Combat Knife
The RUST Combat Knife is a mid to end-game RUST harvesting tool that is highly effective for both farming and combat situations. The combat knife’s persistence is due to its effectiveness and ready availability for those players using it for barrel and crate farming.
As a tool, you can use a combat knife to harvest animal carcasses for Cloth, Leather, Meat, Bone Fragments, and Animal Fat. Rocks and stone tools harvest creatures and corpses slower and also yield less material per cut.
As a weapon, the combat knife does a significant amount of damage very fast compared to most melee weapons but has a very small range and is quite buggy when thrown. The significant drawback of using the combat knife as a melee weapon outside of skinning, or for breaking barrels comes in the form of low durability – it breaks very fast compared to other melee tools. This small detriment is made up for the fact that the combat knife is able to be swung by players without slowing them down. This makes it a superior melee weapon to have at the ready.