Rust Livestock Update (October 2026): What Server Owners Need to Know

Facepunch’s October 2026 patch, the Livestock Update, landed on 1 October with cows, sheep and a ranch economy for players, and a longer list of changes that matter more to the people running the servers: NPCs that walk into bases, a helipad that starts every wipe broken, new loot rooms behind the power grid, and new server settings to tune all of it.

If you run a server, three things need a decision from you this month: whether the Air Wolf helipad at Bandit Camp should start broken (vehicle.padrepairsrequired), how fast heavy fuses decay on your population (powergrid.fusedecay*), and whether your NPC plugins still behave now that NPCs can enter player buildings. And the Halloween update is mandatory on 22 October.

This guide goes through the update from the admin’s side: what changed, which settings control it, what to test, and what your players will notice first. Every number here comes from Facepunch’s own Livestock Update notes.

What the update changed, in one list

• Livestock: cows and sheep you can breed, milk, shear and sell, with fences and gates to keep them in.
• NPC navigation: a new navmesh lets NPCs enter player structures and respect doors opening and closing.
• Air Wolf helipad: starts each wipe in disrepair; no air vehicles for sale until players repair it.
• Powergrid loot rooms at twelve monuments, locked until enough heavy fuses are in the power plant.
• Heavy fuse decay that now scales with how many players are online.
• Biofuel Generator, four-stage sandbags, client-side prediction for grenades, C4 and satchels, a new machete and about 60 fixes.
• Performance: hundreds of megabytes of client memory saved and a new render pipeline in testing.

Livestock: what players will be doing

Cows give milk and sheep give wool; both drop dung and can be butchered for meat, bones and leather. Animals have genes and needs and can be bred, and Facepunch is explicit that animal genes do not behave like plant genes, so your farmers’ old techniques will not carry over.

Grown animals and wool are sold to a new Stable vendor outside the ranch. The price is random and depends on gene quality. A player can turn the offer down twice, for three offers in all; after that the vendor refuses that animal for 15 minutes. Wool trades work the same way, paying more the more wool is handed in at once, up to 400.

Milk left in a fridge for 4 hours separates into skimmed milk and cream, which feed into new milky and creamy teas and two pies. For a PvE or roleplay server this is a gift: a slow, social loop that keeps people logged in between raids.

Sheep are one of the two new farm animals; cows are the other. Image: Facepunch Studios.

NPCs can now walk into bases

This is the change to read twice. With the new navmesh enabled, NPCs can enter player structures and open and close doors. To keep the server fast, only part of the NPC population is processed each frame, up to a fixed time budget, so on a busy server NPCs react more slowly instead of costing server frames. Facepunch says the navigation itself is at least twice as fast as in the previous patch.

What it means for you:

• PvE servers: a base is no longer a safe room by default. Expect reports of scientists inside bases in the first days and explain the change in your Discord before players call it a bug.
• NPC plugins: anything that spawns, moves or controls NPCs is worth testing on a staging server after this patch, mine included.
• Populated servers: slower NPC reactions at peak hours are the design working as intended, not lag.

The Air Wolf helipad starts every wipe broken

The helipad at Bandit Camp now begins each wipe in disrepair, and the air vehicle vendor sells nothing until it is fixed. Players repair it the way they build siege weapons: by hitting it with a hammer to hand over resources. Once repaired it stays repaired until the next wipe.

Two server settings control it:

• vehicle.padrepairsrequired false puts things back the way they were.
• vehicle.setrepairablepads 0 or 1 forces the pads disrepaired or repaired on demand.

On a low-population or PvE server nobody may bother to repair the pad, and then nobody can buy a minicopter for the whole wipe. Decide before the wipe whether that is the game you want, and say so in your server description.

Powergrid loot rooms and heavy fuses

New loot rooms stay locked until enough heavy fuses have been put into the power plant; how many depends on the monument. They are at Airfield, Ferry Terminal, Harbour 1 and 2, Junkyard, Launch Site, Military Tunnels, Nuclear Missile Silo, Radtown, Sewer Branch, Trainyard and Water Treatment Plant.

Facepunch also admits why fuse decay changed: on low-population servers, power outages were blocking the marketplace. Fuses now last longer when fewer people are online. With 10 players or fewer they last four times longer, and the effect fades to normal at 100 players. The small heavy fuse box at the power plant can also be reached from outside through a broken window.

Three settings tune this: powergrid.fusedecaylowpop, powergrid.fusedecayhighpop and powergrid.fusedecaylowpopscale. Small community and PvE servers are exactly who this was written for: check what they are set to before you go looking for a plugin to keep the lights on.

One of the new powergrid loot rooms, locked until the power plant has its heavy fuses. Image: Facepunch Studios.

Performance: what the client saves, and the new renderer

Most of the performance work this month is on the player’s side, which still matters to you: fewer crashes and stutters means fewer people leaving.

• 133 duplicated hand meshes removed: about 100 MB saved.
• The in-game store no longer loads its assets at boot, saving about 250 MB, and unloads them about a minute after closing, about 450 MB.
• Inverse kinematics now run on several threads: about 1 ms saved per frame with 100 players.
• More than 15,000 renderers trimmed from procedural worlds and LOD textures resized, worth 100 to 300 MB in some cases.
• Vehicle physics now tick in parallel.

Rust is moving from Unity’s built-in renderer to its own Rust Render Pipeline. For the first month it is an option in the experimental settings, and Facepunch plans to make it the default after the next patch. If players report graphical oddities in October, ask which renderer they are on.

Smaller changes your players will notice

• Sandbags now stack in four stages, the last one a pillbox; they are cheaper to craft and stack to 20.
• Grenades, C4 and satchels are predicted on the client, so throws feel immediate; the server still has the final word.
• Biofuel Generator: turns raw or spoiled meat into low-grade fuel, but needs stirring by hand about every 30 minutes; it can send an IO signal when it does.
• Oil Rig crude pumping now takes 15 minutes to start producing.
• Decorative frogs, rabbits, squirrels, sea turtles, crabs and jellyfish, kept on a tight budget.
• Horses drop considerably less dung.

The Biofuel Generator turns meat into low-grade fuel, as long as somebody stirs it. Image: Facepunch Studios.

Next: the Halloween update on 22 October

Facepunch has announced a mandatory update on 22 October at 18:00 BST / 13:00 EST. Mandatory means clients and servers must update to keep playing together; the announcement does not mention a wipe. Update your server and your plugins in that window, and keep a copy of your oxide folder from before, in case a plugin needs a fix.

It is also the week players are most in the mood for an event. That is what my Halloween plugin is for: Michael Myers stalks one player at a time anywhere on the map, only his victim hears the theme, and whoever beats him three times becomes him. It runs on its own, with no commands for players and no other plugins.

After Halloween comes the forced wipe on 5 November. My preview of the November update lists what is already in Facepunch’s main branch and what to set on your server before it lands.

Halloween decorations, from Facepunch’s October news. Image: Facepunch Studios.

The checklist

• Decide on the Air Wolf helipad: broken at wipe or not (vehicle.padrepairsrequired).
• Check the heavy fuse decay settings against your real population.
• Test every NPC plugin on a staging server now that NPCs can enter buildings.
• Tell players about livestock, the Stable vendor and the new loot rooms before they find them.
• Back up oxide and update on 22 October at 18:00 BST.

Where Badgyver comes in

I make custom maps, monuments and plugins for Rust servers, and every one of them lives through the same monthly patches yours do. If your server needs something no procedural seed will give it, the custom Rust maps are a place to start; for a server that plays better with smarter NPCs or a live event, the Rust plugins are the other half. Questions about any of them go straight to me on Discord.