Rust Livestock Update — Cows, Sheep, Milk, The Biofuel Generator & The New Rust Render Pipeline

Rust's October update is the Livestock Update, dated October 1, 2026, and it's a big one: a major refresh of farming with cows and sheep, a new livestock economy, milk and cream, the Biofuel Generator, reworked sandbag stacking, new Powergrid loot rooms, client-predicted throwables — and underneath all of it, the migration to the new Rust Render Pipeline.

The full write-up comes from Facepunch Studios — read the official Livestock Update devblog on rust.facepunch.com.

🐄 Livestock — Cows and Sheep

The centrepiece of the update. Two new farmable animals arrive, and they feed into more than just meat:

• Both produce dung. Cows produce milk. Sheep produce wool.
• They can be harvested for meat, bones and leather like any other animal.
• You can sell a grown animal to an NPC in the ranch.
• New meat types: Beef and Mutton — feeding new recipes including Shepherd's Pie and Beef Pie.

Setting up a farm

• There are multiple ways to capture wild livestock, some more efficient than others — Facepunch says they should all be fairly intuitive to discover.
• The new navmesh is the enabler: NPCs can now enter player structures and respect doors opening and closing, so your farm design is genuinely open-ended.
• Like plants, livestock have genetics and needs and can be bred in pursuit of a "god clone" — but the genes don't behave exactly like plants, so old breeding techniques may not transfer.

What about performance?

This was the obvious question, and Facepunch answered it directly. Each frame, only a subset of NPCs is processed, up to a hardcoded maximum time per frame. Because that budget is distributed automatically, increasing the population doesn't directly cost the server FPS — instead, NPCs become slower to react when the budget is exceeded. The team also multithreaded and optimised the new navigation system, at least doubling its performance since the last patch, and says it will keep monitoring and fixing as problems appear.

💰 The Livestock Economy — Selling At A Stable

Growing animals now has a trade loop:

• Lead grown cattle or sheep to a Stable and speak to the new vendor outside.
• You'll receive a randomised offer based on the animal's gene quality.
• You can reject the offer twice more — after which the vendor gets annoyed and won't buy from you for 15 minutes.
• Wool is traded to the same vendor, with up to three offers just like animals. Here the rewards depend on how much wool you bring in one go — the maximum being 400. Facepunch's own description: high risk, high reward.

🥛 Milk, Cream and New Drinks

• Cows give milk, which can be consumed as-is.
• Refrigerate it for 4 hours and a new option appears: skim the milk, producing Skimmed Milk and Cream. Cream is the more powerful consumable.
• Both are crafting ingredients: milk generally increases the duration of tea effects, while cream increases their potency — hence the new Creamy and Milky versions of most pure teas.

🚧 Livestock Fencing

To keep your animals under control, the update adds new animal gate and fence deployables — "perfect for keeping your pet animals safe (ish!)".

🔋 The Biofuel Generator

• A way to finally use raw or spoiled meat. The generator converts organic matter to Low Grade Fuel — but it must be stirred by hand.
• Fill it, stir it, let it process. It takes roughly 30 minutes before it needs stirring again — and you can hook up IO so you know it needs attention even from another room.
• Yield depends on the input: organic matter with a higher calorific value produces more low grade.

🐸 Critters and Swimmers

Smaller wildlife arrives to make the island feel more alive: frogs, rabbits, squirrels, sea turtles, crabs and jellyfish, appearing in the biomes that suit them. They're heavily budgeted with dedicated behaviours to keep server and client cost minimal — for now they're mostly set dressing, and their limits are set with that in mind.

🚁 Air Wolf Helipad Must Now Be Repaired

A meaningful change to how a wipe starts:

• At the start of the wipe, the Air Wolf helipad in Bandit Camp is in a state of disrepair — and the air vehicle vendor refuses to sell to anyone until it's repaired.
• Repairing works like constructing siege weapons: a set amount of resources, transferred from your inventory by bashing the helipad with a hammer. Once repaired, it stays repaired for the whole wipe.
• The intent is twofold: make early-wipe air vehicles a communal effort rather than a clan rush — anyone wanting fast air access must invest significant resources — and at the same time open that vendor up to everyone else on the server.
• Server admins can change this: vehicle.padrepairsrequired (set to false and the change is effectively reverted) and vehicle.setrepairablepads (force the helipad into a fully disrepaired or repaired state with 0/1).

🧱 Sandbag Stacking Overhaul

• Sandbags now have four stages, each upgraded to the next by stacking another sandbag deployable on top. Each stage is taller, with the final stage being a pillbox version.
• All Sandbag skins work across all variations.
• Crafting cost reduced to account for needing more of them, looted Sandbag Barricades now come as a stack of 4, and the total stack size increased to 20.

