First Thursday of the month, so forced wipe. Facepunch released the "Livestock Update" on Thursday, October 1, 2026, and for once the title doesn't tell the whole story. Cows and sheep get the spotlight, but several changes directly affect how you run a server.
At Top-Games, we read the official post line by line for the admins and players of Rust servers. Here's what really changes, and what we suggest you check before opening the doors again.
Livestock: a new gameplay loop, not a gimmick
Cows and sheep arrive as farm animals, with genetics and breeding. Cows give milk and manure, sheep give wool and manure, and both end up as meat, bones and leather. You build pens with new dedicated fences and gates, and you can sell your animals to the ranch NPCs in exchange for a random offer of resources.
Milk keeps in the fridge and then separates into skim milk and cream, which are used to boost teas. Two pies also make their debut. For a solo player or a small group, it's a real way to progress without spending your life farming monuments.
On the server side, our take is simple: on PvE-oriented Rust servers, this update will probably become the heart of the wipe. On a PvP server, a pen full of livestock is mostly one more raid target.
The Biofuel Generator changes the fuel economy
The new Biofuel Generator turns organic matter into Low Grade Fuel. You have to stir it by hand roughly every 30 minutes, and the yield depends on the caloric value of what you put in.
In practice, Low Grade becomes available without relying solely on barrels and the refinery. If you run a server with modified gather rates, keep an eye on this during the first few days: an overly generous yield combined with a x3 or x5 multiplier can quickly make fuel almost free.
Air Wolf: a helipad to repair every wipe, adjustable by admins
This is the most interesting change for administrators. The Air Wolf vendor's helipad at Bandit Camp now starts out damaged every wipe. Players have to pool resources to repair it before they can buy a helicopter.
Facepunch has added two convars, vehicle.padrepairsrequired and vehicle.setrepairablepads, to keep control over this system. A server that wants to keep helicopter purchases available from the first hour can therefore adjust the setting. Remember to mention it in your rules or your announcements channel: your players will want to know whether the helipad is broken on your server or not.
Small servers get a real boost
The new locked loot rooms (the Powergrid Lootrooms) appear at 13 monuments, from Airfield to Launch Site by way of the nuclear silo. To open them, you need Heavy Fuses collected at the Power Plant.
The detail that matters: these fuses now degrade based on server population. According to Facepunch, they last four times longer with 10 players or fewer, then the effect gradually tapers off until it returns to normal at 100 players. That's good news for modest communities, which often struggled to make this kind of content, designed for full servers, work for them.
Performance: new render pipeline, caution on the first night
Facepunch announces several optimizations: NPC processing spread across several frames, multithreaded animation inverse kinematics (about 1 ms saved per frame at 100 players according to the studio), and less memory used by hand models and shop textures. The new decorative creatures (frogs, rabbits, turtles, jellyfish...) have their own performance budget.
The big piece is the game's migration to a custom render pipeline (Scriptable Render Pipeline). In the long run, it's promising. In the short run, a change this deep can bring visual bugs on the client side. If players complain tonight, it's not necessarily your configuration.
On modded Rust servers, keep your usual first-Thursday reflex: wait for your plugin framework (Oxide/uMod or Carbon) to update before restarting, then test your plugins one by one. An update that touches vehicles, NPCs and loot is very likely to break a few of them.
Anti-cheat: Facepunch tightens its official servers
Six more official servers now require TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot. Facepunch reports an adoption rate of around 70% and a measurable drop in cheaters on these secured servers.
This only concerns Facepunch's servers. But players whose PC doesn't meet these requirements could turn to community servers. For you, that's potentially an influx of new players, and one more reason to take care of your own moderation.
The rest, in brief
- Sandbags now stack up to four levels, the last one forming a small bunker. They're cheaper and stack by 20.
- Oil pumping on the Oil Rig starts after 15 minutes.
- Horses produce far less manure (good news for stables).
- Throwing grenades, C4 and satchels now benefits from client-side prediction, for a reduced feeling of latency.
- The machete gets new visuals and animations.
All the details are in the official Livestock Update post published by Facepunch.
Our take
This month, Facepunch gives more tools to players who like to build and produce, and adds concrete levers for admins. Scaling fuses to population is the kind of detail that makes no noise but does small communities a real favor.
If you'd rather discover all this without plugins, there are also pure vanilla servers welcoming this new wipe. So, are you going for a farming wipe or keeping the C4 warm? Let us know in the comments.
Looking for a new server for this October wipe? The full ranking is here: https://top-games.net/rust
