Rust's Livestock update lets you breed cows and sheep for milk and wool

Facepunch released Rust’s Livestock update on 1 October, adding cows and sheep you can capture, keep and breed. The patch also brings a new generator, a batch of small wildlife and a change to how power decays on quieter servers.

Both animals produce dung. Cows give milk, sheep give wool, and either can be harvested for meat, bones and leather. Like plants, livestock has genetics and needs, so you can breed towards a perfect clone. Facepunch warns that the genes “won’t behave exactly like plants”, though, so old techniques may not carry over.

Grown animals can be sold to a new vendor outside the Stables. The offer is random and based on gene quality. Turn it down three times and the vendor refuses to deal with you for 15 minutes. Wool goes to the same vendor, up to 400 at a time.

Milk can be drunk straight away, or chilled in a fridge for four hours and skimmed into skimmed milk and cream. Milk extends tea effects, cream makes them stronger. New animal gates and fences help keep the herd in place. The Biofuel Generator finally gives raw or spoiled meat a use. It turns organic matter into low grade fuel, as long as someone stirs it by hand roughly every 30 minutes. Frogs, rabbits, squirrels, sea turtles, crabs and jellyfish now roam the island too, though for now they are mostly scenery.

For anyone running a server, Facepunch says the extra animals should not cost frames. The server only processes a slice of NPCs each frame up to a fixed time budget, so a bigger population makes NPCs slower to react rather than dropping server FPS. The new navigation system is said to be at least twice as fast as in the last patch.

The Air Wolf helipad at Bandit Camp now starts every wipe broken, and the air vehicle vendor won’t sell anything until players repair it with resources. Admins who prefer the old behaviour have two convars:

• vehicle.padrepairsrequired set to false effectively reverts the change
• vehicle.setrepairablepads forces the pad into a broken (0) or repaired (1) state

Low-population servers also get a break. With 10 or fewer players online, heavy fuses last four times longer, scaling back to normal values at 100 players. Facepunch made the change because power on smaller servers was often offline for long stretches, which also shut down the marketplace.

Mark 22 October in your calendar. At 18:00 BST (19:00 CEST) a mandatory server and client update with Halloween features goes live.