⚡ Powergrid Loot Rooms & Fuse Decay

• New loot rooms added to many monuments. Like the Powerplant room from the Power Trip update, they're locked by default and open once enough Heavy Fuses have been inserted into the Powerplant. Harder monuments need more fuses.
• Where to look: Airfield, Ferry Terminal, Harbour 1, Harbour 2, Junkyard, Launch Site, Military Tunnels, Nuclear Missile Silo, Radtown, Sewer Branch, Trainyard and Water Treatment Plant.
• Heavy fuse decay now scales with server population. With 10 or fewer players online, fuses last four times longer, gradually returning to normal values at 100. Adjustable via powergrid.fusedecaylowpop, fusedecayhighpop and fusedecaylowpopscale.
• The small heavy fuse box at the Power Plant moved — it's now reachable from outside the building through a broken window, helping keep minimum power phases online.

Why it matters: on low-population servers, power was frequently offline for long stretches, and with the marketplace needing power to function that was locking out basic trade. This is Facepunch treating low-pop servers as a first-class case.

🎯 Client-Predicted Grenades and Explosives

Grenades, C4 and Satchels have always been server-authoritative — you click, the server spawns it, and at higher ping that wait is felt. The update adds client prediction: your local client simulates the throw immediately, so throwing these items feels considerably smoother, especially on higher pings. If your prediction disagrees with the server, your client gets corrected — Facepunch notes it shouldn't happen often.

🚀 Performance — The Big Wins

• The new Rust Render Pipeline (RRP). Rust has been on Unity's old Built-in Render Pipeline for its entire life, which limited how far the team could optimise. They've migrated to a custom Scriptable Render Pipeline built specifically for Rust, remaking almost every effect in the game to suit it. The immediate benefit is slightly better performance in most areas from less overhead — but that's the floor, not the ceiling: once fully transitioned, they can optimise it much further, and it unlocks graphical improvements the old pipeline couldn't do. The old pipeline can still be selected under the experimental tab, but only for the first month while issues are found.
• Viewmodel memory: ~100MB saved. Every viewmodel contained its own copy of the same hand mesh. Facepunch stripped it from all of them and created one standard hands mesh, removing 133 meshes — and improved their internal tooling so animation preview still works.
• Dynamic store assets: -250MB on boot, ~-450MB after unloading. The in-game store's assets are no longer part of the core bundles, load and unload with the UI, and are served from Facepunch's backend with blurred placeholders while fetching — falling back to local assets if that backend fails.
• Inverse kinematics moved to jobs: secondary procedural animations (spine, hands) now run multithreaded. Measured gains: Update 1.99 → 1.47 ms, LateUpdate 0.98 → 0.27 ms, AnimationGraphFinish 0.99 → 0.75 ms, with overall UpdateScene 9.36 → 8.29 ms (about -1 ms) at 100 players in view — "a lot less drastic" on low-population servers.
• Also in the changelist: 15,000+ renderers trimmed from the standard proc-gen world, LOD texture size optimisation saving roughly 100–300MB in some cases, vehicle physics now ticked in parallel, muzzle flash performance improvements, Newtonsoft JSON allocation reductions, and detailed frame timing in the F8 overlay to help identify CPU/GPU bottlenecks.

🛡️ Anti-Cheat — More Secure Servers

• Since March, servers have been able to require TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot. After 6+ months of steadily growing adoption, Facepunch is switching more of its own servers to secure: [US East] Facepunch 1, [EA] Facepunch 1, [EU] Facepunch 15, [EU East] Facepunch 1, [EU] Facepunch 16 and [EA] Facepunch 2.
• The goal remains global for all servers in Rust, but they still need more adoption first.
• If your hardware supports it, Facepunch strongly recommends enabling TPM and Secure Boot — they previously measured a reduced cheater presence on secure servers a month after release.

🎨 Cosmetic & UI Changes

• Machete refresh — a new high-quality model with high-resolution textures and a new animation set.
• Country selection UI refresh in the server browser, now that it's a large part of that screen.
• New Workshop skinnables: all four Ladder Hatches (standard, Triangle, Armored and Armored Triangle), with unique top and bottom faces specifically for skinners.
• Plague Doctor Hazmat Suit DLC — "The Plague Doctor delivers no cure — only death and decay."

