Game Update

Rust Updates and Patch Notes: Livestock Update (October 2026)

GadgetVibes Newsroom Oct 6, 2026

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Latest Rust update: the Livestock Update (1 October 2026)

The latest Rust update is Facepunch’s Livestock Update, published on 1 October 2026. Its changelist title is October Patch.

The headline changes:

Cows and sheep are introduced.
New Powergrid loot rooms were added to many monuments.
Facepunch has migrated to the new Rust Render Pipeline.
The Air Wolf helipad in Bandit Camp now starts the wipe in disrepair.

The sections below cover each of these in more detail.

What changed in the Livestock Update

The changelist lists Cow and Sheep as new farmable animals. The groups below break down the rest of the update by topic.

Cows, sheep and livestock breeding

Both animals produce dung. Cows also produce milk, and sheep produce wool. The changelist lists wool as an addition.

Livestock can be harvested for meat, bones and leather, just like other animals.

Like plants, livestock have genetics and needs. They can be bred in the hunt for a god clone.

Facepunch cautions that livestock genes will not behave exactly like plant genes, so older breeding techniques may not apply.

Selling livestock and wool to vendors

Grown Cattle and Sheep can be sold at a Stable in exchange for a variety of resources. A new vendor outside the Stables gives a randomized offer based on the animal’s gene quality.

Players can reject the offer and ask again up to two more times. After that, the vendor gets annoyed and won’t buy the animal for 15 minutes.

Wool harvested from sheep can be traded in to the same vendor. The reward depends on how much wool is brought in at once, with a maximum of 400.

The changelist describes this as a new vendor bartering mechanic.

Milk, cream and new foods

Cows give players a new resource: milk, which can be consumed as is. The changelist lists Milk, Skimmed Milk and Cream as additions.

Refrigerating milk for 4 hours unlocks an option to skim it. Skimming gives two items: Skimmed Milk and Cream. Cream is the more powerful consumable.

Both milk and cream work in a range of crafting recipes.

For tea, milk will generally extend the duration of the effects, while cream can increase their potency. The changelist lists Creamy and Milky versions of most pure Teas.

New food items include:

Beef and Mutton Meat.
Shepherds Pie.
Beef Pie.

Biofuel Generator

The Biofuel Generator gives players a way to make use of raw or spoiled meat.

It takes around 30 minutes before it needs stirring again. IO can be hooked up to signal when stirring is needed.

The amount of low grade it produces depends on the organic matter used, and matter with a higher calorific value gives more.

New wildlife: frogs, rabbits, crabs and more

The new critters are frogs, rabbits, squirrels, sea turtles, crabs and jellyfish. They appear around the island in biomes that suit them.

Facepunch says they are mostly set dressing for now, and their performance limits are set with that in mind. They are heavily budgeted and have dedicated behaviours to limit their use of server and client performance.

Air Wolf helipad at Bandit Camp

Bandit Camp’s Air Wolf vendor won’t sell any air vehicles until its helipad has been repaired. The vendor NPC refuses to sell vehicles to anyone until then.

Once repaired, the helipad stays repaired for the rest of the wipe.

Facepunch intends the repair to be a communal effort, so air vehicles from this vendor no longer spawn too quickly at the start of the wipe.

Sandbag rework

Sandbags have been reworked and now have four stages. Stacking another sandbag deployable on top moves a sandbag up to the next stage. Each stage grows taller, and the final stage is a pillbox version.

Other changes:

All Sandbag skins are supported across all variations.
The crating cost of the sandbag deployable has been reduced.
Sandbag Barricades found in loot now come as a stack of 4.
The total Sandbag Barricade stack size has increased to 20.

New Powergrid loot rooms

The new loot rooms are locked by default. They open up once enough Heavy Fuses have been put into the Powerplant to supply the required power.

The number of Heavy Fuses needed varies by room, and more challenging monuments require more fuses than beginner-friendly ones.

