Facepunch released the Livestock Update on Thursday, October 1, 2026. The patch adds farmable cows and sheep that can be bred and sold, and starts each wipe with the Air Wolf helipad at Bandit Camp in disrepair. The changelist also brings milk, wool, a Biofuel Generator that makes use of raw or spoiled meat, and new pies. Facepunch says repairing the helipad is meant to slow early access to air vehicles. Separately, Oil Rig crude now takes 15 minutes to start producing.

Cows and sheep arrive with a job each

Both animals produce dung. Cows produce milk and sheep produce wool, and either can be harvested for meat, bones and leather like any other animal, or sold to an NPC once grown. Beef and Mutton are new meat types, and the update adds Shepherds Pie and Beef Pie. Horses now drop considerably less dung, which the changelist describes as livestock being more efficient. Wild animals have to be caught first, and Facepunch says there are several ways to do that, some more efficient than others.

Genes set the animal offer, volume sets the wool offer

Livestock carry genetics and needs, as plants do, and can be bred to hunt for what the devblog calls a god clone. The same post warns that their genes will not behave exactly like plant genes, so older breeding techniques may not carry over.

Selling is its own system. Grown cattle and sheep go to the Stable, where the new vendor outside makes a randomized offer based on the animal's gene quality. Reject that offer and you get two more. After a third rejection the vendor is annoyed and will not buy that animal for 15 minutes. Wool goes to the same vendor and follows the same three-offer rule, but the reward depends on how much wool you bring in one go, with a stated maximum of 400.

Milk needs four hours in a fridge

Milk can be drunk as it comes out of the cow. Leave it refrigerated for four hours and a new option appears to skim it, which yields Skimmed Milk and Cream. Facepunch calls cream the stronger consumable of the two. Both are also used in crafting recipes: milk generally increases the duration of tea effects, cream raises their potency, and the update adds Creamy and Milky versions of most pure teas.

Raw and spoiled meat finally have somewhere to go

The Biofuel Generator turns organic matter into low grade and has to be stirred by hand. Fill it, stir it, and it processes for roughly 30 minutes before it needs another stir. Players can wire up IO to get a signal when that happens, even from the next room. Output depends on the input, because matter with a higher calorific value produces more low grade.

Fences, gates and NPC movement inside bases

Animal gate and fence deployables keep livestock where you want them. When the new navmesh is enabled, NPCs can enter player structures and respect doors opening and closing. Facepunch describes that as opening up what players can build inside their bases.

The patch also spreads frogs, rabbits, squirrels, sea turtles, crabs and jellyfish across the island in biomes that suit them. The studio calls the critters mostly set dressing for now, with their performance limits set on that basis.

The performance answer is in the frame budget

Facepunch says it processes only a subset of NPCs each game frame, up to a hardcoded maximum time per frame. When population exceeds that budget, the server distributes work across frames, slowing NPC reactions rather than directly reducing FPS. Facepunch also says it multithreaded and optimized the navigation system, at least doubling its performance since the previous patch.

The Air Wolf helipad now starts broken

The Air Wolf helipad at Bandit Camp begins each wipe in disrepair, and the air vehicle vendor will not sell to anyone until it is fixed. Repairing it works like building siege weapons. You transfer a set amount of resources from your inventory by bashing it with a hammer, and the repair then lasts the rest of the wipe.

Facepunch says it wants the repair to be a communal effort and that air vehicles should no longer appear so quickly at the start of a wipe. A clan that wants fast access has to invest a significant amount of resources, which also opens the vendor to everyone else on the server. Server admins can change the behaviour with the convar vehicle.padrepairsrequired, which effectively reverts it when set to false, or force either state with vehicle.setrepairablepads and a value of 0 or 1.

The Oil Rig timer sits in the same changelist but is a separate change: crude pumping there now takes 15 minutes to start producing. Facepunch gives no stated reason for that one.

A broken blank platform with a lock leads through abstract shared resource blocks to a repaired platform with an open gate, above the words REPAIR THE PAD and AIR VENDOR UNLOCKS.
Concept diagram of the update's repair gate: Facepunch says the air-vehicle vendor will not sell until the Air Wolf helipad is repaired. The studio describes the repair as a communal effort; its announcement does not give the resource count.

Heavy fuse decay now scales with population

Power phases stayed offline for long stretches on low-population servers, which locked out trade once the marketplace needed power to work. Heavy fuse decay now scales with population: with 10 or fewer players online, fuses last four times longer, tapering back to normal at 100 or more. The small heavy fuse box at the Power Plant moved to a spot reachable from outside through a broken window. The convars are powergrid.fusedecaylowpop, fusedecayhighpop and fusedecaylowpopscale.

The rest of the patch, briefly

Sandbags now stack in four stages that end in a pillbox, cost less to craft, and appear in loot as stacks of four with a total stack size of 20. New powergrid loot rooms stay locked until enough Heavy Fuses go into the Power Plant. The devblog's list of 13 entries runs from Airfield to the Water Treatment Plant and names Ferry Terminal twice. Grenades, C4 and satchels are now client predicted, so throwing them feels smoother on high ping. The machete has a new model and animations, ladder hatches became skinnable, and the update adds 11 achievements.

What the devblog leaves out

No figure is given for how livestock genetics are inherited or how far they diverge from plant genetics, only the warning that old techniques may not apply. The capture methods are not listed, only described as multiple and unevenly efficient. Spawn density is not stated for wild livestock or for the new critters, and neither is the resource cost of the helipad repair. Nothing is said about what happens to livestock when a base decays.

Dates worth putting in a calendar

Facepunch says a mandatory server and client update to enable Halloween features is scheduled for October 22 at 18:00 BST and asks server owners to remember the date. The new Rust Render Pipeline, a custom Scriptable Render Pipeline the graphics team built for the game, can be toggled under the experimental tab for the first month. Facepunch hopes to remove that toggle after the next patch and make the pipeline the default once it is satisfied no serious issues remain.