Rust Livestock Update Patch Notes: Cows, Sheep, Biofuel

Rust's October update went live on Thursday 1 October 2026, and the headline is animals you can keep. The Livestock Update lets players raise cows and sheep, breed them for better genetics, and sell the results or turn them into food and fuel. The patch also cuts memory use by several hundred megabytes and moves the client to a new render pipeline.

Livestock: what you can do

Cows and sheep are the two farmable animals. Both produce dung, cows give milk and sheep give wool, and either can be harvested for meat, bones and leather. Like plants, the animals have genetics and needs, and Facepunch says they can be bred to hunt for a god clone, though the genes will not behave exactly like plant genes. A grown animal can be sold at the Stables.

At the Stables, a new vendor makes a randomised offer based on the animal's gene quality. You can reject it twice more, after which the vendor refuses to buy for 15 minutes. Wool goes to the same vendor, with the offer based on how much you bring in one go, up to 400.

Milk can be drunk as it is. Refrigerate it for 4 hours and you can skim it into Skimmed Milk and Cream, and Facepunch calls Cream the more powerful consumable. Milk generally lengthens tea effects, while Cream raises their potency. The changelist adds Beef Pie, Shepherds Pie, Creamy and Milky versions of most pure teas, and new Beef and Mutton meat. Animal gates and fences keep the herd in place.

Facepunch says livestock should not tank server performance: only a subset of NPCs is processed each frame, so a bigger population makes them slower to react rather than costing server FPS. The studio also says the new navigation system is at least twice as fast as in the last patch.

Biofuel Generator and Powergrid loot rooms

The Biofuel Generator turns raw or spoiled meat and other organic matter into low grade fuel. It has to be stirred by hand roughly every 30 minutes, and you can wire up IO to be told when it needs stirring. Foods with a higher calorific value give more low grade.

Powergrid loot rooms build on the Power Plant room from the August Power Trip update. They are locked until enough Heavy Fuses have been inserted into the Power Plant, and tougher monuments need more. Facepunch lists 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 population. Fuses last four times longer with 10 or fewer players online, scaling back to normal values at 100 or more. The small heavy fuse box at the Power Plant has also moved to a spot reachable through a broken window outside the building.

Sandbags, critters and other changes

Sandbags have four stages, each upgraded by stacking another sandbag deployable on top, ending in a pillbox. The stack size rises to 20 and loot comes in stacks of 4. Frogs, rabbits, squirrels, sea turtles, crabs and jellyfish now appear in suitable biomes, though Facepunch calls them mostly set dressing. At the start of a wipe the Air Wolf helipad at Bandit Camp is broken, and the air vehicle vendor will not sell until players repair it. Admins can change that with the vehicle.padrepairsrequired convar. Oil Rig crude pumping now takes 15 minutes to start producing.

Performance and stability

Facepunch's notes put the animation IK move to multithreading at about 1.07 ms of frame time saved with 100 players in the scene, and say the gain will be smaller on low-population servers. Removing 133 duplicate hand meshes from viewmodels saves roughly 100 MB of memory. Store assets no longer load by default, saving about 250 MB at boot and about 450 MB once the store has been closed for a minute. The client now runs on the new Rust Render Pipeline, with a switch back to the old one in the experimental settings for the first month. Crashes are now uploaded automatically, so Facepunch gets reports without chasing players.

What comes next

Facepunch says a mandatory server and client Halloween update arrives on 22 October 2026 at 18:00 BST (17:00 UTC, 1pm ET), and asks server owners to note the date. Rust is 50% off, DLC included, in the Steam Autumn Sale until October 8 at 10:00 PT (17:00 UTC), per Valve's sale announcement and Facepunch's notes. Steam's US store page lists the base game at $19.99, down from $39.99. After the sale ends, expect the normal price; see our Steam Autumn Sale guide for the other deals.

Frequently asked questions

Full notes, including the bug-fix list, are on the Facepunch site.