New Powergrid loot rooms were added to many monuments, including each of these:

Airfield.
Ferry Terminal.
Harbour 1.
Harbour 2.
Junkyard.
Launch Site.
Military Tunnels.
Nuclear Missile Silo.
Radtown.
Sewer Branch.
Trainyard.
Water Treatment Plant.

Facepunch will not reveal the exact locations of the new rooms.

Heavy fuse decay and the Power Plant

Facepunch says that on lower population servers, power is often offline for extended periods.

Heavy fuse decay now scales with population. With 10 or fewer players online, heavy fuses last four times longer. The decay gradually scales back to normal values at 100, and with 100 or more players fuses last as long as they did before.

The scaling is adjustable with the convars powergrid.fusedecaylowpop, fusedecayhighpop and fusedecaylowpopscale.

Facepunch says it will keep monitoring heavy fuse decay and make adjustments as necessary.

Separately, the small heavy fuse box at the Power Plant has moved. It is now accessible from outside the building via a broken window.

NPC navigation

With the new navmesh enabled, NPCs can enter player structures and respect doors opening and closing.

Facepunch also multithreaded and optimised the new navigation system, and says its performance has at least doubled since the last patch.

Each game frame, only a subset of NPCs is processed, up to a hardcoded maximum time per frame. Facepunch says that as the population grows, the server doesn’t directly lose FPS. Instead, NPCs become slower to react, because the load is spread across frames when over budget.

Facepunch says it will monitor server performance and fix problems as they appear.

Rust Render Pipeline

Before this migration, Rust was still using Unity’s old Built-in Render Pipeline.

Nearly every effect in the game had to be remade by Facepunch so that it works with the new pipeline.

On performance, Facepunch says players should see slightly better results in most areas at first, because the new pipeline has less overhead. It adds that once the transition is complete, it will be able to optimise the pipeline further for more performance gains.

A setting under the experimental tab lets players switch the Rust Render Pipeline on or off.

Multithreaded inverse kinematics and animation

Inverse kinematics (IK) covers secondary procedural animations such as spine or hand movements. Facepunch moved all of it to be multithreaded. Before the change, IK was processed individually for each player at the end of a frame, straight after the animations had played.

Facepunch says it can now use IK in its new animation subsystems while keeping them multithreaded. It also says it previously relied heavily on Unity’s built-in IK and now has more control over existing IK.

Update: 1.99ms to 1.47ms (-0.52ms).
LateUpdate: 0.98ms to 0.27ms (-0.71ms).
AnimationGraphFinish: 0.99ms to 0.75ms (-0.24ms).
UpdateScene: 9.36ms to 8.29ms (-1.07ms).
Director begin+end: 1.41ms to 1.37ms (-0.04ms).
DirectorUpdateAnimationBegin: 0.42ms to 0.62ms (+0.20ms), which is a worse result.
UpdateIkJobData: 0ms to 0.11ms (+0.11ms).

Facepunch says the new IK saves around 1ms of frame time with 100 players in the scene. It says the gain will probably be less drastic on lower-population servers, where only 5-10 players are seen at once.

Also in this area, old animation clips for the old player model were removed. 3p animation subsystem updates were made for many weapons.

Memory savings and store loading

Viewmodels and the world

Facepunch removed the hand mesh from every viewmodel and made one standard hands mesh that is created when a viewmodel is equipped. It removed 133 meshes and saved roughly 100MB of memory in total.

More than 15k renderers were trimmed from the standard proc gen world. LOD texture sizes were also optimized, saving about 100-300MB of memory in some instances.

The in-game store

The store now loads and unloads textures as the relevant UI pages come into and out of view. Store assets are no longer part of the core asset bundles, so they don’t get loaded automatically.

The store now fetches images from Facepunch’s backend infrastructure. If the image-serving backend has a problem, the game loads local assets instead. Players may see blurred placeholders, made with BlurHash, while fresh images that aren’t cached are fetched.

Facepunch lists a saving of 250MB of RAM at game start compared with the last release build. The client also unloads store assets if the store hasn’t been opened for a minute, saving about 450MB.

