New Rust update adds livestock, slows the race to vehicles, and finally gives spoiled meat a use

The Rust October update is here, and this time the big new feature is the addition of livestock. Given how long the survival game has been a dominant force on Steam, it seems surprising to realize that farming the likes of cows and sheep hasn't been a thing until now, but that's all about to change. On top of that comes a range of smaller creatures dotted across the world, some additional loot rooms, a change to the post-wipe vehicle race, and something useful to do with your spoiled food.

With the introduction of farmable cows and sheep to Rust comes all the additions you'd expect. New fences and animal gates let you set up pens to keep them enclosed. Sheep provide wool, and mutton meat, while cows offer milk and beef, and both are a source of dung. From that comes the ability to separate the milk into skimmed milk and cream, with the former increasing the duration of tea effects, and the latter boosting their potency. You're also able to cook shepherd's pies and beef pies.

When your animals are fully grown, you have the ability to sell them to ranches, earning a randomized offer of resources based on the animal's stock. You can reject this offer for up to two more, but after that there's a 15-minute cooldown before you'll have the chance to try and offload them again. You can also trade wool in at the same vendor, with bigger rewards if you bring in a larger supply at once.

Should you find yourself with meat that's spoiled, you can now dump it into the new biofuel generator, which converts organic matter to low-grade fuel. The downside is that it must be manually stirred around every half an hour, although you're able to set up indicators to let you know when it's time.

A range of smaller animals have arrived in the wasteland, too. Squirrels, rabbits, frogs, sea turtles, crabs, and jellyfish can all now be found in regions that support them. For both the livestock and these smaller critters, Facepunch assures that it's spent time on implementing smart NPC processing to minimize their impact on performance, and notes that these additional inclusions should be considered "mostly set dressing" for the time being.

Taking inspiration from the new loot room that was introduced to the power plant, Facepunch has introduced similar spaces to "many other monuments" across the Rust map, including the airfield, junkyard, Radtown, trainyard, water treatment plant, and nuclear missile silo, to count just a few. These rooms will be locked to start with, requiring a certain number of heavy fuses to be inserted to generate enough power. The amount you'll need will vary depending on the overall challenge of the monument.

In an attempt to stop power from quickly burning out on servers with lower population, a new scaling system has been applied to the decay rate of heavy fuses. At its most extreme, on servers with ten or fewer players, heavy fuses will last four times longer, and this duration will gradually reduce up to its standard value when a 100 player count is reached. Additionally, the small heavy fuse box at the power plant has been moved so it can be accessed from outside, through a broken window.

When a wipe takes place, the Air Wolf helipad will now be broken down, and must be repaired before anyone can use the air vehicle vendor. Doing so is "a process similar to constructing siege weapons," requiring you to bring enough resources along and gradually hammer them into place. This is designed to be a "communal effort" that will slightly limit how early into a fresh wipe vehicles will start becoming commonplace.

Facepunch has also redesigned how sandbags work. You can now stack them up to four rows high, with each stage increasing their height and the final one transforming it into a 'pillbox' with a small window to aim through. In order to accommodate this change, the cost of crafting them has been reduced, looted sandbag barricades come in stacks of four, and the total stack cap has been raised to 20.

Elsewhere, explosives such as grenades, C4, and satchels are being given some client prediction. Facepunch explains that the server-sided nature of these can sometimes make them feel unresponsive, particularly on high-ping servers. The new prediction should make these "way smoother," unless they're out of sync enough that client-side correction needs to kick in. Also getting a polish is the machete, although this one's a simple model refresh with high-res textures and fresh animations.

Facepunch has also continued to make numerous technical improvements to Rust. These include the migration from the default Unity render pipeline to a custom one "made specifically for Rust by our graphics team." The developer says this should result in slight performance improvements straight away, but says that you can expect greater gains in the coming months once the transition period is complete. For just this month, you'll have the option to toggle between the two options, in case any particular issues arise.

The Rust Livestock update is out now. Facepunch's Halloween update will be released on Thursday October 22 at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST / 7pm CEST. This will include "a mandatory server and client update" to set the mood for the scary season.