Rust October Update Adds Livestock, Biofuel and Slower Vehicles

Facepunch released its October update for Rust, adding farmable livestock, small wildlife, a biofuel generator and changes to how vehicles become available after a server wipe. The update also adjusts loot distribution, basebuilding items and rendering infrastructure.

The update introduces cows and sheep that players can keep in pens built with new fences and animal gates. Sheep produce wool and mutton; cows produce milk and beef. Both animals also generate dung. Players can separate milk into skimmed milk and cream; skimmed milk extends the duration of tea effects while cream increases their potency. New recipes include shepherd’s pie and beef pie. Fully grown animals can be sold to ranch vendors for randomized resource offers; players may reject up to two offers before a 15-minute cooldown prevents further sales. Wool can be traded at the same vendor, with larger shipments yielding higher rewards.

Spoiled meat can now be processed in a biofuel generator to produce low-grade fuel. The generator requires manual stirring roughly every 30 minutes, and the game allows indicators to alert players when stirring is due. Facepunch implemented smart NPC processing for the new fauna to limit performance impact. Small creatures added to the world include squirrels, rabbits, frogs, sea turtles, crabs and jellyfish; Facepunch describes many of these as primarily cosmetic for now.

Loot distribution was reworked with new lockable rooms modeled on the power plant loot room added to several monuments across the map, including the airfield, junkyard, Radtown, trainyard, water treatment plant and the nuclear missile silo. These rooms start locked and require a number of heavy fuses to be inserted to generate power. Fuse requirements vary by monument difficulty. To reduce rapid fuse burnout on low-population servers, decay now scales with server size: on servers with ten or fewer players heavy fuses last four times longer, with duration tapering to the standard rate as player counts approach 100. The small heavy fuse box at the power plant has been moved to allow access from outside through a broken window.

After a wipe, the Air Wolf helipad is removed and must be rebuilt before the air vehicle vendor becomes usable. The repair process follows steps similar to constructing siege weapons, requiring resources and repeated hammering. Facepunch describes the repair as a communal task intended to slow the early appearance of vehicles on fresh wipes.

Several basebuilding and combat systems were updated. Sandbags can now be stacked up to four rows; the final stage becomes a pillbox with a small firing window. Crafting costs for sandbags were reduced, looted sandbag barricades now drop in stacks of four and the overall stack cap was increased to 20. Grenades, C4 and satchels received client-side prediction to improve responsiveness on high-latency connections. The machete received a model refresh with higher-resolution textures and updated animations.

On the technical side, Facepunch began migrating Rust from Unity’s default render pipeline to a custom render pipeline built by its graphics team. The developer expects modest performance improvements immediately and larger gains as the transition completes. For one month after the update, players can toggle between the two rendering options if issues arise.

Facepunch also announced a Halloween update scheduled for Thursday, October 22. The Halloween release will include a mandatory server and client update.