Some old DLC store media was updated as well.

Other performance work

Vehicle physics performance was improved by ticking vehicles in parallel.
Detailed frame timing info was added to the F8 performance overlay to help identify CPU/GPU bottlenecks.
Newtonsoft JSON allocations were optimized.
Muzzle flashes are cheaper: graphics are not spawned for distant flashes, and lights and particle systems don’t run on flashes that have faded out and are waiting to be recycled.

Machete refresh and interface updates

The machete has a new high-quality model with high-resolution textures and a new set of animations.

The country selection UI has been given its own design and refreshed, and it is improved in the server browser.

Gameplay tweaks and balance

11 new achievements were added.
Client prediction was added for throwables.
Oil Rig crude pumping now takes 15 minutes to start producing.
Colliders on the Legacy Shelter entrance were improved, making it easier to get into or out of.
The Water Wheel’s melee protection was massively increased, to roughly 4-5x as strong.
Remotely controlled turrets can now hit reactive targets.
The size of the HQM collectable was reduced.
Attack heli armor plates now fall off according to the side that got shot, rather than in a fixed order.
There is a new option to change the lock code on boat steering wheels.
Smart alarms can now be deployed on top of other deployables.
Deployment of carvable pumpkins was improved.
Horses now drop considerably less dung.

Painting and sign changes

A new option inverts the colour of the brush preview when painting.
Neon sign painting gains a colour wheel option.
Neon sign painting also gets a larger brush size.
The painting brush outline is now a higher contrast inverted grayscale variant.
The old version, which shows the colour, remains available behind the paint.outlineinvert ConVar.
The paintbrush outline on ornate frames was fixed.
Analytics were added for signs being painted.

Gameplay and world fixes

Boats, vehicles and deep sea

Fixed a rare client crash that mainly occurred in the deep sea.
Possibly fixed a player being left behind when standing too close to a player boat’s wall while entering or leaving the deep sea.
Fixed the handbrake on non cars not working as intended with toggle duck enabled.
Attempt #2 to fix players getting killed in boats when driving close to the shore.
Possibly fixed players swapping between running and swimming animations on the ocean surface.
Fixed boat vendor dialogue on floating cities giving the wrong direction to purchased boats.
Fixed player boat exploits.
Fixed rail junctions sometimes being impassable by train.
Fixed PT boat turrets not appearing correctly on the death screen.
Fixed the locomotive bell not being audible to other players.

Oil Rig, monuments and world

Fixed a rare map generation issue causing holes in the ocean.
Fixed oil rig radiation starting even though the locked crate was not looted.
Fixed a rare case of crates duplicating on the oil rig.
Fixed the missile silo disappearing when viewed from far away.
Fixed a crate spawn that clipped into a cave wall.
Fixed a floating light on the large oil rig exhaust.
Fixed the static piano in Outpost randomly breaking.
Fixed NaN values sometimes being generated for water level.
Fixed eggs from wild chickens sometimes falling through the terrain.
Fixed the parent history antihack causing invincibility on the cargo ship under odd conditions.

Combat, weapons and animations

Fixed a console warning when hitting objects with a torch.
Fixed head item overlay effects when downed or dying.
Fixed player model animations ending too soon when the last item in a stack is used on various entity types.
Fixed the battering ram hitting TCs through walls.
Fixed the cannon being clippable through deployables.
Fixed the hammerhead bolt ragdolling a player without line of sight.
Fixed arrows being slightly rotated inside the crossbow viewmodel.
Fixed the minigun ammo counter not updating correctly inside a container.
Fixed pool cues being low quality in first person.
Fixed animation issues when shooting during the new running animations.
Fixed salvaged cleaver sounds being audible from too far away.

