Rust Livestock Update (October 2026) for Server Owners

The Rust Livestock update went live on Thursday 1 October 2026, according to Facepunch's official patch notes published that day. It forced a map wipe, added cow and sheep farming with genetics, put the Air Wolf helipad into disrepair at the start of each wipe, and shipped new convars and server performance work that owners should know about.

What is in the Rust Livestock update?

The October 2026 update is built around farming animals. Facepunch's notes list these headline changes:

• Cows and sheep. Both produce dung, cows produce milk and sheep produce wool, and both can be harvested for meat, bones and leather like other animals. They have genetics and needs, much like plants, and can be bred toward a perfect clone.
• Stables bartering. Grown cattle and sheep can be sold to a new vendor outside the Stables for a randomised offer based on gene quality. You can reject an offer twice, after which the vendor refuses to buy that animal for 15 minutes. Wool trades in the same way, up to 400 at a time.
• Livestock fencing. New animal gates and fence deployables for pens.
• Biofuel Generator. Converts raw or spoiled meat and other organic matter into low grade fuel. It has to be stirred by hand roughly every 30 minutes.
• Air Wolf helipad repair. The helipad at Bandit Camp now starts each wipe broken, and the air vehicle vendor will not sell anything until players repair it by hitting it with resources, similar to building siege weapons.
• Powergrid loot rooms at Airfield, Ferry Terminal, both Harbours, Junkyard, Launch Site, Military Tunnels, Nuclear Missile Silo, Radtown, Sewer Branch, Trainyard and Water Treatment.
• Sandbags reworked into a four stage stackable deployable with a cheaper crafting cost and a stack size of 20.
• Oil Rig change. Crude pumping now takes 15 minutes to start producing.

There was no forced blueprint wipe mentioned in the patch notes, so blueprint wipes stay your call. Our Rust wipe guide covers the difference.

Which new convars did the October update add?

Livestock adds a handful of server convars. These are the ones that change how your server plays:

Facepunch did not publish default values for the powergrid convars. To see the current value on your own server, type the convar name alone in the console and it prints what it is set to. To keep a change after restarts, add the line to server/<identity>/cfg/server.cfg. Our server.cfg guide explains where that file lives and how it loads.

How does heavy fuse decay scale with population?

Heavy fuses now last longer on quiet servers. Per the notes, if 10 or fewer players are online, heavy fuses last four times longer, and this scales back to normal by 100 players online. That is a real quality of life change for small community and friend servers, where a handful of players used to burn through fuses at the same rate as a full official server. If you want official behaviour on a small server, the three powergrid. convars above are where you tune it.

Should I turn off the Air Wolf helipad repair?

Only if your server is small. On a busy server, the repair turns Bandit Camp into an early wipe objective and nobody gets a minicopter in the first minutes. On a 3 to 10 player friend server, though, it can mean nobody buys an air vehicle for days. If that sounds like your group, run this in the console and add it to server.cfg:

vehicle.padrepairsrequired false

Or keep the feature and just open the pad for this wipe with vehicle.setrepairablepads 1.

What changed for server performance?

Facepunch listed several server side improvements in the October notes:

• Animation IK is now multithreaded, which Facepunch says saves about 1 ms of frame time with 100 players.
• Vehicle physics now tick in parallel.
• Removing duplicate viewmodel hand meshes saves around 100 MB of memory.
• Automatic crash uploading is now enabled to speed up stability fixes.

These stack with the September Breach and Clear update (patch notes, 3 September 2026), which reworked physics broadphase, added vehicle pooling to remove 20 to 30 ms spikes and halved server occlusion generation from 44 to 22 seconds. If your server still stutters after the wipe, the cause is more likely entity count or plugins. See our Rust lag fix.

Is TC upkeep group scaling still in Rust?

Yes. Group upkeep scaling arrived with Breach and Clear in September and is still active. Tool Cupboards charge no extra for the first 4 players, then 2% per player for the next 6, then 4% per player after that, capped at 300%. Facepunch's example: 6 authed players means +4% upkeep and 12 players means +20%. Players who were deauthed in the last 24 hours, and anyone authed on a code lock in the base, still count. The convars that control it sit in the decay. group, so you can soften or disable it on a PvE or casual server.

What this means for your server

1. Update the server. Self hosters run SteamCMD with +app_update 258550 validate. Our full force wipe schedule explains timing for the next one.
2. Update Oxide or Carbon after Rust. The framework can lag the game by a few hours on wipe day, so plugins may not load until it catches up.
3. Check animal and farming plugins. Anything that touches animals, the Stables or vending may need an update for the new livestock entities.
4. Decide on the helipad and fuse convars for your population and save them in server.cfg.
5. Budget memory. Pens full of animals and new deployables add entities. Watch RAM through the wipe and see how much a Rust server costs if you need a bigger plan.

On a GamezServers Rust server, a restart updates Rust and your chosen framework together, and the console in the panel takes convars directly, so the helipad and fuse changes take a minute.

FAQ

When did the Rust Livestock update come out?

It released on Thursday 1 October 2026, the October force wipe day. Facepunch published the patch notes on its official news page the same day.

Did the Livestock update force a blueprint wipe?

The patch notes do not mention a forced blueprint wipe. Only the map wipe is required, and blueprint wipes are up to each server owner.

How do I disable the Air Wolf helipad repair?

Run vehicle.padrepairsrequired false in the server console and add the same line to server.cfg so it survives restarts. That makes the vendor sell air vehicles from the start of the wipe again.

Why do heavy fuses last longer on my server now?

Heavy fuse decay now scales with population. With 10 or fewer players online they last four times longer, returning to normal by 100 players.

When is the next Rust update after Livestock?

The next monthly update is planned for Thursday 5 November 2026, the first Thursday of the month. Facepunch confirms each update in its patch notes on release day.