🐞 Fixes & Improvements (Highlights)

The changelist runs to roughly 90 fixes. The ones most likely to be felt in play:

• Crash uploading is live. Having fixed EAC blocking crash dumps last month, Rust now uploads crashes to Facepunch's backend automatically, so the team gets a direct report instead of chasing reproductions — expect better stability over time as a result.
• Boats and the deep sea: a rare client crash primarily occurring in deep sea is fixed, along with handbrake behaviour on non-cars, players being killed in boats near shore (attempt #2), and an issue leaving a player behind when entering or leaving deep sea near a player boat's wall. Player boat exploits were also fixed.
• Battering ram no longer hits tool cupboards through walls, an exploit allowing players to clip their head through a roof using storage adaptors is closed, drop box placement no longer allows a one-way peek, and hackable crates no longer pay out more clan points than intended.
• Combat and items: hammerhead bolt no longer ragdolls you without line of sight, landmines are the right size again, campfires no longer cook certain foods twice as fast, cooking workbenches no longer turn off mid-cook, the minigun ammo counter updates correctly from containers, and arrows no longer sit slightly rotated in the crossbow viewmodel.
• Monuments and world: a rare map-generation issue causing "holes" in the ocean is fixed, oil rig radiation can no longer start before the locked crate is looted, a rare oil rig crate duplication is fixed, crates clipping into cave walls are fixed, and the missile silo no longer disappears at distance.
• Admin and server tooling: RCON disconnects no longer knock out other RCON connections, the server browser no longer errors when refreshed quickly, players are no longer kicked by background-work errors, admin loadouts save and load item positions correctly, and various client commands can be set from the server again. Server console compatibility with Linux and Windows terminals was also improved.
• Input: fixes for Greek and Cyrillic keyboard layouts, both for general input and for binds.
• Rendering & deployment QoL: a new option to invert the brush preview colour when painting (the old colour version remains behind the paint.outlineinvert convar), a colour wheel and larger brush for neon sign painting, lock codes changeable on boat steering wheels, smart alarms deployable on top of other deployables, and attack helicopter armour plates now fall off in random order instead of a predictable one.
• Also: oil rig crude pumping now takes 15 minutes before producing, the Water Wheel's melee protection is 4–5x stronger, the HQM collectable is smaller, horses drop considerably less dung (livestock are more efficient), and old animation clips for the old player model were removed.

🖥️ What This Means For Your Server

• October 22 is a mandatory update. The Halloween Update requires both server and client to be updated — the same pattern as every forced Rust update. Schedule it, warn your players, and don't be caught mid-wipe with an outdated build.
• The livestock performance model is deliberately server-friendly. Processing only a subset of NPCs per frame and letting NPCs slow down instead of the server losing FPS is the right design for populated servers — but it does mean a livestock-heavy server with hundreds of animals will show reactivity degradation rather than an obvious frame drop. Worth watching on a big farming community.
• Low-population servers got direct attention. Heavy fuse decay now lasts 4× longer under 10 players, and the fuse box moved outside the Power Plant — both aimed at keeping power (and therefore trade via the marketplace) available when your server isn't full. If you run a quiet server, this is a real quality-of-life fix.
• Three new convars are worth reviewing: vehicle.padrepairsrequired and vehicle.setrepairablepads if you don't want the Air Wolf helipad repair gate, and the powergrid.fusedecay* trio if you want to tune fuse lifespan independently of population.
• The Air Wolf change reshapes early wipe. Forcing a communal helipad repair is a deliberate levelling of the playing field, and it also means your entire server benefits once it's done. If your community is clan-heavy, expect opinions.
• Client-predicted throwables change grenade play at high ping. On a server far from some players, grenades, C4 and satchels will now feel responsive rather than laggy. Good news for fairness; do expect the occasional client correction in the first weeks.
• The render pipeline migration is the long game. The old pipeline remains selectable in the experimental tab for about a month, so if any of your players report graphical or performance oddities, that's the troubleshooting lever — and Facepunch intends to make RRP the default after the next patch.
• Memory savings help everyone. ~100MB from viewmodels, ~250MB on boot from store assets (up to ~450MB after unloading) and up to 100–300MB from LOD textures is a meaningful reduction in the footprint of the client — good news for players on lower-spec machines and for high-population servers.

Running a Rust community? NolimitHost Rust server hosting gives you the fast high-clock CPU performance that populated wipes need, plus NVMe storage, DDoS protection and automated backups — so forced update days are a restart rather than a rebuild.

Conclusion

The Livestock Update is a farming patch on the surface and a performance patch underneath. Cows and sheep bring dung, milk and wool, genetics and breeding, a Stable vendor with a reject-for-a-better-offer gamble (max 400 wool), new Beef, Mutton, Shepherd's Pie and Beef Pie, dairy-drinkable Skimmed Milk and Cream, and Creamy/Milky teas. Add the Biofuel Generator for your spoiled meat, animal fencing, frogs, rabbits, squirrels, sea turtles, crabs and jellyfish, a repairable Air Wolf helipad, four-stage sandbag stacking, new Powergrid loot rooms across twelve monuments with population-scaled fuse decay, and client-predicted throwables. Underneath: the Rust Render Pipeline, ~100MB of viewmodel memory saved, up to ~450MB from dynamic store assets, multithreaded IK, parallel vehicle physics, and more secure anti-cheat servers in the TPM + Secure Boot programme.

Read the complete devblog and changelist from Facepunch: Livestock Update.