Building and deployables

Fuseboxes now show the model for the currently inserted fuse type.
Fixed campfires cooking certain foods 2x as fast.
Fixed the composter showing Turn On and Turn Off options.
Fixed the elevator causing an NRE when saved.
Fixed hackable crates giving out more clan points than intended.
Fixed upgrading high external gates misplacing attached door controllers.
Fixed reskinning sheet metal doors misplacing attached door controllers.
Fixed an exploit that let players clip their head through the roof using storage adaptors.
Fixed triangle foundations connecting together when they shouldn’t.
Fixed some items showing a condition bar even though they could never lose HP.
Fixed cooking workbenches sometimes turning off mid-cooking.
Fixed drop box placement allowing a one way peek.
Fixed landmines being too big because of a recent change.

Interface, server and admin fixes

Interface and menus

Fixed inconsistent text alignment and spacing on item descriptions in the inventory UI.
Fixed layout issues with item pickup and item dropped notices.
Fixed text highlighting issues when searching in settings.
Fixed the store showing Store content failed to load when the Rust item inventory is totally empty.
Fixed the console and menu toast occasionally drawing their lines over one another.
Fixed input issues with Greek and Cyrillic keyboard layouts.
Fixed an error that could occur when binds were used with a Greek keyboard layout.
Fixed the server browser causing an error when refreshing quickly.
Fixed sometimes not being able to enter CCTV codes in the computer station UI.
Fixed the country selection tag showing the player’s country regardless of streamer mode settings between updates.
Fixed the player count of gamemodes changing when clicking different game modes.

Server, admin and crash reporting

Facepunch had earlier fixed EAC preventing the game from dumping crashes.
In this update, Facepunch added automatic uploading of crashes to its backend.
Facepunch says it now gets a direct report of crashes instead of having to chase down players and reproduce them manually.
Improved server console compatibility with Linux and Windows terminals.
Admin loadouts now correctly save and load item positions.
Fixed the admin loadout UI not treating diving tanks and shields as occupying the backpack slot.
Fixed players being kicked by errors in background work.
Fixed RCON disconnect messages sometimes dropping other RCON connections.
Allowed various client commands to be set from the server again.
Jobs 4 (experimental): fixed protobuf string serialization not being thread safe.
Jobs 4 (experimental): fixed syncvar serialization not being thread safe.
Fixed PlayerMovement hitting an NRE if the server sends snapshots out of order on connect.
Fixed SyncVar buffers being leaked when using parallel saves.
Removed MutexPool.

Coming next: Halloween Update on 22 October

Facepunch will release a mandatory server and client update on 22 October at 18:00 BST / 13:00 EST to enable spooky features (Halloween Update).

Secure servers: more Facepunch servers switching

In March, Facepunch introduced the ability for servers to require TPM + Secure Boot, and enabled it for 6 of its own servers.

The servers being switched to secure are:

[US East] Facepunch 1.
[EA] Facepunch 1.
[EU] Facepunch 15.
[EU East] Facepunch 1.
[EU] Facepunch 16.
[EA] Facepunch 2.

Facepunch says its desired goal is still to make secure requirements global for all Rust servers. It also reports a reduced cheater presence on secure servers a month after release.

For more, see our Rust coverage.

Plague Doctor Hazmat Suit DLC

The Plague Doctor Hazmat Suit Item DLC is now released. Players can buy it in-game or through the Rust Steam item store.

The changelist also lists a Plague Hazmat Suit skin as added.

New workshop skinnable: Ladder Hatches

October’s workshop skinnable is the Ladder Hatches, a set of four items.

The variants include the Triangle Ladder Hatch, the Armored Ladder Hatch and the Armored Triangle Ladder Hatch.

Facepunch put in extra effort to make the top and bottom of the hatches unique for skinning. All ladder hatch variants are now skinnable.

Steam Autumn Sale on Rust

The Steam Autumn Sale offers 50% off Rust and all DLCs. The Rust – Warhammer 40,000 Pack is 20% off.

Previous updates

Rust Breach and Clear update: patch notes (September 2026)

Sources

Researched from official Facepunch announcements with AI assistance; reviewed by GadgetVibes.