Rust Keybinds Guide

The No Nonsense Rust Keybinds Guide for Players

I am the kind of player that customizes my keybindings in every game I play. This is mostly because I use my Control key as my push-to-talk key in TeamSpeak, and most games use this key for important controls. Rust’s keybinding system is a bit difficult to use because it constantly will reset your bindings in certain cases. This Rust keybinds guide will help get your keybindings just right in Rust, and save them so never have to worry about them again. When you are done, don’t forget to backup the config files somewhere, maybe on Dropbox(Shameless Affiliate Link Plug).

Most Rust Keybinding guides are going to tell you to bind a bunch of keys through your F1 console in-game, which is great until you close the Rust and restart it later. In most cases, your commands that you just bound will be gone the next time you start Rust. To avoid that, we will be using a text editor like Notepad on Windows, TextEdit on OS X, or Vim on Linux. You can also use the text editor of your choice, but those are text editors I know are available free by default in those operating systems.

Bind a Rust Command to a Key#

There are a bunch of commands and command combinations in Rust that you can bind to keys. To bind a Rust command or command combination to a key in Rust you do the following.

Examples of Rust Keybinds for Single Commands#

Rebind the Use command to the G key instead of the E key.#

Find line 1 and replace it with line 2 in the keys.cfg file.

bind g "+use"

Bind a new command with an option to a key.#

The following bind will setup a bind for your F12 key to teleport to your home 1 if you are playing on Rustocalypse. Yes, the double double quotes are correct.

bind f12 "chat.say "/home 1""

Bind a Combination of Rust Commands to a Key#

Rust also allows for multiple combinations of commands to be bound to a single key. This allows for a bind that allows you to chain commands together that allow a player to toggle the equivalent of an autorun command in Rust with a single keystroke. Most of these types of combination keybinds in Rust are possible because most commands are repeated when used without a +. So +forward goes forward as long as your bound forward key is depressed. Without the +, as just forward, the forward command repeats and the player will walk forward until the +forward key is pressed.

Examples of Rust Keybinds for Multiple Commands#

Bind a Key to Autorun Toggle in Rust.#

bind q "forward;sprint"

Unbind a Rust Key From a Command#

This is useful for those alternative keys Rust binds by default that just won’t unbind in the Rust UI. This is exactly the bind I use to remove the bind from the Control key for the Duck command. Otherwise I duck every time I try to talk on TeamSpeak.

Examples of Unbinding Rust Keybinds#

bind leftcontrol ""

Thanks to RedBDGR for his awesome Rust Community Guide on Steam where I got the original information about how to configure these binds.