Rust Livestock Update Patch Notes (October 2026): Cows, Sheep, Stackable Sandbags and a New Renderer

Rust's October Livestock update adds farmable cows and sheep, milk and wool trading, a broken Air Wolf helipad, stackable sandbags and the new Rust Render Pipeline.

Rust's monthly update for October, the Livestock Update, landed with the forced wipe on Thursday, October 1, 2026. As the name suggests, the big addition is farm animals: cows and sheep you can capture, breed and sell. But the patch goes well beyond farming. It changes how the early game race for air vehicles works, rebuilds sandbags, opens new powered loot rooms across the map and moves the game onto a brand-new rendering pipeline.

TL;DR

• Cows and sheep are now farmable, with genetics and breeding like plants. They produce dung, milk and wool.
• A new Stables vendor buys grown animals and wool through a randomized offer system.
• The Air Wolf helipad at Bandit Camp starts each wipe broken and must be repaired before anyone can buy air vehicles.
• Sandbags now stack through four stages, ending in a pillbox.
• Powergrid loot rooms open at many monuments once enough Heavy Fuses are in the Power Plant.
• Heavy Fuse decay now scales with server population.
• Client-predicted grenades, C4 and satchels feel smoother on high ping.
• The new Rust Render Pipeline arrives, with a temporary toggle in the experimental settings.

Livestock: the biggest change

Cows and sheep both produce dung, cows give milk and sheep give wool. Like any other animal, they can also be harvested for meat, bones and leather. The update adds new beef and mutton meat, plus Beef Pie and Shepherd's Pie.

There are several ways to capture wild livestock, and Facepunch says they should be fairly intuitive. With the new navmesh enabled, NPCs can walk into player structures and respect doors opening and closing, so you can build a proper barn. Animals have genetics and needs, just like crops, so you can breed toward a "god clone". Facepunch warns that the genes don't behave exactly like plant genes, so your old farming tricks may not carry over. New animal fences and gates help keep your herd in place.

If you're worried about server load, Facepunch says NPCs are processed in a time-budgeted slice each frame. A crowded server should make animals react more slowly rather than tank the server's frame rate. The team also says the new navigation system is at least twice as fast as in the last patch.

Selling animals and wool

Lead a grown cow or sheep to the Stables and talk to the new vendor. You'll get a randomized offer based on the animal's gene quality. You can turn it down and ask again twice more, but after the third refusal the vendor won't buy from you for 15 minutes. Wool works the same way, except the offers scale with how much you bring in at once, up to 400 wool.

Milk, cream and biofuel

Drink milk straight, or refrigerate it for four hours to skim it into Skimmed Milk and Cream, which is a stronger consumable. In crafting, milk generally extends the duration of tea effects, while cream boosts their potency. There are new creamy and milky versions of most pure teas.

The new Biofuel Generator finally gives raw and spoiled meat a use. It turns organic matter into low grade fuel, but you have to stir it by hand about every 30 minutes. Food with more calories produces more fuel, and you can wire up IO to tell you when it needs stirring. On a related note, horses now drop considerably less dung, which makes livestock the more efficient fertilizer source.

Balance and gameplay changes

Air Wolf helipad repair

At the start of every wipe, the Air Wolf helipad at Bandit Camp is now in disrepair, and the vendor won't sell any air vehicles until it's fixed. You repair it like a siege weapon, by hitting it with a hammer to transfer resources from your inventory. Once repaired, it stays that way for the rest of the wipe. Facepunch wants this to be a server-wide effort that slows down how quickly helicopters show up after a wipe. A clan that rushes the repair also unlocks the vendor for everyone else. Server owners can turn this off with convars.

Sandbag stacking

Sandbags now have four stages. You upgrade each one by stacking another sandbag on top, and the last stage is a pillbox. To make up for needing more of them, the crafting cost is lower, sandbags found in loot come as stacks of four, and the max stack size is now 20. Existing sandbag skins work on every stage.

Powergrid loot rooms and fuse decay

Building on the Power Plant loot room from the Power Trip update, new locked rooms have been added at monuments including Airfield, Ferry Terminal, both Harbours, Junkyard, Launch Site, Military Tunnels, the Nuclear Missile Silo, Radtown, Sewer Branch, Trainyard and Water Treatment Plant. They open once enough Heavy Fuses are inserted at the Power Plant, and harder monuments need more fuses.

Since the marketplace also needs power, low-population servers were losing basic trading. To fix that, Heavy Fuses now last four times longer on servers with 10 or fewer players, scaling back to normal at 100 players. The small Heavy Fuse box at the Power Plant can now be reached from outside through a broken window.

Other tuning

• Oil Rig crude pumping now takes 15 minutes to start producing.
• The Water Wheel is roughly four to five times tougher against melee.
• Attack heli armor plates now fall off on the side that gets shot instead of in a fixed order.
• Remote-controlled turrets can now hit reactive targets, and smart alarms can be placed on other deployables.

Performance and tech

The biggest technical change is the move to the Rust Render Pipeline, a custom renderer that replaces Unity's old built-in pipeline. Facepunch expects slightly better performance at first, with more optimizations and visual upgrades to come. For the first month you can switch between the old and new pipelines in the experimental settings if you run into problems.

Grenades, C4 and satchels now use client prediction, so throws feel more responsive on high ping, and the server corrects any differences. Memory use also drops: a shared hands mesh saves about 100MB, and store assets now load only when needed, saving around 250MB at launch. Crashes are now reported automatically, which should help Facepunch fix stability issues faster.

On the anticheat side, six more official Facepunch servers now require TPM and Secure Boot.

Bug fixes worth knowing

• Battering rams can no longer hit Tool Cupboards through walls.
• Fixed campfires cooking some foods twice as fast as intended.
• Fixed a rare case of crates duplicating on the Oil Rig, and Oil Rig radiation starting before the locked crate was looted.
• Fixed hackable crates awarding too many clan points.
• Fixed a drop box placement that allowed a one-way peek, and a head-clipping exploit using storage adaptors.
• Fixed rail junctions sometimes blocking trains, and landmines being too big after a recent change.

What it means for players

The Livestock Update rewards players who settle in. Farmers and builders get a whole new production chain to optimize, from breeding stock to milk-boosted teas and biofuel. PvP groups will feel the helipad change most, since early air control now costs real resources and opens the vendor to everyone. Sandbag pillboxes and the new monument loot rooms give fights more to revolve around, and players on smaller servers should finally see power, and with it trading, stay online longer.

The next date to remember is October 22, when Facepunch plans a mandatory server and client update to switch on its Halloween features.

This article was written by AI (Claude) and checked against the sources above. Games are updated regularly, so details may change.