Rust force wiped on Thursday, October 1, 2026, and the Livestock update came with it. The headline is farming: cows and sheep you can catch, pen, breed for genetics and sell. Read past the animals and the patch notes say more to server owners than any update this year, because Facepunch shipped three gameplay changes with convars attached and a hard date for the next mandatory server update.
This is the server owner's version of the October 2026 patch notes. What changed, what it costs your box, and which settings you can actually touch.
Cows, sheep and what they give you
Both animals drop dung. Cows give milk, sheep give wool, and either one can still be harvested for meat, bones and leather like any other animal. Milk is more than a snack: refrigerate it for four hours and you can skim it into Skimmed Milk and Cream. Milk stretches the duration of tea effects, Cream boosts their potency, and both feed new recipes such as Shepherds Pie and Beef Pie.
Livestock carry genetics, the same idea as plant genes but not the same behaviour, so the old clone-farming tricks will not carry over one to one. Expect your farming players to spend the first week working out the new god-clone math.
New animal gates and fence deployables keep the herd in one place. One detail to flag in your Discord: Facepunch says that when the new navmesh is enabled, NPCs can walk into player structures and respect doors. In September the new navmesh was still opt-in behind -useNewNavmesh (we covered it in our Breach and Clear breakdown), so check your startup parameters before players report cows strolling through a honeycomb.
Will livestock tank server performance?
This is the question every admin asked the moment the trailer dropped, and Facepunch answered it directly. Each frame the server only processes a subset of NPCs, up to a hard time budget. When the animal population grows past that budget, the server does not lose FPS. The animals just react more slowly, because the work is spread across frames automatically.
The new navigation system was also multithreaded and is at least twice as fast as last patch. The decorative critters (frogs, rabbits, squirrels, sea turtles, crabs and jellyfish) are heavily budgeted on both server and client and are set dressing for now.
The honest read for a server owner: livestock should not cost you raw frame time, but a modded server with high animal populations will see sluggish AI before it sees lag. If you already run tight on CPU late in a wipe, watch your server FPS in the first three or four days rather than the first hour, because farms grow as the wipe matures. Our Rust server lag guide still covers the usual suspects.
The stable vendor and the wool economy
Grown cattle and sheep can be led to the Stables and sold to a new vendor. The offer is randomized and scales with the animal's gene quality. You can reject it twice for a new roll; reject a third time and the vendor refuses to deal with you for 15 minutes.
Wool works the same way, except the reward scales with how much you hand in at once, up to 400. Carrying a full stack across the map to the Stables is exactly the kind of high risk, high reward run that turns into a Discord clip. On a PvE or low-pop server, this is a new reason for players to log in daily. On a busy vanilla server, expect the Stables to become a killing field.
The Biofuel Generator rounds out the farm loop: it turns raw or spoiled meat into Low Grade Fuel, but someone has to stir it by hand roughly every 30 minutes, and you can wire IO to tell you when it needs attention.
Air Wolf helipad: the change with a convar
At the start of every wipe, the Air Wolf helipad at Bandit Camp is now broken, and the air vehicle vendor sells nothing until players repair it. Repairing works like siege weapon construction: you hit the pad with a hammer to transfer resources into it. Once fixed, it stays fixed for the rest of the wipe, and it is fixed for everyone, not just the clan that paid.
Facepunch's goal is to stop minicopters flooding the map on day one. That is a good default for vanilla. It is less obviously right for a 3x or a build server where the whole point is getting into the air quickly. Two convars control it:
vehicle.padrepairsrequired false
vehicle.setrepairablepads 1
vehicle.padrepairsrequired false effectively reverts the change. vehicle.setrepairablepads forces the pads into a fully broken (0) or fully repaired (1) state. On a DoomHosting server, put them in /server/rust/cfg/server.cfg from the Files tab so they survive restarts; typing them into the console only lasts until the next reboot.
Power grid loot rooms and fuse decay on low-pop servers
New locked loot rooms now sit in Airfield, Ferry Terminal, both Harbours, Junkyard, Launch Site, Military Tunnels, 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.
That made one existing problem worse. On small servers the grid was often dead for hours, and with the marketplace now needing power, low-pop players were locked out of basic trade. Facepunch's fix is population scaling: with 10 or fewer players online, Heavy Fuses last four times longer, scaling back to normal at 100 players. The changelog lists the convars as powergrid.fusedecaylowpop, fusedecayhighpop and fusedecaylowpopscale.
This is the most useful setting in the patch for small community servers. If you run a 20 to 50 slot server, the default curve already helps you. If your peak never passes 30, raising the low-pop threshold keeps the grid alive without anyone babysitting the Power Plant. Run find powergrid in the server console to see the exact names and current values before you change anything.
Dates and checks for server owners
- October 1: force wipe and Livestock update. Update your server, then confirm Oxide/uMod has published a build for this patch before you start plugins again.
- October 22, 18:00 BST: a mandatory server and client update for Halloween. Plan a restart window, and expect a short gap before Oxide catches up.
- Next force wipe: check the date in our Rust wipe schedule and pin it in your Discord.
- RCON fix: disconnect messages no longer drop other RCON connections, which matters if you run several admin tools at once.
- Upkeep: sandbag barricades now stack in four stages up to a pillbox. Our Rust upkeep calculator is still the fastest way to check base costs.
Host your Rust server with DoomHosting
Every convar in this post goes in one file, and on DoomHosting's Rust servers you can edit server.cfg straight from the panel's Files or Config tab, wipe from the panel and install Oxide plugins without touching FTP. Dedicated Ryzen 9 hardware, DDoS protection and 24/7 support come standard.
Fence in the cows, fix the helipad, and decide before wipe day whether your server wants either one.
