The next week, he bought the full version. Free tools can get you started, but time limits, watermarks, and anticheat flags make the paid version feel less like a luxury and more like a necessity. Also, don’t automate mouse movements on a server that actually enforces rules.

He sighed, deleted the program, and spent the next hour manually painting a stick figure holding a sign that read: “BANNED FOR BEING POOR.”

He downloaded the zip, ignored Windows’ warning, and launched the cracked-sounding interface. It looked like a 2005 shareware CD: gray panels, sliders, and a demo image of a skull. He loaded his dragon-helicopter PNG, set the canvas size to “Large (in-game),” and hit .

“I’ll just do it in sections,” he told himself. “Thirty minutes a day.”

Eli stared at the screen. Rustangelo had gotten him flagged. Worse, the free version didn’t have the “human delay” setting—it painted like a machine gun.

Nothing happened.

For twenty-seven glorious minutes, Rustangelo moved his mouse in hypnotic arcs, dipping brushes, mixing colors (well, the nine colors Rust allows), and painting a violent, beautiful scene. The dragon’s eye was especially good—a flickering orange gem.