — that is normal; the icon in the notification area, next to the clock, is what tells you it is running.
2. Press F9 in game. The menu appears; the game keeps every click and key until it does.
3. Open Settings and set graphics.uiscale to match the value in your F1 console — the inventory grid moves when that changes, so the app has to know it.
4. Open your inventory in game, press F9, then Zone calibration → Main inventory, and drag a rectangle around the slot grid. Adjust the columns and rows with the arrow keys until the overlaid grid lines up with the game's slots. Enter saves.
5. Press F9 → Recycler output. Each calibrated zone gets its own card. Hit Calculate.

The full walkthrough, with screenshots, is in the usage guide.

Keys

Key	What it does
F9	Open the menu (configurable)
Esc	Close the overlay entirely, from anywhere
Tab	Close the overlay, the way it closes the inventory in game
↑ ↓	Move through the menu
← →	Adjust the selected value
Enter	Select

How good is the reading?

Item icons are matched by fingerprint, not by OCR: the game draws the exact PNG that ships in its own Bundles/items/ folder, so a slot can be compared against the whole index directly. Measured on rendered slots at the size the game actually draws them, 80 % of slots are identified outright and 85 % have the right item among the three candidates the debug panel offers, where one click corrects the slot and recomputes the total.

Anything the app is not confident about is reported as unidentified rather than guessed — a wrong item silently corrupts the total, a rejected one costs a click.

The numbers, the recycler formula and the whole pipeline are documented in How it works.

Building from source

npm install
npm start        # run it
npm run dist     # build the Windows binaries into dist/

Details, including how to regenerate the item database from your own game install, are in Building.

Status

• Click-through, always-on-top overlay window with a configurable global hotkey
• Aim dot with full styling and manual centring
• Item database and icon fingerprints built from the local game install
• Zone calibration, stored per resolution/uiscale profile
• Recycler HUD: every zone at once, efficiency and cycle time per zone
• Slot recognition, stack-count reading, one-click correction
• Recipes and recycler yields extracted from the game's own bundles — 996 items
• Crafting tree, in both directions, navigable
• Shown only while the game's window is in front
• Rust Breeder module

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.